Work Experience Evaluation

Although my intention was to try and experience different areas of the industry, my main focus was to try and get work placements at a local newspaper, which was all arranged back at the beginning of the semester however due to various reasons mentioned in a previous blog entry all these arrangements fell through. Although this was extremely disappointing for myself at the time, looking back over my work experience placements I feel it was a worth while and a beneficial thing for me because it forced me to step out of my comfort zone and look at other various career options.







Now looking back and evaluating my experiences I feel I enjoyed the TwoFour placement the most – although I did rate The Weston Hospice Project higher in a previous blog entry but after completing my final days on the project my mind changed due to various reasons. If I’m honest I did really enjoy the first filming day I thought we all worked well as a team, we had plenty of hands on involvement and we all got on with the job. However after that first filming day I felt things began to fall apart. I found the organisation to be poor and the lack of communication became every frustrating – at times I felt I kept nagging but this was to try and keep the process moving and to find out when the next filming days would take place so I had a rough idea of when I could complete the edit. Once I found out there wouldn’t be another filming day I got straight to work on the edit – however this did limit my editing decisions because of the lack of pictures but I managed to complete an edit which The Hospice seemed happy and satisfied with. However in my opinion I felt it could have been a lot better if things had remained to the original filming schedule / plan. But it provided me with an opportunity to work on a cooperate film something I have not done before so it was a worthwhile experience for myself, it’s not something I would probably consider branching into.



Whilst working at TwoFour I did get to experience ‘real’ work and although some of it did get a little boring I did enjoy my time there and would defiantly go back if I had another opportunity to do so. It made me aware of all the other career opportunities that could be available to myself with the skills and knowledge I have learnt on the course and has shown me there are other path ways to a journalistic career other than newspapers – I am quite interested in possible working on documentary and factual programmes where I would get the opportunity to use my journalistic skills.







Across the Pond gave me a great understanding of what it is like to work on a film set – the long hours, the cold weather, script alterations etc and it’s not something that really appeals to me but it was great fun meeting and working with new people and I did have a good job role ‘stills photographer’ during my time on the project. The role enabled me to be part of everything getting to see a wide view of everything that happens on a film set but it also provided me with an opportunity to talk to various people with different job roles allowing me to find out and discover what their jobs entailed.



Over all I have found this module to be very constructive and insightful although I am still a little disappointed I didn’t get to visit a newspaper but I have had a brief experience of that before; so completing other tasks has provided me with more experiences to add to my C.V. and a wider understanding of the variety of jobs available within the media industry! Things I really need to consider for the near future!

Editing my Showreel.

I enjoyed completing this task, because it gave me the opportunity to look back over past work and I was able to see how my technical skills have developed over the two years. But then it came to selecting the parts I wanted to include within my final show reel, there was quite a few scenes from various projects I had done but some were far too long for the time limit I had – One Minute.
I decided I wanted my showreel to show I can work on a variety of different genres and my skills are not limited to just one area; so I chose to include a short clip from my documentary ‘A Guide Dog Puppy in Training’ to show my abilities in producing and editing documentary style programmes. To show my editing abilities I chose to include a music video I had edited together ‘Wake Up – Montage of Images’ as I felt it showed the different types of programmes I could edit – again showing I wasn’t limited to one area. I decided to include a scene from the music video where effects had been used the reason I chose to include this scene was to add a more effective and appealing element to my showreel.

I then wanted to include some clips showing my drama genre skills. I chose to include a fast past scene from ‘Escape’ a drama I co wrote, directed and edited with Aleicia. The reason I chose to include the running scene was it changed the pace of my showreel making it more entertaining to watch. I also included a dramatic ending from my multi-platform film ‘One Day…’ This scene was very short but I feel it had an effective ending to my showreel.

Writing My C.V.

