The start of our "We Create Identity" project

Today we had our second lesson of We Create Identity. The morning session started with some videos about creative projects (a guy walking trough the USA showed as a timelapse, lampposts displaying art on the road and a game trailer for example) to get our creative juices flowing; a kind of warm-up. After that it was time to get down to business. We were told that we had choose a theme for the upcoming project: creating an interactive video. Besides that, we also had to figure out what our skills are. We would have to  present our theme and skill(s) in the afternoon in a 20 second pitch.

Excited by the prospect of starting a project but slightly nervous about the 20 second talk I came to the afternoon session. We were told that we had 5 minutes to investigate which people had chosen the same theme.  This resulted in people sitting together as groups for the project, making it useless to give a presentation in which you have to "sell yourself". The teacher cleverly adapted the assignment by giving us a choice between presenting yourself, your theme and your skills or presenting your theme as a group. Everybody chose to present as a group in the end. It is interesting to experience what it is like to have to come up with a presentation about your group in less than five minutes. Due to the on-the-fly nature of the presentations, content and structure varied greatly. Some people only introduced themselves and told us what their skills are, whilst others had a more or less fleshed out idea about how to complete the project. Others cleverly used their minute of fame to recruit people with a skill that nobody in their current group had.

I teamed up with Tom van den Berg, Isabel Pfab & Alina Rommerskirch, and we have chosen the theme "nature". We want to explore a moral dilemma: should you let nature be for its own good but with disadvantages to humanity or should you alter the course of nature in a way beneficial to us, but with negative effects on nature itself? The webpage for the project can be found here.