Digital Murals

Posted by Jo Murphy Dec 19, 2006

At Mary MacKillop Primary Birkdale we decided on the purpose of our mural. From the purpose we moved to how the process would develop and worked out the content from there.

Jenni Proctor Career Clarity the Careers Officer and Librarian utilised a sum of money that had been awarded to the school for the Careers Programme . She wanted to exemplify the spirit of Programme Achieve by creating what we later called a Visioning Wall.

One of the Key Phrases quoted from Programme Achieve was “You can do it” In a rap song prepared by the Year 6 students and presented on the day they rapped ....."You Can Be What You Want To BE!"

"Empowering Learners of all Ages To Shape and Enrich Our Changing World by Living the Gospel of Jesus Christ." Brisbane Catholic Education Framework. was another of the slogans.

"Never See A Need Without Doing Something About It" was also quoted from Mary MacKillop our Patron Saint. (Sculpture in the forground by Mardy Kearny a Qld Sculptor.)

We had set out to consciously encapsulate the ethos of the school through words and images. Our moto is Reach Out... Embrace ...Achieve

We collaborated to find out how the children viewed the world that we want to be so free and empowering for them. We invited each and every one of them to do a drawing of how they see their world in 10 years time. We ask them to image forward.

As the Creative Arts Teacher I coordinated the project. I either facilitated the workshop process for the children myself or devised a workshop sheet for other teachers and children to follow. This was so that the process followed the same, consistent theme. From there I worked with Jenni Proctor and David West a Graphic Artist and parent of two children in the school to choose a representative sample of the work. We wanted to glean across all age groups to come up with a representation of the whole.

The selection was difficult because the quality of the work was high and breadth was wider than we were able to assemble into the wall space. However after much processing the selection was finalised.

A professional photographer was then hired to come into the school for a day to photograph the children in the course of their normal activities. He was also paid to photograph the artwork. We had decided that photographing the work would be much quicker than scanning it.

The Photographer suggested the rainforest image for the background. It was enhanced with a golden glow and this created the ambiance carrying forward into every photograph of the kids. it had a unifying effect.

The raw images were then taken by David to another technician and they blended the images into a collage. By the time the Photoshop file was created it weighed 2gbs!