This past week my main focus has been on creating and compiling my content for my project. I have been deep diving into the book Finding Our Families in order to find my exact content. I have spent this last week highlighting and underlining the whole 250 page book in order to tell myself what I want in my project and what is not as important. I also wrote and sent off the letter to my donor. The process of writing this letter was hard. It made me really think long and hard about myself as a person and what I wanted to tell him about me. After writing this letter I was full of so many different emotions, that I just stared at my computer screen silently for 20 minutes. It is hard to put into words how it felt to put down my many questions and thoughts I have towards him onto paper.
After meeting with my peers I learned that my current content did not have a clear enough voice. I absolutely agree with them. I have been struggling pulling text from the book but also trying to keep a more general less guide booky tone that is found in the book. I need to deep dive into the text for the third time and really think about what I want the reader to get out of all the information. If a viewer who knew nothing about the subject picked up my book what would they get out of it? I need to really look at the hierarchy of my content. I got feedback that my peers most favorite part was when I included the survey I sent my siblings (Please if you are reading this keep submitting, Only 5 of you have their are 23 of you so come on!) and the letter to my father. It made them care more about my topic. I also came to the realization that I need to write my own introduction. I am not the best with words, so I am a little nervous about including my own in the book. I think that by looking closer into the main text I can come up with my own voice which will in turn help me with writing my introduction.
Visually I am thinking about connections. In terms of that I am not just looking at how connections are built but also how they are deconstructed and then reconstructed. I am looking into ways where my visuals could be unseen but then seen in some way. Maybe I will have some visuals that are completely blurred and some in hyper-focus or a muxture of both. I am lookign forward to this upcoming week where I will be able to experiment more with the making.