Prior to our media one session I was anxious about presenting my work to the class, not realising it was a unanimous feeling as we walked through Building 9. There was something so intimate about presenting something where the brief was quite literally ‘you’. Although I was satisfied with my end result, I still had no idea if I was going to do something entirely different to everyone else; endeavouring not to embarrass myself, I very much stayed on the ‘safe side’. I felt a rush of relief when told we would only be presenting to a small group of people, and also when we were shown examples of our tutor’s work before ours. Once presenting the work I realised we all chose very similar ideas, the major being the dichotomy of home life compared to social life. I definitely, without realising, conformed to this theme, as I felt it painted two accurate yet different portraits of myself: how I interact with friends compared to how I am at home.

The act of critiquing work is something that I struggle with — I’d rather send someone down the ‘yellow-brick road’ than tell the honest truth (not to be disingenuous, but rather to save hurt feelings). The ‘colour-coded method’, however, allowed us to be candid, but meant that, perhaps, the punch was softened. I found it relatively easy to say something positive or to give alternative ideas I had, yet when it came to things that didn’t work not many put their hands up. Being the self-deprecating teens that we are, we self-assigned ourselves to this task, showing that we are ready to critique our own work before others. This is something that we will surely become more comfortable with over the duration of the year, and we will hopefully realise that constructive critiques are necessary in order to improve in our craft.