When I first read the module requirements I did think this task wouldn’t be that difficult, but after attempting it a number of times I began to think differently. I was finding it extremely difficult to condense everything down to just one A4 page.
After starting to think the task was impossible to do, I decided to have a look at some C.V. templates, which I downloaded from some job agencies. After looking at a number of templates I noticed the majority of them were at least two pages long – which was the frustrating thing because two pages in length seemed to be the norm for most people yet we were required to hand in one page.
After quite a few failed attempts of trying to condense my C.V. (even changing the font size) I decided to read some useful tips on writing C.V.s to try and get an idea of what type of things I should be including and what I should leave out. I discovered that I did not need to list all my G.C.S.Es subject qualifications (something I had been doing) all I needed to include was how many I achieved with grades A- C.
Surprisingly this seemed to save a fair amount of space – which was great but I still needed to cut it down further.
The other thing that I found was taking up the majority of the space was my work employment and experience – I was listing the all my job roles and job description another thing that was not entirely relevant – all that needed to be included was my job roles and the dates of the placement. I decided to choose not to include work experience placements I had completed in schools and at solicitor offices, as I believed it was not relevant to achieving a career within the media industry. To get around not including this content I chose to title my C.V. ‘Media C.V.’ rather than just have a general C.V. this made it more specific to the type of jobs I would be looking for.
After finally condensing my ‘Media C.V.’ down to one A4 page I still wasn’t extremely happy with it – I thought my personal statement was brief and lacked detailed I wanted it to be more inspiring and focused on what I wanted to do! After several more attempts of writing it I was finally happy with the finished product I felt my personal statement was a strong opening for my C.V. and all the content needed was included

'YOUR MEDIA, YOUR FUTURE' Event Evaluation

I feel this module has had its ups and downs but has been a beneficial learning experience for all of us. There has been times where I have found the module to be enjoyable and times when I have completely disliked it! However I feel we have all done well and have achieved what we set out to achieve.

As a group I believe we all worked extremely well together – everyone got involved and contributed a fair amount towards the project, which was great because in the past I have worked within groups where some group members haven’t always pulled their weight and have relied upon others to complete everything; but this definitely wasn’t the case on this group project! I feel we had good communication between us all, all regularly staying in contact and up to date with the event progress via group meetings, e-mails and telephone. In my opinion I felt everybody seemed comfortable in putting their opinions and views across to the rest of the group and the group were always willing to listen and always open to a variety of suggestions.

During the project we did face a few problems such as arrangement of actors, organisation of designing and printing posters, work experience commitments, booking college equipment/ space. But as a group I felt we handled all of these situations well and resolved them in the best possible ways. I don’t feel there were any major disasters during the whole thing!

On the actual day of the event the majority of things ran smoothly but like most things you do encounter a few minor obstacles and for us it seemed to be a few technical hitches with the computers. One being one of the event videos wouldn’t play straight away on the i-macs, to resolve the problem the video format needed to be changed and retransferred. Another technical problem was one of the show reels wouldn’t play from disc, which meant one of the guest speakers had to alter their talk arrangement around the technical problem – this didn’t cause too much of an issue though because they just worked backwards by explaining their background, jobs and experience first and showing their show reel at the end of their talk allowing time for the show reel file to copy onto the actual computer rather than play from the disc.

From the feedback we have received and collected I believe we have achieved our aims and have managed to host a successful media event! Some of the feedback does show some mixed responses and there is some things we could have changed or done a little better – like having the show reels and videos already uploaded onto each computer and possibly having a separate feedback sheet to the quiz just because the ‘quzzinaire’ needed to be handed in before the end of the event to be able to announce the winners and I don’t feel it provided enough time for the audience to give all of their feedback as they hadn’t heard all of the guest speakers. Another thing I would possibly change about the event is maybe having another question and answer time after all the guest speakers had finished their talks, just because some people may have a question that relates to more than one guest speaker or they had thought of a question during the rest of the event and would like an opportunity to put it to the relevant guest speaker. But all of these things are learning curves for us all and things we will consider if we get the opportunity to plan and host another event in the future.

