Free Love [top]
This project was a good exmaple of where mistakes are as valuable as successes. The video shown was the test phase of the project which worked better than the calculated final balloon flights we tried. The footage of the balloon being assembled and our interactions as it was made, communicates the “love” in the project and the completed itself was the result of that. To set the balloon free at the end of the video was metaphorical but also held other connections to love in a human sense. The balloon was made to be released and it would have been wrong for us to keep it and the fact that so many factors involved in the balloon flying properly. The wind had to be right, there had to be no rain, the temperature had to be right, there had to be no one else around, the fuel had to burn long enough and so on but none of these things were calculated before and during the act, it just worked. The next few balloons we designed closely and we applied much more practical thought and they all failed to fly. But this failure itself was a nice metaphor for love in that it highlighted how accidental and organic a thing it is and that trying to calculate it and manage it turns it in to something else. The video is badly shot and badly edited to look human and ”real”. Given the chance again though, I would like to try it with more prefessional filming and more time spent on editing to see if it communicates in the same way.
In terms of how the message was distributed it was relatively successful. We used Youtube as the holder and word of mouth served as a good way to get people to watch it. Nicks natural dancing ability and graceful moves helped as a talking point for people to latch on to and talk about. If we’d used other ways to advertise the film then more people would have seen it. We could have promoted it on notice boards in the University, sent the link by text, put the link on t-shirts and so on.
