This week I was introduced to the final major project for my second year.

The week began with a lecture from Greg discussing what the FMP would entail and how we could go about our ideas. The session allowed me to begin brainstorming what I wanted to do for my FMP aswell as introduce me to the criteria I had to meet in order to get the best possible grade I can. I think the introduction lecture allowed me to really think about the skills I have gained over the past two years and how I can use them to my best ability alongside a topic I am truly interested in.

After we had been briefed on the FMP, we were then, as a class, put into pairs. Our task was to interview the other person in order to gain an understanding of what they wanted to do their FMP on.

I began the task by taking five minutes to write out the questions I planned to ask my partner. The questions I can up with were:

Where do your main interests lie?

What are your plans for the future? How can you tie this into your FMP?

Do you have any current ideas for what to do for your FMP?

To begin both myself and my partner, Elle, were unsure of what we wanted to do for our Final projects. This meant we would have to both really push with the questions we were asking in order to understand what the other was interested in.

When I began asking my questions Elle informed me of her interest in Fashion and theatre before continuing to explain she was still unsure of what her future plans were. After a 10 minute discussion about potential ideas and themes Elle was still unsure of what she wanted to do for her FMP but was now more aware of where her interests lie.

I found this exercise very enlightening; it allowed me to really understand what I am truly interested in aswell as teach me how to use your questions in order to really probe the person you are talking to in order to gain insight into their interests and backstory. The task also allowed me to practise my interviewing skills which could potentially be very helpful within my FMP research. In the future I would try to leave myself more time to come up with questions as I do not think I had enough to ask, I would also work on my wording when coming up with questions as I think they were all quite similar.

After finishing the interview task, I was then tasked with working to brainstorm some potential ideas, ready to brainstorm my FMP with Greg.

When I was brainstorming I had three main ideas for my FMP:

  1. Fashion double page spread
  2. Fashion business plan
  3. Fashion Campaign

After jotting down my three ideas, I then began to pull each one apart.

I started with the double page spread. Quickly after beginning to look into this idea, I opted against it as I had carried out the same thing in my FMP last year and did not want to do the same thing again. The factor that my main interests lie in fashion business rather then journalism also helped me with my decision.

I then began to look into a business plan. To begin with I was extremely interested in carrying out this fir my FMP. I am very interested by fashion business and am also planning to study a fashion business course at university so knew it would work well in my future portfolio however after careful consideration I decided that this idea was slightly to broad; it did not touch a specific area of fashion business and I was therefore struggling to come up with a hypothesis, thats when i came up with the idea of creating a campaign.

Creating a campaign fitted in well with my plans to study fashion merchandising at university and also gave me lots of options for a hypothesis that was interesting and allowed me to meet all the UAL criteria in research, production and conclusion.

I ended the week with a chosen topic and potential hypothesis ideas, ready for my discussion with Greg next week. This discussion will help me to decide on my final hypothesis by allowing me to get some feedback on my idea so far.