Reflective Statement
In order to organise and carry out the visual essay, my group and I had several meetings where we were expressing our thoughts and ideas about how we see Eastbourne as a seaside and holiday destination. From the meetings we discussed the points that we wanted to include in the video in order to present Eastbourne as a physical and social space in which tourism takes place. Our initial plan for the video was to represent Eastbourne as we “see” it, in terms of, the large amount of elderly people with the contrast of young people. We developed our idea starting by filming two of our colleagues, one dressed as a young person and the other one as an elderly lady. The plan was to take them around the places, filming one at time acting in the same way. The outcome of this idea aimed to show that Eastbourne can attract all types of people. Consequently, we carried on filming and taking pictures based around our initial plan. Within two weeks of completing the project, we decided to have a tutorial. Talking with our teacher made us realise that we were stereotyping the people in Eastbourne. We were trying to create an image, made of our assumptions, by representing the behaviour of elderly and young people. Our interpretation created a superficial illustration of Eastbourne. However, in order to capture and construct a visual narrative of Eastbourne, we needed to carry out a research where we could develop an understanding of how Eastbourne was built.
After reading and analysing a few articles on the Eastbourne Borough council, we found out that Eastbourne has remained its image of a genuine seaside coast for a long time. The research enabled us to understand the history of Eastbourne and to observe the signs that demonstrate it as an authentic seaside destination, as it remained its authentic Victorian design all along the seafront and throughout the town . We then decided to look for evidences where we could examine the differences and improvements that have taken place. To help us with this, we found an archive video advertising Eastbourne in the 70’s. After watching the movie, we chose to capture the idea of showing Eastbourne in the past and present, in order to illustrate the authenticity of Eastbourne as how it managed to remain the same and possible adding some of its changes.
During the whole process of making the essay we were all very engaged. We were helping each other to use the video camera and tripod to find the best view and angle for our video. Going all around the town and seafront was very educative, as I particularly had never been to the museums and art galleries in Eastbourne. We had a few challenges with the filming due to the weather condition. We had to cancel two of our meetings, which challenged us more with time. Also, the fact that this essay is required in the winter time, we could not have a real image of the “Sunshine Coast of Eastbourne” as it is in the summer time.
Downloading the pictures into the computer was also very challenging as none of us in the group, has a Mac computer, and has also never edited a film. However, with help and team work to learn the program we managed to transfer all our videos, which summed up to 2 hours and 59 minutes of filming. We had