Legend of the Dragon 

Joel Wong :D

 

This year’s project has been a fun but difficult one. As a person who has not much of an art background, I thought joining this category would be a wrong choice. I thought we would be making intricate designs and sculptures just like the ones inside the art gallery as a project, but I was wrong. When my group and I went for the Prelims and saw the other groups’ work, I realized that art can be anything from videos about life to simple yet beautiful sculptures. As long as it is a meaningful piece of work, that object or video can be considered as art.

 

 

During this period of time, I learnt that time and tide waits for no man. It is something we have to use wisely as we cannot go back in time. We went to Ian’s house to do our project, which is at Eunos. For a person who lives at the North, that is a really long travelling distance. Due to the distance, I am always late for the project by about half an hour. However I make up for the lost time by staying till about 6 before we all call it a day. We only met on weekends, so the total number of days spent was about 4 to 5 days. Since we stayed for the whole day, we were still able to complete whatever we needed to do.

 

 

Another problem was the initial design of the dragon’s body. We realized that our original idea for the dragon’s body was too time-consuming as we had to melt the plastic bottles to form the desired shape. This was not environmentally friendly as burning plastic will produce toxic gases that will harm the environment. This goes against our aim of the project.  Also, if we were to put a bottle at the wrong position, it will be extremely difficult to take the bottle out as this may destroy the whole dragon. Therefore, we changed to a 3-bottle segment format, whereby the bottles are now placed horizontally. This is much easier to build and maintain as we use hot glue and tape, which can be cut and be redone. This was also environmentally friendlier as there was no need to burn any plastic.

 

 

I am sure the teamwork and responsibility skills can be applied in real life when we are going to work. With responsibility, I can complete assignments fast and well by setting priorities right. Setting priorities are important as they determine what is more important so that we can complete the most urgent work. If we set our rest time as priority then work can never be finished. Therefore these skills can help in my future.

 

 

Overall I feel that this project was a success. Since we were good friends, we were able to convey our thoughts about the dragon sculpture easily. Though we had conflicts on the meeting times and the amount of workload we had to share among ourselves, we still managed to work together and get this project done.