Guest speakers- Musion, Southpaw, Cream-Club

The first speakers of the day were Dan Harold, Creative Services Director, and Lee Probert, Creative Technologist at Southpaw. They are a company located in Tunbridge Wales which is closed to home so this furthered my interest. They gave a really professional presentation that conveyed the operations of their company clearly. They showed some of the big companies which they have as clients such as Dunkin Doughnuts, Honda and Callaway Golf which I felt was really impressive. They showed us one of there projects which I felt was really individual and I hadn't seen before it was for their clients Dunken Doughnuts and it was to make a randomised list of doughnuts to collect which I thought was great.

 The next speakers were Natalie Thatcher, Animation Team Leader at Cream-Club. Cream-club conveyed that they were a company who gave technological tools to estate agents in  local areas and try to make them the best in that area. It was a clever idea as it really did create a new way to sell houses instead of the way everyone is selling their houses in the same way so really sets them apart as a company that uses these tools. All of the colleagues at the company where recent graduates so I feel there would be an amazing atmosphere and working their would be a great experience and a chance to meet some interesting intellectual people. The tools would need film and animation so it was clear that doing an intern ship there these are skills which i have and which would allow me to settle in well at the company. However they then said at the end of the speech that they were not looking for interns however was an interesting speech and was good to learn about the working of this unique company.









The final speaker was from Ian O’Connell, Director, and Roisin Griffin, Production Manager and Producer at Musion.  They were a company that make 3D holograms of famous people. They even scale the holograms down to a smaller size so that they can perform at smaller venues from 1,000 up and then for stadiums with 50,000 they can scale them up to create a huge performance for everyone to see. They showed us some of there holograms performing and they were amazing I couldn't believe how real it looked. They said they had became most popular from there holograms of Michael Jackson and Tupac which I felt was so cool. They didn't say anything about taking on interns of placements which I was disappointed about as they would be such an interesting company to work for.

Visual effects- lecture 2

Today's lecture was on visual effects effectively it was a detailed portray of what pre-production, production and post-production infers. We were shown different processes that go within these element and who is behind doing this process. I felt that there were allot of interesting skills that go into these processes I felt that how the 3D modelling was implemented was very interesting and as its a personal interest of mine and I will research more into this subject in my spare time.

The lecture really just went through step by step of every little element in the process and its outcome. However I felt the detail that went into explaining the visual effects was interesting and I learnt allot. It was a productive lecture.

Guest speakers- Holiday Xtras, Nintendo

The first speaker we had was Simon Wood, Technology Director, Holiday Xtras. This was a very influential speech as he spoke allot about the opportunities provided at the company and the learning opportunities which are provided. I was very interested as the role sounds very designed base and features allot of skills that I am using daily at University. I am also personally familiar with the company so this gave me further interest  into following up the speech and aiming  for this placement. Overall it was interesting and I feel I learnt more about what the company does and opportunities it provides.





The second guest speaker was Kieran Barton who was a Kent student on placement with Nintendo last year in Germany. It was a really interesting speech as he went into allot of detail into his work that he produced in the year and explained that he had to spend hours a day playing Animal crossing in order to get some of the footage he needed to implement his poster/ game designs for Nintendo. It was also interesting as he elaborated on his transition to moving to Germany and was enthusiastic towards us to make the choice to move abroad due to the new experience and chance to learn a new language. It really opened my eyes to what experience I could have by working abroad and has defiantly influenced me to look into game design as a placement.

Feedback of presentation

Reviewing the presentation that it wasn't our best performance. There was a bit of confusion between us to what the product actually was and how we would make it unique to others. To improve on this in our future presentation we are going to run through the project step by step and make sure everyone has the same understanding of the project. We also hadn't looked into cost enough as other teams had a clear understanding of pricing however we were unsure. however we discusser after and realised that we should have priced it per pupil that used the product.

I feel that my presentation skills are improving each week and that my speaking skills are becoming clearer and more confident.

Preperation for presentation - Bestoke business

For this weeks brief we have to make a bespoke web design business that needs to be innovative and unique.
The first thing we need to do is to assign each other roles for the project so we all are clear to what we are doing individually. To assign each other roles were going to have to research similar companies in order to understand which roles are necessary to produce such a business. Also we need to find out what services these similar business are providing and try to think of a way to do something unique to these business.
We have decide to focus more on the education sector where we can implement web services into schools and education. The product that we wish to produce is a school tracker where you can select the subject that you are studying and add clear evidence that you have completed this work. We are going to add a function which allows you to add a photo, video or just notes to describe what work you have completed. We aim towards schools that are already technologically advanced and use ipads and desktop with children in schools. Having finalised this idea we set off to look for bussiness that may offer this service but we couldn't find one. So we had came up with a unique idea.

