Work Placement

About a month ago, the college set us up with Helen Foley, of the Bath College union, where we were given an opportunity to do some work with the college, arranging and composing a series of promotional videos displaying the various FdA courses available to undergraduates, including our own course in Digital Design. The placement requires us to interview 8 of the foundation course leaders and display them in a positive light with supporting footage and imagery of the college. We will also have to do all the editing, create an overlay, and find music to get it ready on a customized Youtube channel. I had initially paired up with some fellow colleagues on my course; Will Southward, Alex Stevenson and Max Lynn but it has just been reduced to myself and Alex S now, as Will has left the course and Max has found preferable work experience.
Over the weeks thus far, we've planned out and interviewed 7 of the course leaders with a HD Sony Z5 camera and captured the footage onto one of the macs in H201. Tomorrow we will be filming Fhiona McKie (Fashion) who is the last lecturer needed. Below is a list of lecturers/students filmed thus far.

Lecturers:
Matt Atkinson - Principal of City of Bath College
Mark Smithers - Music
John Curry - IT & Computing
Neil Davies - Sports
Katrina Diamond - Heritage Management
Wayne Austin - Business Management
Catherine Sellars - Digital Design
Students:
Jen - Business Management
Rebecca 'Dizzy' - Music

Self Directed Proposal

Here's a link to my Digital Art blog. Where I am showing work done for my Self-Directed assignment.

http://www.alexparkerdigitalart.blogspot.com/

"Throughout my life I have had a passion for drawing. As a young boy I was renowned for my doodles and sketches, teachers and classmates marveled at the characters and scenes I produced and eventually I was set on becoming an artist. Things seemed so simple back then. Today I am doing a course in Digital Design. I spend my time composing digital adverts, logos, motion videos, websites and I work with clients, helping them with their design needs. All of this is to help further my knowledge of the design industry for which I am now aspiring to become a part of. So you can imagine how working digitally involves a lot of work on computers, I spent many years learning the different skills and software of the digital world and in the process I neglected some of my core drawing skills. I would like to use this opportunity to brush up on some old skills and techniques and then incorporate these skills into my digital medium. I think these skills will prove valuable to me as a creative designer and not just as an artist. Another part of this project, will involve me looking into the influence that digital design and computers has over contemporary designers and artists, I want to see the benefits and the disadvantages this medium has brought into the industry."

Dad's Music Company

For a number of years, my dad has been in the music business, initially starting out as a singer/songwriter, nowadays he creates a lot of stock music, mostly instrumental tracks. And now he's hoping to expand his horizons by making his music accesible on the internet. We had a little chat about how to approach the design and the messages to be conveyed, and we both agreed on using an old bakelite radio to represent the music, which would be floating around in space in a sort of mysterious and quirky scenario. So I got to work, creating the bakelite radio from scratch on Photoshop. I also created a logo for the business "Paul Parker Music" incorporating the use of a chevron, a symbol often associated to vintage radios:

Something Vintage yet Stylish.

I overlayed the logo onto a grill/amp-like texture as a central focus on the bakelite radio. The radio itself uses textures from samples of bakelite and I have used a number of layer styling methods to make it as realistic and as edgy as possible. I have also added a little green light and buttons which the user could interact with. This whole composition is designed as a sort of "home page" on a website, with buttons linking you to the specific pages that make it up. I won't be actually composing the website for the company, just creating a brand image and constructing the space and objects associated with it. The main one in this instance, being the radio:

Click for a bigger image!

With the radio, my dad wanted me to try and get a good balance between retro, classic and sleak design and yet also make it appeal to people under forty! I can't really put my finger on it, but I think that it does have somewhat of a modern charm. The space background scenery also bolsters this I think:

What's this vintage machine doing in space?

My dad is very pleased and impressed with what I have done. He rewarded my efforts with 8 bottles of Kopparberg Pear Cider! He's asked me if I can create some album covers for him as well, and I'll be having a go at them at some point. Stay tuned for the results!

Interview with John Strike

During my time at Future Publishing, I managed to arrange an interview with John Strike, who is the Deputy Art Editor of Xbox World 360 magazine. I felt like it would be a good opportunity to learn a bit about the magazines industry as well as furthering my own knowledge of the industry and the skills/equipment associated with it. It also meant ticking off another task for the Professional Studies module.

3rd of March 2011 - 10:15 - 11:00

Name: John Strike
Occupation: Deputy Art Editor - Xbox World 360 magazine

How did you find yourself working for Future?
"I started out doing a 3 year degree in Graphic Design at the Cumbria institute of Arts. At the end of the course, we had an exhibition/gallery type thing to display work we had done. The work was seen by a contact from Future Publishing, who then recommended me to the Bath branch."

