Crit Sessions

I know I've not posted in my blog for a while, but there is more to come - I promise! For now, I'm just going to cover the crit sessions I supervised today and my thoughts and feelings on how it went:

Once again, it was the same setup as last time. There were six students in total to go through in a two hour period and the session was supervised by myself and another fourth year student.

Compared to the previous pitch session, I felt I had more control and was more confident speaking to students about their work. I felt it was easier to offer critique this time, perhaps because the students had further developed their ideas and had work to go along with it. I tried as best I could to keep a student on track with what is required of their unit at the end of the day. The advice that was offered tended to be a lot more generalist rather than focus on singular modules and problems within them (though any serious issues were addressed when possible). I made sure to inform students where I thought they were doing well, but also give them advice and tasks to work towards. I also noticed that students tended to be stuck on small details rather than seeing the bigger picture or were struggling with technical issues rather than artistic ones. While it is equally important to understand technique and trying to learn key skills, it is crucial to develop artistic skills too.

For the pitch session, I watched the time and made sure that each student did not exceed their 20 minute slots but in the end there was half an hour to spare. I felt that I cut the students short so on this session I was more liberal when it came to watching the time, as I had hoped that it would work out better. Unfortunately, it turned out that we ran about 30 minutes over the limit, so next time I will endeavour to make sure that the students have a 20 minute slot and must manage their time accordingly.

Another issue I experienced was understanding the student's distinct modules and their deliverables. It would have helped if they were to prepare a powerpoint covering their modules, what they have to deliver and any previously covered content summarised, as not to waste time going over concepts which we already know (unless things have changed). This also might have fixed the issue of a lot of the work being viewable on the current computers. I advised the students to take screenshots of their work in progress so critique and advice can be given. Next time, the students should be more prepared with backups and work saved in common file formats which can be viewed on any computer.

Overall, I felt a lot more confident this time giving advice and guidance to the students both for general work and specific problems. I also felt that I offered them reasonable solutions, told them to scale back or return to an idea when they should or encourage them to work in a particular direction appropriately. However, I did make sure that the advice given to them was not concrete, and any major changes, decisions or problems in their work should be discussed with their module or personal tutor first. I also offered them help with Maya in particular in the Maya software clinics, so that I could help them out 1:1 with any technical issues they may have in their work.