Reflection and Development - Ask me Anything…. An Interview with Amanda Henderson
When given this assignments and asked to contact a creative that we find inspiration from I never expected to ever get a response back from Amanda Henderson whose work I have been following for the past 6 years since I left high school and explored my paths in design. This project allowed me to explore different avenues on how to present work in a creative way that would represent the topic and respect the creative. Although the the process of contacting the creatives figuring out questions and approached was over a few weeks once received an email back from Amanda everything followed after that. My subject title in my email was ‘help an RMIT student out with a brief interview’ sending it to gloss creatives general interview I was expecting to receive an email back saying that Amanda herself would be too busy to do it, but to my surprise it was she who responded back to me within a few days and stated that she would be down to do the interview and that I could call her on the Thursday last week. To this I was so excited and nervous, excited because my first creative responses to me and nervous because she is some I had looked up to for years. The way I approached this assignment is basically what would like to learn from this experience and how can they assist me through the questions that I ask. Some of the main questions that I wanted to ask Amanda was how she deals with challenges in her field and how she goes about dealing with them and where she’s gets her inspiration from.
SoI began brainstorming questions that I could ask her and what kind of things that would great for me to learn from her but also what could others reading this that hadn’t heard of her either.
After that I began to brainstorm what concepts I could do and present this assignment. Because it was a phone interview that lasted around about 20 minutes I was left with a lot of information. What was such a bonus but also a con because I had to sift though the interview and re listen to the interview which was cringe worthy because nobody really like listening to themselves talk. I thought about making a youtube video however changed my mind after explore how I would be able to represent Amanda through that video and how that reflects back on the work that she does.
After talking in class today about what we should do for our interview layouts I was leaning towards and article or even a vine. However after speaking with Bronwyn about what my creative does, she asked me well if she’s a visual merchandiser wouldn’t you represent her in 3D and that is when I began to explore my options other than an exhibition or display of what I could do that would be different and interesting and how I can make everything relate and endure emotion as Amanda would say.
How can I represent a 3D design with out having to do a physical and typical display?
And so the process of making this pop up book began. I figured after listening back to the interview with Amanda that I wanted to showcase keywords and phases that she use through this interview like 'creating magic’ or go to the CORE and how I can represent them in a 3 dimensional way. Making this pop book I had do a lot of tests and research on how pop up books are make and not only that how to make them effective. After doing some research through that I came up with the idea of making title on the cover of the book embroidered to give it that extra flair and make it look like a really book. So I bought some material from spotlight and when to my local embroidery place and made it happen and the result was a success. Now I honestly didn’t expect this pop up book to be as time consuming as it really was. And by the end of it I lost count of the hours it took me to cover the book and prep it for the information to go inside it.
The end result how was all worth it the book turn out great I believe. For a person that had never covered a book or make a pop up book I feel very proud of what I have accomplished with this and how I represented it in a unconventional way. One of gloss creatives key statements was that they create temporary themes that endure emotions and things that you would want people to have a last memory of because it was something different. Through this I hope it was something fresh and something not done in this project that would be remembered as a good represent of a creative in a creative way. Using key components of what they do and how they do it and trying to think out of the box with it.
I do have to reflect on the stress level that I felt trying to hand this assignment in especial changing my idea from something more simple like an article or zine for say to a pop up book which I honestly did not expect would be so much more work to do. Hopefully the results speak for themselves, and I hope you enjoyed it, because all in all it was a fun project to make and create!
