My Showreel…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsGf-PmnhLw

I have created a short showreel containing examples of various pieces of work I have completed whist studying at university.

Motivation Statement

The following Motivation Statement identifies my intentions for future employment in ‘Audio and Visual Editing’.

Background:

After completing school I decide to study ‘Performing Arts’ at college, and it was there I discovered my interest for editing. Although my course involved performing, I found I was in my element when working behind the camera rather than in front of the camera. So I decided to make a career change and I applied for a placement at Coventry University to study ‘Media Production’.

By my second year of University my love for editing was growing stronger. Throughout my 3 years of studying I had worked on a variety of different projects, for example: A documentary project which involved recording and editing a 20 minute interview down to 3 minutes, producing a radio show in which my role as editor involved composing jingles and creating a show-real, I also worked in a small group to script, direct, produce and edit a ‘Short Story’, again my main role was editor.

For my work experience I undertook a placement with a local Charity named ‘WORKCARE’ in which my brief was to create a 10-15 minute DVD to promote the Charity. I filmed, edited and produced the DVD which is now featured on the Charities website and is regularly used to promote the organisation.

(Take a look: http://www.workcare.org/workcare-thevideo.htm)

Skills:

Whilst studying at University I have worked with the following editing programs:

‘Avid’, ‘Audacity’ and ‘Adobe Audition’.

I have a good understand of all 3 editing programs.

After visiting websites such as www.skillset.org it has become apparent that the skills required to edit both audio and visual material is very similar. The general skills required are as followed: Excellent aural skills, Excellent visual skills, Ability to work efficiently under pressure, Excellent communication skills, Good organisational skills, Ability to work to strict deadlines, Developed sense of rhythm and timing in story telling and The ability to lead a team.

I feel I am the right track to achieving all the above and in some area’s I already have the experience to back them up. For example whilst on my work experience I was working to a  tight deadline as well as scheduling shoots around the availability of the Charity which involved a great deal of communication skills.

I have motivation and drive and will fight for a career in editing.

Editing programs…

Whist studying at university I used a variety of different Editing programs, some of which I used a lot, some of which I used occasionally, but I have at the very least the basis skills required to use the following programs.

Audacity

Adobe Audition

Avid

Photoshop

My C.V

BBC…

I am registered to receive regular e-mails from ‘BBC Careers’ informing me of various job vacancies as well as work placement vacancies.

In my second year of university we had to complete a work placement for a set amount of days. I tried very hard to get a placement at BBC Coventry and Warwickshire as I know one main presenters, but unfortunately he could not help me as all applications have GOT to be completed online.

I did complete an application (see below) but unfortunately it didn’t go through, I will put this down as a practice run-through and will try even harder on future applications as I now have a rough idea of what they expect.

I have continued to keep in touch with my contacts at the BBC as I was instructed to let them now when I’ve graduated, there’s hope yet for a future with the BBC.

Skills Audit Sheet…

Today was not a good day…

Today has been by far my most stressful day; nothing seemed to be going right, it started bad and got worse and worse. Firstly I was meant to meet the girls at university at 9:00am but arrived late due to traffic (I later found out this was due to a lorry blocking off my round whilst delivering barrels to my local pub, typical!) Once I arrived at university we jumped straight into editing as everyone was eager to get done and get home.

Out of Charlotte, Stacey, Hayley and myself I have the most experience when it comes to editing and when we have worked together on previous modules I have always taken the editing role. So automatically I began to try and edit the images to produce our stop motion footage. On this occasion though my editing experience wasn’t really helping me as I was using ‘Final Cut Pro’ an editing program I have never used before. I played around with the program for quite a while and every time I thought I’d cracked it another problem would appear. I enjoy editing and can become quite obsessed with getting it perfect, so for me not to be making progress was extremely frustrating! While I continued to try and figure out how to use ‘Final Cut Pro’ Hayley went across the road to print bureau as our A3 prints were ready to be collected. Although we were all at uni trying to sort out our stop motion footage, we were all very stressed and our minds weren’t really in it so I didn’t feel we were working together as I team. Everyone was feeling the pressure!

