My First Reflections

My First Reflections 25/09/2019

This week has been my first few days, since coming back to college, following the planned schedule. This means that we have already been a part of five lessons!

The first lesson I took part in, was Client Brief with Gina on Monday morning, this lesson was split into two parts, the first was about professionalism, the second was about our client brief and watching films made for clients by students in the past, including one made by my friend Jake Mason, who is now at university.

At the beginning of Gina’s lesson, we talked about professionalism, my class all had an activity to do, the activity was writing about another student's top qualities, (relating to media and professionalism). After this activity, the whole class selected their favourite attributes. Below is an image of what characteristics our class found most important when acting professionally.

Here are five of my favourite qualities, ones that I think are most important to be professional around a client/interviewer.

1. Presentable – Wear suitable clothing, e.g. black on a film set.

2. Confident – Rehearse what you need to say before you say it.

3. Driven – being lazy is not good enough; you need always to be thinking about your next move.

4. Open-minded – not everything in life is going to go your own way.

5. Knowledgeable – you need to do your research, before any client meeting and interview.

In the second half of Gina’s lesson, we looked at past client films, most importantly, how to succeed where others had failed. The most important thing I picked up from was, these past client brief films were unable to explain the purpose of why the video was created, they just seemed like mumble jumble, an interview here, so B-Roll there, they just didn’t seem like the quality I would expect, as say, a business owner, for example at the place I work called Burnett & Hillman, they had a video made for them to put on their website to show what they do.

Below is that video…

In this video I believe it is clear what Burnett & Hillman manufacture, now this video was made by a professional team with a professional camera, however, I like that there is a voice-over and the different shots used in this commercial piece.

After looking at other student films, from the past years at Weston College, some are creative, there was one which was about abuse against men and women, this one was simple but effective, there was also the one I mentioned earlier made by my friend Jake called; ask for Angela, which I wrote about, showing its strengths, below is the example (please excuse my handwriting).

I also wrote a piece about a client film, referring to the Tropicana in Weston-Super-Mare, what was its strengths and weaknesses, I thought, although this client film lacked in quality, a lot of the footage used in it was archived and, it is not all the best quality, so this film is an excellent example of how hard some client films could be. Here is the photo of a piece of paper of my initial thoughts of the Tropicana film.

In conclusion of Gina’s lesson, it was an excellent way to explain and let us know what is expected when we make our client brief films, as well as, how to act in a professional manner around clients and interviewers, this was extremely informative.

After our lesson with Gina, we had a lesson with Mel. This study was on preparing for our futures in the media industry or Progression in Media Industries, e.g. PIMS.

In this lesson we were tasked to fill out various forms, spanning from, researching job roles in the industry to actually writing a covering letter for a job, we also even filled out a form applying for an apprenticeship, all of this work can be found in the PIMS section of my blog, or on my Client Brief website page.

The activities were fun, and I found them beneficial as well as this our new futures academy, restructuring seems to be very promising this year, unlike last year’s futures academy I will massively benefit from the lessons they will offer this year.

The last thing I have achieved this week was a tutorial with Dan (my tutor), we talked about my work experience placement, I had found at Moonraker VFX in Bristol. We also talked about how I personally improved over the last year, Dan wants me to learn a new skill and that for me would be lighting as well as learning some VFX at my industry placement.

Other than this, I am super happy with what is going on so far in my college course, and I believe this year will be fun, but also quite a stressful one, with all the overlapping projects, but I will manage.