A skateboarding Barbie, a bellydancer and a girly goth... Is this WORK?!

Well, our first University project is now well underway, with a whole four days remaining to complete it. It has moved around so much in the last few days but I hope and pray that we have now settled on a crazy idea :)

The brief was to take the people on our table and form a 'tribe'. We had to find a common ground to represent this tribe and then represent this visually to the rest of the group.

Our common grounds were: Music, photography, comedy, we all go to Uni and we all like to go out for a drink with some friends but not go wild. Our first idea was to take the drink idea, represent ourselves by the symbol of the glass that we drink from and make coasters incorporating our favourite colours, ingredients of each person etc.

As this project moved around, we decided that it was boring. I commented that it all felt a bit predictably prim and proper, like a 1950's black and white photograph. Then it clicked... Someone came out with the phrase "Things aren't always what they seem..." and then we realised that this is our common ground - we are all dark horses! We realised that everyone probagbly has something funny that they do, but when discussing, since we have only known each other for a week, we all say very safe things.

So we decided to make jack-in-the-boxes, where on the outside of the box you see normal 'safe' photos of each person, but when you open it, something normal pops out with a strange twist. For example, I am going to be dressed in a little pink dress, but riding my skateboard. This is to represent that we all have more in us than would first appear.

We are then putting on a presentation which will confuse people, so they will walk into a blacked out room with strange music playing and a funny smell. There will be phrases on a screen such as "things aren't always what they seem", "dark horse", "Still waters run deep" etc. Then a presentation will cut in (we are all hidden in the cupboard) and you will hear our voices speaking about how our tribe got to this point. It is dark and you are listening rather than watching us because we are a tribe who are not 'really' seen.

After this I will skate out of the cupboard, Anna will bellydance (I had a prize blonde moment by saying it would be HILARIOUS if someone dressed as a bellydancer, then she told me she actually did it!!!), etc. We will then tell people to look inside the boxes on their tables and the jacks will pop out! It is all great fun.