Part D...

White lie -noun a lie perceived as or intended not to harm, but told in order to avoid distress or embarrassment.

I chose to name my project 'little white liars' because my project is based around the concept of white lies, which come into everybody’s daily life but a lot of people don’t like to admit to telling them. I find it interesting how many people tell white lies subconsciously as though it is part of a routine, and how a white lie is an accepted lie in society. Just as people tell white lies there is a certain understanding that we encourage them so our feelings are not hurt.
I also wanted to highlight people’s perceptions and first impressions they have towards other people by mixing up who said what lie. From this I wanted people to become aware of the prejudices they have just from a picture and show how these judgments may not necessarily be true and hopefully cause them think about this in their everyday life. I also wanted to create a piece of work that everybody can relate to and reflect personally from, and show how similar human beings are.

To start my project I asked random members of the public on the street for the last white lie they had told. Or one they could remember. It was important to involve as many different types of people as possible to get a variety of lies and images. I then recorded their answer on an audio recorder, as a quick reliable source to go back to, rather than writing their lie down. Got I them to cover their face with it a piece of white card while I took a full body photograph of them. It was essential in the photograph to capture all of the body so you were still able, without seeing their face, to know certain things about the person such as sex, age, interests and other visual signifiers that cause us to make judgments and assumptions about people automatically.

I chose to cover up the persons face in the image, so you cannot see a facial expression, so the person reminds anonymous in admitting their lie (which some would not have done without). Once I had got enough photographs and audio recorded lies I spent time transcribing the comments and editing the photos in Photoshop for the web. I used Dreamweaver to create a final interactive web piece. I chose to make a roll over (photo image that swaps to another when the mouse rolls over). Some with the portrait first, some with a lie quote. This I think helps the project appear quite self explanatory at a glance and encourages the idea of the audience rolling over the image with their mouse.
The hardest thing I found in this project was getting the public to participate, as many people were reluctant to help. Luckily I had prepared myself for rejection and improved my people and persuasion skills while doing this project. It helped also that they weren’t going to be identifiable in the final work. I faced my fears and confidence issues and since this project, feel I’m now able to approach any member of the public, which I believe is a very useful skill to have.

I think my project came together really well and I’m proud of it. It think it can improve and have more impact the bigger it gets (sheer scale) and the more diverse the people and lies become. This is something I might come back to it the future so it may be an ongoing project.