After giving our presentations at the end of Phase 1 on Friday 18th October 2019, we were instructed to do another exercise on that day's afternoon session. This involved taking one of the four topics we had talked about, and drawing four images relevant to that topic onto a piece of paper. We were not allowed to write any words anywhere on the page.
The core of this activity was to get us to finally choose and 'marry' ourselves onto one subject, chosen for purely personal reasons.
We then showed the first year games design and art students the images to see whether they could glean the subject. This was to see how effective our drawings had been. If people totally blind to what we had been doing could guess, our images had done their job.
We were then told that Phase 2 was, as I mentioned before, all about taking one of the four subjects we had already studied and researching the absolute maximum out of it, or research 'within an inch of our lives' as Adam put it. In essence, Phase 2 was two whole weeks of pure research.
I thought this was a great idea and enjoyed this phase immensely because the extra time meant I could truly get dug-in to the subject matter, which in my case was the American frontier. My previous four topics research felt lacking as the bigger time constraint meant I could only really touch on my topics and not delve enough into them. We had been given the same amount of time for one subject only, and this greatly reassured me.
At the end of Phase 2, on Friday the 1st of November, we would give yet another presentation but this time, you guessed it, on all the deep research we had done on our singular topic.
I would like to think that I was already well-ahead of this phase, as I have been studying the American frontier since my early teens, and have nothing but an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on the subject. I have always wanted to study it throughout both secondary school and college, but have not really had the chance because the topic was never in the syllabus (except of course if you count my 'small-scale research project' for Film Studies A-Level, which was also a very personal project) I have watched countless Westerns, from Spaghetti Westerns to Modern Westerns to Classic Westerns and Space Westerns. I know an awful lot about the time period itself, including the technology of the time and the American Civil War. In other words, it's a tall order to find something Western-themed that I haven't heard of or already seen. I felt like I was the best person to give this presentation.
However, despite my natural affinity for the subject matter, I still wanted to properly go over whatever research I could do over Phase 2 to really get my facts straight and perhaps learn something I didn't know before. I found the parts about the American frontier's foundation and the lives of the pioneers to be very interesting.
It was also the biggest excuse ever to lose myself in one of my favourite topics of all time!
I enjoyed Phase 2 because it gave me the opportunity to study into something I truly love.
Phase 2
Week 4: 21/10/2019 - 27/10/2019
Week 5: 28/10/2019 - 03/11/2019