For Year 1 students, the Co-Lab project is a unique opportunity to step out of their specific pathway, collaborate withstudents from other courses, and experiment with the theme of Sustainability. We sat down with student Cricket Elliott to discuss her project 'Burn Out', the challenges of cross-course collaboration, and the experience of exhibiting work publicly for the first time.
Q: To start, can you walk us through your Co-Lab project? How did you interpret the theme of 'Sustainability'?
Cricket: I interpreted sustainability as self-sustainability—looking at it from the angle of efficient burning. I was thinking about how "burning yourself out" is something that a lot of people do. I created an actual living flame character who has to choose between different fuel sources. These fuels are metaphors for different lifestyles and how people balance work and life to make sure they can keep going without burning themselves out.
The project is mainly choices along a journey. Throughout the story, thegame tells you, "Oh, you're doing well so far," or "You might want to think about your choices a little bit better." By the end, you can either fix your mistakes and get the "good ending," or reflect and get the "bad ending"—which is just burning out.
Visually, I used digital collage techniques. I went around Glasgow taking my own photos of subjects I wanted, and I actually used backgrounds from the workshop I had done because we were filming throughout the streets of Glasgow. I was able to use still frames from those videos and put them into the images so they worked with the environment I chose.
Q: Co-Lab is all about stepping out of your own programme. What was it like collaborating with students from different courses during the workshops?
Cricket: It was really good because I was working with people in my group that I’d never spoken to before, from completely different courses. I did the Sound and Vision workshop. I really enjoyed it because it was based around creating a film, but without necessarily having a narrative. Our theme was "People," so we were trying to figure out different ways to capture that in ways that aren't just obviously recording people in the streets. It was about looking at just how people are around Glasgow.
Q: Finally, this project ended with a physical pop-up exhibition. How did it feel to take this digital game out of the studio and show it to an audience for the first time?
Cricket: I was able to talk people through it who hadn't seen my project before.I could explain to them what my intentions were with the game and what it meant.
They seemed to pick it up and play it really well! They enjoyed it and even played it multiple times to get different endings. It was great seeing their reactions—they were like, "Oh no! Ah!" whenever something went wrong. They seemed to respond quite well to the mechanics, which was good!
To find out more about undergraduate programmes in the School of Innovation and Technology please visit: https://sit.gsa.ac.uk/department/undergraduate