This module has provided me with a wider understanding of how much time, effort, planning, organisation and team work goes into organising different events and how they are beneficial to the subject areas. But also being involved in the event and having the opportunity to listen to the guest speakers has made me think about where I really want to focus my career towards and what I want to achieve after this course and in the future because there is a variety of career opportunities available it’s just finding a way into the industry and from what I have learnt it’s all about networking!!!

FEEDBACK

Last but not least we needed to complete our folder ready to submit! To be honest everything was pretty much in the folder, all the minutes, the research, e-mails regarding various things, our brainstorming sessions, funding applications, the event videos etc but we needed to tidy it up and add the last few items such as the event photographs, the quizzinaires and results, analyze the feedback we had received from our feedback forms and complete a video edit of the event.
To make the most out of the time we had, we decided to divide the remaining tasks between us – Sam began organising the file, Tom and Kate completed the edit between them, Adam sorted out all the still images and burned them to disc and I analyzed the feedback.
Having gathered up feedback before and arranged the data into graphs I was familiar with my task and got straight to work. The first thing I did was divide the feedback questions up focusing on one at a time to make the information gathered clear as possible. I input the data collected into an excel spreadsheet and processed a graph to show the results of our feedback.

As you can see from Graph One ‘ Did the event meet your expectations?’ We received a mixed response of feedback. But a good percentage of people felt the event met their expectations.



Graph Two ‘Did you find the event interesting?’ also shows a mixed percentage of feedback but once again the higher percentages show that the audience did find the event interesting providing us with some positive feedback!




One of our main aims of the event ‘Your Media, Your Future’ was to encourage and inspire people to progress onto higher education or give them a wider understanding of the job roles within the media industry – hoping they would still want to achieve a career within the industry and from graph three we can see that the event had a mixed response to inspiring people to continue into the media but the higher percentages show that people did find our event inspiring, however I personally would have liked to seen a higher percentage of people inspired.




Another aim for our event was to promote the FDA Broadcast Media Course, once again trying to encourage young people to progress onto higher education and with the results showing in Graph four the majority of the attendees said they would recommend the course to others resulting in more positive feedback for our media event.



Over all we have received a set of positive feedback from out audience, which shows that our event has achieved it’s aims and has been a success amongst our attendees.

The Day of The Event

When I first arrived I got straight to work helping Adam display the job role posters along the corridor leading to the performance space. Once this job was completed I moved onto my assigned role of ‘monitoring the i-macs.’ Before I could do anything I needed to locate Rob (the music technician) to get him to move three i-macs into the reception area, my second task was to find Wendy (the media technician) to borrow a fourth i-mac, which also needed to be set up in the reception area. Once all the i-macs were set up I transferred a different short film to each one and set it to play on a loop for the audience / guests to view. I did encounter one minor problem with one of the films, for some reason the ‘Location Sound Recordist video’ wouldn’t play in QuickTime. To save wasting time I knew the file was playing fine on my laptop, as I had previewed it the night before to ensure all the videos were o.k. So I just dragged the file onto a memory stick and attempted to transfer the new file to the i-mac again, thankfully this time I had a little more success and the film began to play. Phew!!

For the first part of the event the audience / guests were taking part in the ‘quizzinaire’ this required them to browse around the reception area and corridor searching for the ‘quizzinare’ answers. During this time I remained in the reception area ensuring all the i-macs were in working order and answering any questions any of the guests had.







Once everyone was seated in the performance space, I got the opportunity to join in a listen to the guest speakers, Cormac and Valerie which was fantastic because they all gave very informative talks containing some good advice for people wanting to work within the media industry.





After the first two talks I moved onto my next task of the day, which was to supervise the refreshments and collecting the raffle tickets, which had been given during the signing in process. The aim of the raffle ticket was to ensure people only took one cookie so that there was plenty to go around. At first this task was quite boring just standing there but then I got chatting to some of the audience members and guest speakers which was great because I was able to find out verbal feedback about the event so far and some more information about the media industry.