2 hours later I had got to the point where I had given up, I was beyond stressed, very tied, and stuck in a basement with no windows, whist at the same time not being able to concentrate as all I could think about was how much work I had left to do. So it was time to call in some help, so we went to ask Bex, she is an absolute genius when it comes to the technical side of Media and as it happens a pro on final cut. Bex very kindly came to our rescue and talked us through step by step what we had to do, she even wrote us step by step instructions. Did I mention she is a life saver. Once we had the instructions and we knew what to do I asked the girls if they would mind if I went home as I’d reached braking point, this didn’t go down to well. Although we were all very stressed about our workload, I had got to a point were I felt I had to leave; from the instructions Bex had given us it should have only taken another 20 to 30 mins so I didn’t feel I was leaving the girls with to much to do. If I felt they really needed me there I would have stayed. The girls weren’t very happy with my decision but at that particular moment in time my stress got the better of me.

When working so closely with a group of individuals you’re going to get moments where you don’t all agree on the same thing, this was one of them moments, but that’s just life.

Although it was a crappy day, the girls did manage to put the Stop Motion footage on to a DVD which is a good thing.

A3 Prints…

For the handing in of our work I suggested we have our final images printed on A3 photo paper, the girls also suggested we have at lest one of the images printed on canvas as we will be printing 2 of our images onto canvas for our degree show. Knowing we didn’t have a great deal of time to get the images printed, I made my way to the reception of the Ellen Terry building in order to use the internal phone to try and get hold of him. Being the very busy man he is he didn’t have time to meet with us but I had a little chat with him on the phone and he advised us to go to the print bureau and put in our order as soon as possible. Knowing we were handing the images in on the 30^th April he pushed the images through for us and we picked them up today, he’s a star!

We are very happy with all the images bar 1. One of the images (see ‘Final Image 7’ on Flicker) you will notice a grey area around the hair of our module. We were aware of this when we went to order our images at the print bureau and mentioned it to the member of staff working at the bureau desk. After looking at the image the member of staff very kindly offered to help us edit that particular section of the picture, after editing the grey area it seemed to look a lot better and we went away pleased. Unfortunately when printed it didn’t look so good after all; we are now faced with the decision of whether to include it with our final choice of images???

As well as the A3 prints we also had an A2 canvas printed of another image from our final choice (see ‘Final Image 5’ on Flicker). We were relatively happy with this print apart from a small section to the left of the image which had not white balanced to the same effect as the rest of the image. This is not too much of a problem as it will only need slightly adjusting in preparation for our Degree Show.

Photoshoot 5…

After our convocation with Mez and how we had found it impossible to edit our stop motion images in order to make them flow as though it is moving footage, we decided to re-shoot. We did have a great deal of time to plan the photoshoot as we hadn’t intended on shooting our stop motion images again, let alone so close to the deadline. So I got straight on the phone to my mate Keith Homes and luckily we managed to book the photography studio for the Monday. Whist I was on the phone to Keith the girls had started to book the equipment, within the space of an hour we had everything organised and ready to go. There was just one little problem, none of our models were available to come in for the photoshoot, where were we going to get a dancer at such short notice? All eyes turned to Hayley (she was a dancer for years), she wasn’t keen on the idea but she took one for the team and agreed to be our model.

Come Monday we were ready and raring to go! The photoshoot went really well and Hayley was great, she put together some really nice dance sequences which will work really well when in stop motion. I am really please with how the images turned out and I’m extremely happy we decided to re-shot; we now have 700 images as apposed to 50, much better!

(All the images shot in photoshoot 5 have been printed as contact sheets in my workbook).

Progression of room design…

Over the course of this module I have create several digital designs of how we want our room to look for the Degree Show. Below you will see the progression of my designs and how they have changed, starting from a very basic design to a more accurate design. As previously mentioned in our Final Crit feedback Paul suggested we hand in an improved digital design of the room rather than setting the room up and taking photographs. If we were to have set the room up as we wanted it for the Degree Show this would have been extremely time consuming, so by designing a digital version I have saved the group a lot of time.