At the beginning of our first project: Deciphering the Creative Industries (DTCI), Hannah gave us a checklist for our personal values to help us develop our project. When I was ticking the values from the checklist, I noticed that I would like to do something related to “Family”, “Inner harmony” and “Pleasure”.

Based on the initial values, the idea of “Record your story” was more and more clear after the brainstorming mind map. Also, after I reviewed the existing journal article:  Collaborators in Dreams, I chose to further explore the area of illustrated books.

However, I didn’t realize that I was aiming to tell others the idea of “Illustration could be a way of recording stories” until my classmate, Sayuri, pointed out this idea for me at the critique lesson. Thanks to her, I caught the key points of “Record” and “Illustration” on my project, and I could tell that my ideas were related to my subject.

While researching illustrated books, I gained more knowledge of how these books were published today. Plus, I found out that there were recordable storybooks now. As a result, I combined all these ideas together and decided to make my manifesto into a kind of storybook as well.

In my opinion, my manifesto video and the outcome of the project were successful. The most successful part of the project was the skills that I learned and the courage of trying something new throughout the process. I chose to film my manifesto video with stop motion animation on the day I just learned how to make it, and tried my best to edit the video with Adobe Premiere program, which I was not familiar with but did whatever I could to learn how to use it in a short time. The process of learning something new was really difficult to me. Fortunately, I enjoyed the process of filming stop motion animation, recording my voice and chose the background music to make my video more interesting. In my opinion, the video of my manifesto was successful as well. I made it into a live story as an example to express the ideas of my manifesto.

I think I didn’t answer the brief fully but at least a part of it. My manifesto was more likely to be my belief and plans to do in the future. However, I didn’t mention a lot of the role of illustration in creative industries nor the idea of “Illustration could be a way of recording stories” in my manifesto due to the time limit.

If I had more time, first, I would do more research on the function of illustration, especially for recording stories and add them into my video. Second, I would color my pictures of stop motion animation and film it again. Last but not least, I would discuss with my tutors about my project more to widen my horizon. I knew it would be dangerous if I kept thinking inside the same box.

To sum up, I enjoyed the process of developing my manifesto. I loved the video I made, and being thankful for all I had learned from the project.