After the refreshments I got to listen to the remaining two guest speakers Jason and Laura. Looking back I’m glad we decided to collect up questions from the students before hand to put to the guest speakers because although a few people did put their hands up and ask many remained quiet so it was great to have something to fall back on and the questions collected previously were asked by Sam, so there was always a question for each of the guest speakers to answer.





Although all the guest speakers’ talks were great to listen too the ones I found most beneficial to myself were Cormac Macmahon and Laura Abrahams.

Cormac because I have a strong interest in journalism and his career / talk was based very much around this subject area. Although I have an interest in journalism I’m not entirely sure which area of journalism I would like to focus my career towards so his talk was very inspiring and beneficial to myself. After the event I did speak to Cormac about possible completing some work experience with him during the summer. He told me to send him an e-mail attaching my c.v. and available dates and he would see what he could do.

The reason I found Laura’s talk interesting was because I found she had a wider view on the industry and although she was very passionate about the media and her work she had a realistic view and explained it’s always very useful to have a back up plan and something to always fall back on as the media industry is a very hard world to break into. This advice has made me think about other possible options for the future!

Once the event was completed with success, all of us went for lunch with two of the guest speakers Valerie Burke-Ward and Laura Abrahams which was really nice because we got to find our more about them, their jobs, and the industry. It was great listening to some of their experience and stories they had encountered over the years.

I felt the event went extremely well and all our planning and hard work over the pervious weeks / months had paid off.

The Event Budget

We were informed by our tutor Kim Brooke that we were able to apply for some funding from North Somerset Council to help with the cost of our event ‘ Your Media, Your Future’.
As a group we got together to plan out and organise a budget of everything required for the event. Having all completed budgets before in previous modules we all had a good idea of what needed to be included.
We decided the best way to begin planning the budget was to write down everything on the flip chart of what we needed, and what we felt would be beneficial to the event. I found this was a great way to brainstorm as a group because everyone was able to input their contribution and each point was discussed with everybody evaluating the pros and cons and whether it would be beneficial to our event.
As the event was being held all morning we decided it would be a good idea to supply light refreshments and snacks for the guest speakers and the audience. As the event was being held in the Performance Space at Weston College it made sense to use the cafeteria on site ‘Loxton’s’. To be able to add this cost into our budget we needed to know the cost and type of refreshments Loxton’s would be able to provide, so we decided to speak to Loxton’s about their availability and what they would be able to offer and a reasonable cost. They provided us with a hospitality list containing a list of prices. As we only wanted light refreshments we chose to order tea and coffee and some trays of cookies and biscuits. It was also decided we would supply lunch for all the contributors after the event. (Guest Speakers, Kim and for ourselves.)




Another line included in our budget was costs for printing up some posters and banners. These prices were based on quotes Tom had researched at a previous date.
Once we all had a good idea of the budget and total cost for our event Sam and I filled in the ‘North Somerset Funding Form’. This took a fair amount of time ensuring everything was filled in correctly and all the information they required was included. One main issue with North Somerset was they wanted some of the event material to be re-used and beneficial to more than one thing, it was decided that the posters and banners would be used at the ‘Volksfest. Festival’.
To make the event a little more interesting and interactive for the audience we decided we would run a small quiz, which would be combined with a feedback questionnaire this would be called ‘Quizzinaire’. To encourage the audience to complete the ‘quizzinaire’ a prize would be supplied ( 2 x £20 WHSMITHS Vouchers) – this was kindly supplied by Sadie Skelling from Student Services at Weston College. Weston College also gave us £500 of funding to help towards the event.
The North Somerset Funding Application form was sent off and lucky for us we were granted the full £750 funding to use for our event. So with both sets of funding we were able to include everything we wanted and felt would be beneficial for the success of the event.



Picture Source

http://www.weston.ac.uk/college/gallery-university-campus