What is "The Major Project" That is a very good question!
One must choose a topic that will result in a culmination of all skills academic and practical, to produce four images to present along with a three thousand word dissertation rolling out all findings on your topic. Choosing a topic to put all effort into, researching for the next academic year, that is ten full months, and being able to justify why that particular topic is not an easy thing to do.
Many subjects can take ones interest, holding a special memory or generally something that you have been curious about for various reasons, but can you explain, in detail why you would study all aspects of just one of those topics for that amount of time?
It is like being told to pick just one grain of sand from the beach. where on earth do you start? How do you start? In class examples of past students body of work are shown to give an all round idea of where to start and how to achieve the required work. Well that is all fine and well, but it is previous work, It can not be repeated even if ones style is different, so again the question looms where to start?
Having no ideas can tend to create an artistic block, the more one tries to think outside the box, the more the lid stays firmly shut! So a list is created of interests, then comes a process of elimination gradually starting to going through subjects that interested and could have potential as "the one". The problem with that is how would one imagine final images to incorporate practical special effects skills with each idea when these skills have not been learned.
The initial idea of phobias could have had potential, however this has been repeated many times over, diluting the genre to the point of boredom. so trying to bring something new to the topic saw brief research into fear of numbers, a fear of public speaking and a fear of getting old!
This last topic, mid conversation on a Friday morning brought on that elusive lightbulb, EUREKA, Happy dance moment!! DO people really fear getting old? Apparently yes. That in turn raised the question, what is old anyway? At the same time as this question was raised, a sixtieth birthday brought the realisation that while thirty years ago that answer would have been sixty, it no longer was! and thus, The Major Project Topic was born! ... "At what point do we perceive ourselves to be old?