My Culture Moodboard

 

To make a start to the brief and begin gathering inspiration and ideas, we went on a ‘culture hunt’ which involved looking into our own lives and the things we surround ourselves with. Namely, I had a chance to think about my culture, what that meant and how it could help with the brief.

The first task was to spend 1o minutes drawing something, and this was done four times so that we had a few images to look back on and try and establish a personal aesthetic. Here are all of my drawings, which I put together in a mood board:

 

 

Our first drawing had to be our favourite possession; something that makes us happy and that we use every day. I struggled a lot with this one because I have a lot of items that I use on a regular basis that make me happy and picking a favourite was never something that I had considered or felt was necessary. After a lot of thinking, I ended up picking the one that I would be the most miserable without – my window. I use it every day and it makes me smile almost every time. Next was ‘favourite hobby’ and I had many options to choose from yet again! This time, however, instead of trying to narrow it down, I chose to put a number of things I love to do, such as reading, writing, drawing, watching films, listening to music, travelling/going on walks and playing with my bird. The third prompt was a favourite place – somewhere that you visited and want to go again. Upon reading this one, I already knew the answer, France of course! Every time I go there, I feel amazing and fall deeper in love with the culture. To represent the whole country, I drew the most famous landmark, The Eiffel Tower. Finally, we were asked to draw our favourite person. For personal reasons, I cannot go into detail, but I drew my mum, holding me as a baby.

Now that I have a mood board of images that have a special meaning in my life, I can start to think about what kind of things I could base my project on for this brief by looking at any connections between the images. The most obvious links that I can see are nature, creativity and places that I feel connected to (Bulgaria and France). Based on these things, I believe that I could choose an interesting topic within culture since they seem to be huge parts of my life and I feel that others could also relate to them if I present them in the right way. For example, nature and Bulgaria are nicely linked since it has a lot of beautiful mountains and valleys, and creativity can be interpreted in many different ways in any culture, and since I am so passionate about it, I could choose one of the arts and a country to link them to.

 

Culture Representation

 

When somebody mentions a certain country or continent, usually, certain things pop into people’s minds, based on what is taught in schools, what is seen on the internet and general accumulated knowledge. These are stereotypes, and whilst sometimes they aren’t true and are greatly exaggerated, they do play a vital role in helping identify a certain place or culture, which is important since people from the other side of the world may not know what it is like where you live at all.

 

Stereotypes

Every culture has universally recognised stereotypes

Example: Australia

Giant spiders, crocodiles, snakes, kangaroos and koalas everywhere, mostly dessert, Aussie slang, surfers, G’day mate, vegemite

 

Realism

Often countries / cultures defy visitors expectations

Example: Germany

Cleanest countries, very diverse, 10% vegetarian, very welcoming/friendly, not all Germans like beer!

 

Cultures can be shown in a variety of different ways, some being more subtle than others. The above stereotypes show a few, and here are the general categories –

• Signs

• Habits

• Language

• Colours

• Clothing​

• Brands

• Weather

• Attitudes​

• Environment 

• Architecture

• Plantlife

• Food

 

As a class, we put these to the test by playing a game called ‘Geoguesser’. The game took you to different places on google maps and through seeing them in 360-degree view, you had to guess where in the world you were and select that place on the map. How close you were to the actual place determined how many points you got. I am not very good at Geography so I predicted that I would not do well and I think that I was correct because my score wasn’t all that great:

 

 

For almost every guess, I found myself relying on the architecture and environment than most. Occasionally, there would be some telltale signs which would reveal the location thanks to the language, but overall, things like the trees, cars and houses were most helpful to me. It made me realise how much people rely on their surroundings to guide them since, without signs, most of us would not be aware of where we were. This is because, even though the environment helped me guess, I was often wrong because of it since there are many places across the planet that have similar plant life and ground texture. Things like language, symbols and colours are needed to help specify where exactly you are, and furthermore, fashion and brands can help determine culture. I will keep these in mind when choosing what media product to produce for the culture brief so that I know how to make it clear what culture I am trying to portray.