Workshop activities
Our first task was to create a mind map for our chosen theme. The challenge being, that the person we are presenting to has no idea about the subject, and we are not allowed to explain in words what it is. From my research, I wanted to summarise that parkour is about quick movement over obstacles. I began with drawing stick men jumping, climbing and getting over different challenges in the top left-hand corner. After that, I drew some silhouettes and stop-motion frames to show an animation of someone jumping. I then drew a clock, as parkour focuses on making use of movements as quickly as possible to get through obstacles. This is something that differentiates it from free running and other similar sports. It was difficult to find any parkour related content within magazines. I stuck some images of buildings, as often times parkour is depicted as running and jumping on buildings. This was a challenging but interesting exercise that I think resulted in a pretty cool mind map.
During another workshop, we had to find an article we like and black out text within it to make it have a completely different message and tone. I initially struggled with this task, as I was not sure what words to hide and what to keep. I was very reserved with what I chose to cross out.
After completing that task, we tried again, but this time we selected an article about our chosen theme (mine being parkour) and proceeded with the same process. This time I was better at crossing out more words, resulting in a funnier result. From the new text we had formed, I had to select 8 words that summarised my theme. As I did not have many words left, this was not too tricky, most of the words left were appropriate to the theme (gymnastics, landing movement etc.)
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These exercises, were helpful in looking at our topics from another angle. Changing meanings, or trying to explain what the theme is about without talking about it are interesting challenges that made me think more deeply about the core principles of parkour. The most frequently occurring word that is used when discussing the topic of parkour, is "movement".