We assigned ourselves roles which were
Myself: Front end developer
Steven Everest; Finance manager
Robert Harden: Back end developer
Brad Arnott: Director
Khalid khan: Assistant Director


Having researched the roles needed to create this business we felt these were the roles that we would need to complete the project.

Guest speakers- Addison group & Eurocontrol

Today's guest speakers were Farina Broadley and Monica Balducci from (Addison Group). Addison group are a web development group and design websites for all platforms and mobile devices for companies. This was a particularity interesting lecture as this is the field I am aiming to go into for my placement year. They presented there company showing all of their awarding winning work which was truly inspiring they also showed some of the huge companies such as FIFA and Tesco which were there clients. There also was a Kent student with them he had done a placement year with them and was great as they showed the work they had given him and had really pushed him to his full potential. This speech inspired me more to follow up my ambition for webdesign.

The second guest speakers were two Kent students Ayshling Mulhern and James Thompsonat who had done there placement year at  Eurocontrol last year. The placement was in Luxembourg and they showed us some of the amazing events they had done whilst living there. They showed us some of the projects they worked on which was a flash animation they had updated for a flight control video. Aswell as a video they had to produce for the company to be in shown in conferences in a few places around the world. It showed a broad use of camera operating and digital skills. I feel that the placement would be a inspiring learning curve. I will apply for the Eurocontrol placement  as they spke very enthusiastically about how helpful this experience was and how much fun they had working.

Seminar Feedback

Having just completed the seminar it honest I felt that we should have put more effort into our research and material that we used as it seemed that other groups had put allot more time and resources then us. Some of the other groups had even gone as far as contacting the companies of the material they were using .

I also feel that our presentation skills were not as great as people in the group had to use there sheets allot to remember so I feel in the future we should learn the pitch better so we don't need to use the sheets.

Lecture on data protection and IPR

In this lecture Ania spoke about digital rights management, creative commons and moral rights. I feel that these lectures are really building my understanding of copyright. Which I feel is so important as being on a digital course there's so much copyright restrictions and I need to know what i can and cant use.
The punishment involved with abusing copyright was discussed which was an eye open to me as it is really serious. TV shack was discussed as an example of abusing copyright. However it was clear that most abuses go to court and are then dropped.

So I feel that attending these lectures as well as using my own research I will have a much broader understanding of copyright laws.

Preparation for seminar

Today, I had a meeting with  my seminar pitching group and we planned the first five sections in the brief that we needed to research. We then assigned roles and area which we each wanted to research, everyone was happy with their choices and then we worked on our research sections.As we were researching together it was effective as we could keep each other up to date on what research we had found and could see if everyone was happy with the standard of everyone's research. Brad opened up a Google doc so everyone could put their work in one document which allows us to see our project as a whole.

I choose to go for researching images of crashed fighter planes and found this main resource on www.britishpathe.com, this website was great as there was so much choice and had all dated material and showed the copyright licences so you know what you were allowed to use. I found allot of images of fighter planes between 1915 and 1930. I choose three images which came to a total of £40 to use the images.

I felt that it was an interesting experience and really helped my researching skills and also showed that our team was productive and that we could work collaboratively together.

Copyright lecture

Today's lecture was focused on copyright. It gave me such a better understanding of what copyright is and what it protects. It was interesting to hear some copyright statistics i was shocked when I heard that other 35% of films were illegally downloaded. I felt like this was a scary thought and i can imagine this will only get worse as we continue into the digital age so I feel something needs to be done to crack down on stolen content.
I think the lecture are really key towards our own future work as we need to know how to protect our work. It was interesting to hear that if you sell an item of your own produced work it will be copyrighted for a 10 year period.
I really learnt allot from this lecture and it has pushed me to research further into copyright as its clear there's still allot I need to learn.

Searching for placements

Having chosen to do a year in industry I have been searching for a digital arts associated placement for next year. I have spent weeks developing my CV and have gone to three meetings over this period to meet with Famy to review my CV and make improvements.
I have been using the site ratemyplacements to find a placement I have found two placements at Disney which I have both created personalised cover lettersd for the job roles. I have just applied to both of these placements Disney creative placement and Disney production managment placemnt.
Both of these placements are involving being a digital course so I fit the requirrments correctly as well as having key skill sets which i have learnt as modules at university. I hope to hear back from the

Film and TV future trends

Today's lecture from Jane was pretty interesting as it was focused on other forms of online television such as catch up TV , you tube stars and Vlogs. Firstly she showed us some youtube and Vlog videos of some internet famous twins who call themselves Jacksgap. I had heard of them before and seen some of their videos so I knew hoe popular they are however she showed some statistics about them that I had never heard and which I found interesting  88% of their subscribers are female between the ages of 13-17 so shows who the majority of their audience are. Another example she showed us of youtube stars was a gamer called Joseph Garret who has over 2.3 million subscribers and focuses his channel around minecraft which is a game which is very popular in the gaming community.