As a Deputy Art Editor, what sort of work do you do?
"I work in a team of designers and editors on the Xbox World 360 magazine, which is roughly 132 pages long. We aim to visually represent the content using assets and stories, liasing ideas with eachother and sending each page through a number of processes to be analyised by a number of different people. The Production editor runs through the content to make sure everything is relevant and that there are no spelling mistakes, accidents etc. A lot of the images in the magazines we use are supplied to us by the individual game companies for our usage. We can then tweak them and edit them so that they can be added appropriately in their respective positions in the magazine. The Xbox World 360 magazine is an unofficial magazine – which basically means that it holds a lot more personalised elements rather then the formal and by-the-book ways of the official magazines, like with Imagine Publishing, who are probably our biggest rivals at present. Each of our magazines has its own budget, and each magazine divides the budget out into the art and template side of things and the written work, editorial side of things. It takes us roughly 16-18 working days to create each issue of XBW 360 with teams of six working on them."

What skills are required to work in this sector of the industry?
"In this particular sector of the design world, it is important to have a good grip on the software InDesign, as it is the software we currently use to arrange the magazine page templates. It is also good to have proficiency with PhotoShop as we occasionally need to edit and manipulate certain aspects of an image or the design of the magazine. It’s nice to think that “experience counts for more than a degree” but in reality, you are more likely to be chosen if you have a degree. When I first became involved with Future, I only had knowledge with PhotoShop and Illustrator but the company trained me to use InDesign  and it was a sort of baptism of fire when I first started out."

Do you enjoy working at Future? What are the positives and negatives?
"It’s great working with Future, they teach you the skills you need and they train you up for the workload. It’s not the most taxing of professions and you get to work in a very relaxed environment, meeting people from all over the world. The downside I suppose, for me, was that I had to move a long way from my home up north in order to work at the Bath branch. Often with this sort of work and many others in the design sector, there can be a lot of travelling involved, especially in the journalism side of things. Often you will be shipped off to review a certain event taking place on the other side of the country. The actual workload can get a bit frustrating after a while, as well. The templating system we use on the magazines is rather restricting in the way it can stop us being as creative as we’d like to be. Overall though, I don’t regret my being here and hope to keep my job for the meantime anyway."

A Day’s Work at Future Publishing

Future Publishing, Bath, BA1 2BW

When Video Games journalist, Rob Taylor had come in to talk to us, I was interested in speaking to him about possible work placement, which the course requires that I find. He wasn’t able to provide me with two weeks but he managed to score me a single day’s work experience working on the Xbox World 360 Magazine with the Deputy Art Editor; John Strike. I was instructed to get to the Future Publishing HQ at Quay House, Bath for 10.00am. One of the amazing things about this placement was its location. The Future Quay House building has multiple floors dedicated to all the magazines that they work on. My bus stop was literally across the road from the building which meant I could get there in good time. Upon entering the building and waiting in reception, I met John Strike and Rob Taylor (for the second time) and they showed me around the Future building; the cafeteria (with free coffee vending machines and a wide selection of tasty treats!) and upstairs I was led into the South Wing, where John and Rob are based with the Xbox World 360 magazine team, as well as the PSN team and PCGamer team. It was a fantastic place to work, and had a really nice relaxed and friendly atmosphere. Everywhere you looked; there were magazine and video game equipment and memorabilia…truly it was Heaven on Earth! I had asked John in an e-mail whether it was possible to interview him regarding his background and life at Future and he had agreed. And we went down to the cafeteria and had a nice long chat about a number of topics (which I will expand upon in my next post). John was a very down-to-earth guy and had a lot of information for me, which was fascinating and very helpful, and I was even given a free copy of the latest XBW360 magazine! After the chat and interview, we went back into the South Wing and I was put to work on one of the freelance iMacs. John had provided me with some in-game screenshots of the upcoming game ‘Rage’ for me to spruce up using PhotoShop.

id Software's 'Rage' Due for release in Sep 2011

Sandbox style action and shooting at it's best!

I was then taught how to add them into the InDesign magazine template page, It was a lot of fun and I learned some core skills on PhotoShop and InDesign. After my work with the ‘Rage’ news page, I learned that it would actually be used in the upcoming series of XBW360 magazines and that I would be credited for the work done which was an exciting prospect! For lunch I went down to the cafeteria and then when I got back I noticed that one of the journalists working on one of the other magazines was heading off to London for some Pokémon related event. It just shows how busy and demanding this career can be. The same team had also managed to get hold of one of the new Nintendo 3DS hand-held consoles and Roy (presumably a journalist or reviewer of some sort) was playing around with it on the ‘Monkey Ball‘ game. Judging from his frequent outbursts of profanity, I expected that the game was pretty difficult! After I had finished manipulating and adding the pictures into the ‘Rage’ double spread, I was given another page to work on, adding the pictures into the news article regarding a new ‘Sherlock Holmes’ game. The work done is likely to be featured in the next few editions of the XBW360 magazines (104 & 105) so I will have to look out for those in the local newsagents when they get released! I had a lot of fun from my time at Future and felt a lot more experienced and skilled with the software and industry at the end of the day.  I was very thankful for the opportunity John and Rob had given me and would love to go there again in the future perhaps one day!

I added the pictures!

Pictures and Background on here too!