The whole group has communicated on Facebook throughout the course. Moodle has been almost totally ignored apart from getting info on the course and uploading essays etc. It just isn’t so instantly available as Facebook. If anyone had a problem or an idea to put to the group they could get an answer in minutes if not right away. Facebook works!
You can’t do this in Moodle. A tutor could look through these pages and instantly see what was going on, how things were progressing, and assess whether anyone needed assistance.
That’s my rant over. The group had discussions in college amongst ourselves and with tutors as how to proceed with finding a venue, setting a date, getting funding, naming our exhibition, etc, etc. We decided on the Guildhall in Leicester because it had a lot of visitors, was near the city centre, close to Cathedral and the Richard III visitor centre. I measured the Library in the Guildhall so we had an idea of what we could fit into it.
We also had to find a name for our Exhibition, Minus 6 was chosen simply because 6 students had dropped out of the class for different reasons and it sounds good too! Next was a logo….
Pete came up with this, what can you say, it looks really good.
Funding. We decided to use crowd funding to finance our exhibition. I put my hand up to set this up. I must admit, I knew very little about crowd funding but I rooted about a bit, looked at a few sites and Indiegogo seemed to be as good as any.
This is the final total, which is a lot more than I thought we would get. As you can see, as an incentive to donate you can give perks, and we decided to give an A4 print for a £10 donation, an A3 for £15 and 2 A3s for £20.
Indiegogo Takes its cut of the total amount.
So we raised £501 in total The money went into paypal and my bank account without any problems, it took about 10 days for it to arrive. I just held my breath and paid for the hall and the drinks before it came through. It did say on the site that this how long it would take, so no complaints there. We should break even with all the costs added up (room hire, perks, food, diy costs, and drink)
Many thanks to Pete for the promotional video, and getting the campaign started on Indiegogo. I set up the account ok, but I’m sure Pete tweaked something to make it work!
Everyone shared this on Facebook to publicise it and get it out there to as many people as possible.
Of course as this is being done, we had to decide how to display our images. You can’t mount pictures on the walls in the Guildhall, It’s an historical building. We had to mount on display boards which the college would provide. All we had to do was clean these up and paint them.
Picture By Todd pinched from facebook used without permission. Pete, Me and Julie sanding.
Obviously costs incurred here for paint sandpaper etc. Everyone played a part in the sanding and painting. I’m not used to being a team player, but I really felt that everyone played their part in all of this, and we all worked as a team to get the exhibition staged.
Setting it up on the day.
This one from Steph. Showing the drinks/ food tables being prepared.
Food (mainly Samosas), Cakes and drink, had to be provided and I’m sorry I’ve forgotten who did what, but everything turned up on time and everything got eaten!
Whilst all this was going on we had to get our work printed! I took some of my images to one printer to get an Idea of how things looked like at A4, and what the cost would be for the whole lot. The prints were almost identical to the ones I’d made at the college. I did decide on another printing place in the end which was cheaper.
Pete was tireless in his pursuit of advertising the exhibition, He got us a spread in The Leicester Mercury about us and with an image each for all of us. The Mercury did an article about the opening night of the exhibition with a group picture of us all (except me, because I was late.) I did get some business cards printed for my table and I left a portfolio of my work for people to browse if they wanted to see other work that I had done.
Micks photography blog 