I watch one youtube comedy star name Jimmy Tatro who has over 2,266,700 subscribers. He is a naturally funny person who channel is full of comedy short films that he makes about everyday life he started of in college making the videos and now is hugely popular and his popularity has lead to him staring in the Hollywood film 22 jump street. So I feel this really shows the power of sites such as YouTube and the opportunity they can give talented people.

Jane then moved on to a game show called "Rising start" which I had never heard of yet I found it a really interesting idea. It added a new element to game shows as you can download an appTo finu for the show and the audience then vote using the app whether they like the singer or not. So really created an individual interactive experience for the user which I felt was great and should be used on more programs.

To finish of the lecture Jane talked about Netflix which i personally have and use allot. I feel that streaming sites are going to revolutionise how me consume television. And I fell that more and more shows are going to want to sign up to be on Netflix.There are already allot of big shows such as Orange is the new black that is a Netflix based show so I fell this will happen to allot more shows in the future.

First seminar task - Pitching first idea

For our first seminar task we had to pitch an idea for a TV program or film to be broadcast in the UK.

I choose to pitch with  a group of five and decided to pitch a TV program instead of a film. As we had choose a TV program we were presenting to a Channel 4 daytime commissioner for

broadcast. 

I contacted the group together for a meeting and we brainstormed ideas, we researched popular channel four day time programs for inspiration and soon came to the idea of creating a cookery game show with a twist. 

We then decided our roles for the pitch so we could individually research our roles in the making of the game show in order to effectively convey each of our parts in the making process to our pitch audience .

Group Roles:
Director: Thomas Morgan
Producer: Khalid khan
Assistant Producer: Steven Everest 
Production Manager: Brad Arnott
Researcher: Robert Harden

The feedback from our pitch was very good because we were told that we were confident and had presented well as a group and all seemed to have a good understanding of individual roles. To improve in the future, we could have maybe researched more into statistic and cost to get a more in depth understanding of the cost of creating a project like this. However all in all the practice went really well and I think that it helped a lot with my confidence and presentations skills. 

Guest speeches

We had our first guest speakers  today, we had four different  speakers each selling the opportunity of doing a Year in Industry at there company. The first speaker we had was from  GForces which was a very interesting company who creates online software, 3d models, advertisement, animation , videos, and websites for different car companies. There were two Kent students who also spoke on behalf of the company they had just finished there year in industry there and was great to see some of the work that they had produce. It relly got me enthusiastic towards doing a year in industry for a creative company.

It was interesting as the speaker introduced the work of the company showing us a car advert that they had produced recently and showed us some behind the scene footage to convey the filming and photography opportunities available at there company. He also showed us two more videos of some of there work one was anther car advert that was filmed in there office in Dubai which i found very interesting and showed that working t the company could allow you to travel and work globally for them. The next video he showed was some of the 3dmodelling work they do and tried to get us to spot the difference between a 3D modelled car and an actual car, Half the room had got it wrong which shows amazing they had become at 3d modelling.

 He told us what it was like to interview and what the processes were and this therefore meant that for future I could easily understand what I will have to go through to be able to get an interview, and what to look for and to be prepared for. Alongside this, it was good to be able to see what other aspects there were rather than just working, they also said about having a great social life to it as well.

The second guest speaker was Cos Costantinides he was a Kent student who was did his placement with Argos. I thought it was great hearing about his experience from a students point of view as he seemed honest and open to his year in industry  which was very informative. He explained his recruitment experience and gave us tips on whats best to do in order to come across as professional and serious about the job.  
He conveyed his enthusiasm to doing a placement year and showed us some of the work he had produced which was amazing as he had helped develop some of the Argos website as well as designing the pages for the womans jewelley.section.
It was an eye opening speech and I will defiantly look into a placement at argos for my year in industry.

Online presence- week 1

Today we had our first lecture for our professional practice module which I felt was very effective and interesting. We were shown some of the types of industry that are in the UK It gave me a better understanding of what industry's are out there and what industry's relate to our course. Next they covered the year in industry it was scary to hear the slim amount of people that got placement last year with only 14 out of 40 getting placements which I though was very low I expected more.  However I am staying optimistic and am going to apply for as many placements as possible that I feel our in my skill set.

Also I created my linked in profile today and started uploading all of my work, adding connections that I know, writing a bio of myself and overall creating an professional online portfolio of myself.