Evaluation

Moving Tides has come to an end! (Kinda), and no one can deny it was the end we all hoped for thanks to the good old English weather. The Moving Tides procession was cancelled. Although the big finale didn’t happen there is still a lot that has been learnt from this project, Budgeting, sourcing, lesson plans, working with children, developing creative ideas and designs for the world of carnival and holding onto those things I am able to look at my moving tides experience as an extremely positive one both professionally and personally.

When starting the project and being briefed I was excited mainly by the idea of designing for carnival and the construction behind the designs. However as the project developed a key factor to the project was the creative journey with in the schools, getting children excited by the arts and allowing them to develop their skills and knowledge of how our industry of costume and live performance works.

Working In the schools has shown me how much i admire all the behind the scenes work that goes into live performance and carnival, the excitement of being creative of a small budget and developing and researching different skills and how to apply them, such as plastazote workshops, silk painting and dying and even make up for carnival.

I was extremely nervous about running workshops in Westfield School; this would be the first time I have had to get children excited about my design to create the buzz of carnival from the very first day of meeting them. However on stepping into Westfield all those worries were gone when receiving a great reaction from the children involved and having other school children telling me they wished they could be involved in the project.

Working with disabled students can be challenging at times mainly in the communication aspect. Some children’s disabilities meant they would shy away from me being a new face in their class, others meant their speech proved difficult to understand. These factors were overcome very quickly with a bit of patients. Once getting to know the children after my first session i was able to notice when a child was struggling with a task and when extra help would be needed.

Carnival was always an area of work I have been interested to explore, and it is definitely an area i would like to develop further in my studies, developing onto more large scale costumes and a key interest in head dresses and costume probs.
I feel one of my biggest achievements with in the school was being told by the children they had all really enjoyed my workshops. When talking to the teaching staff at break and lunch times they also thanked me and informed me that workshops such as moving tides dont happen enough, and the arts with in schools can sometimes be forgotten able. It was an amazing feeling to know that because of the work ive been doing with in Westfield the children have been able to develop creative skills  such as dyeing, laminate techniques and costume design that may not have been looked at before i had arrived.
Not only have i developed in my creative sense I know feel more comfortable with my abilty to time manage, organise, and budget with in the costume industry. These are all factors I feel i was lacking before as I had only focused on making, It has made me question the idea of possibly transfering these skills over to supervising and trying my hand at that.

On learning the moving tides carnival could possibly be cancelled due to weather, at first there was a lot of disappointment among all people involve. We had worked so hard for so long on creating the best costumes we could for the children - however it is very clear now if the carnival had of went ahead it wouldn’t be the amazing day it was meant to have been anyway, costume would have been cut, make up would have ran, children would have gotten rained out and unwell, this is something none of us wanted.

I appreciate how hard it must have been for the organizers of the carnival to make that finale decision as they had been working on it longer than any of us costume students had. Which again reassured me it was the best choice for everyone involved.

I think it is worth mentioning how much I have appreciated the opportunity to work on moving tides and have it known that I’m extremely grateful to all the help and support i have received along the way from such people as the organizers offing constructive advice on costume designs, Adele and Alison for overseeing our costume development, budgeting and workshop plans, and of course all the teachers and children at Westfield for being so welcoming as well as being excited about the creative process of the costumes - i couldn’t have asked for a better experience though maybe could have asked for a little bit of sun on carnival day.