Over the last fortnight, we have begun to use our experience of walking through Birmingham and viewing the city through the eyes of a ‘tourist’ to enable us to discuss potential ideas and concepts for our travel publication. After watching two short documentaries; ‘Heart Bypass’ and ‘Reyner Banham Loves LA’ by the likes of Jonathan Meades and Reyner Banham respectively, we also began to look at how we could approach the travel guide in a different and unique way.
Heart Bypass – Jonathan Meades https://vimeo.com/109471765
Following the videos, we had a group discussion and came up with a number of potential ideas for a unique travel publication. As a group, we all have different interests and as a result it was clear that different things stuck out to each of us during the walk and the documentaries so many ideas were discussed. As you can see from the attached word cloud exercise; these were the key reactions and things to note within my group to the Meades documentary about Birmingham.
Feeling inspired, this allowed us to move forward towards a more solid idea for our publication. Once split into individual groups, we came up with a list of potential sites and ideas for the publication which over the next couple of weeks, we will be delving into further. My group’s initial thoughts for the publication are as follows;
- To include some city urban myths with some ‘fake news’.
- To show the forgotten history and layering through time of Birmingham (not entirely factual).
- To blend the historical images of Birmingham with those of today (not all images entirely of Birmingham).
- Celebrate ‘self deprecation’ and our ability to be critical about our city by having a quiet joke with the tourists.
- Celebrate the accent so often mocked by translating the guide phonetically on one side into ‘Black Country’.
- Celebrate what we are proud of and perhaps cleverly alter aspects we are not so proud of.
Holly Turton
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