Swift and Cuckoo - Digital Design Services

The Creative Garden Event, hosted by Seed Creative, is an annual event that brings together creative professionals from Leicester’s creative industry together under one roof, giving people interested in a career in the creative sector a chance to connect, and find out more about opportunities and respective professions. Guest speakers included Scott Choucino, Ruth Singer, and Stephanie Walker. It was a fantastic way for me to meet professionals and hear about their real life experiences. I was given the opportunity to tour Leicester's Creative Quarter, which houses a large number of creative businesses in shared buildings, and I also learned about different local creative networks, business support, and funding opportunities. I’d definitely recommend attending this event if you are interested in a creative career.

Chris Gray is the Operations and Training Manager for Seed Creativity, and he took some time out of his busy schedule to discuss some great tips on how to develop and present myself as a professional person for seeking employment as well as running my own business. He discussed the need for skills in the following areas: Time management Time keeping Attitude Confidence Team building Chris Gray is based at: www.seedcreativity.co.uk/

Anton and I arranged a meeting with Wajeeda, who is the Social Media Marketing Manager at Leicester College, to discuss our research and creative ideas for YouTube content, and get some feedback. Wajeeda, was very interested in my ideas and asked me to send them over to her by email. She also had some of her own ideas which she asked us to look into. The first was to film the popular social media #MannequinChallenge. Anton took the lead on this, and we were able to get our BAPSCI class to take part. Anton did a great job with the filming but was a little slow on the editing and I had to chase him to get it across to the client. The other challenge she asked us to look into was the #BeanBoozledChallenge. I managed to film a group of students who agreed to take part, however the results weren’t as fun or interesting, and due to the lack of enthusiasm of other students taking part, we decided to shelve that particular project.

I sourced some video equipment from my place of work, and was able to arrange a short tutorial with my colleagues who work in the production team. They showed me how to set up the camera equipment (including lighting and mic stands) ready to shoot an interview. They also discussed where to shoot from and what framing to use; ie full body, or just a headshot. I learned about basic video camera settings such as shutter speed, aperture and gain to help me get the optimum footage in different lig hting situations. 

I worked with Anton, another Graphics student, on this project and together we came up with some great initial ideas; We created a questionnaire aimed at other students asking them what type of content they watch in general, and on what platforms. We then took it a step further and asked them what types of content would encourage students to watch a college or university channel more. Carrying out this market research is important because it will help us to understand the project, as well as understanding the end user. Many of the results were in line with some of our first ideas, which confirmed we were on the right and we decided to develop those ideas further into storyboards.

As part of my university course we have been given a fantastic opportunity to work on a live brief for a real company. We had four options to choose from: 1. Leicester Highcross Light Sculpture 2. Leicester Highcross Pop-up Shop 3. Leicester College YouTube Channel 4. Hate Crime Project I was initially interested in working on the Highcross Light Sculpture, because it gave great opportunity for publicity as it would appear on the beams in the middle of the shopping centre food court. However because only artwork can be submitted and not any branded advertisements I decided against this in the last minute, opting for the Leicester College YouTube brief as it gave me the opportunity to learn new skills in animation and video.