For my showreel I have struggled putting together all of my artefacts that I have created over the last three years of university to display into a showreel. I haven’t managed to get a copy of some of my pieces of work in which I am proud of due to not recieving a reply off the lecturer who has them so I have decided to write about them instead.
In my first year at university our end of year project was to make a television show particularly a ‘magazine show’ which featured coventry in it. Our group decided to make a television show based on the format of ‘this morning’ and we called it ‘Coventry Today- A summer special’. Basically our show featured a male and female presenter (like this morning) and featured inserts that included- places in coventry to go for good days out in summer, summer fashion, summer foods, drinks etc and also a competition. My job role in the production of our magazine show was the ‘directors P.A’ for this job I had to be focused, organised and have good timekeeping skills aswell as communication skills. It was my job to communicate to the studio from the gallery via the floor manager. It was after being in this job role that I started to consider that maybe a career in television production behind the scenes would be something I could pursue in the future. For this television production module we recieved a grade first for our magazine show as it really was a good show, the grade reflects all the hard work every single person from the group put into it. The lecturers were also very impressed with our magazine show, so much so that it is shown at open days to students visiting the university that are interested in the media production course.
In my second year at university I did quite a few projects in which I am proud of and would also like them to display here but yet again I have still to get hold of all the footage. My first project of the year was a short film in which we had to put together using still images and audio. My group of four decided to do our film on one of the group members mothers and how tough her life is being a single mother. It was quite a moving piece in which the images were a tool to provoke emotion and matched the audio, for example we had pictures of Zoe (member of our group) when she was little with her mother when the audio mentioned the past etc. For this project we achieved a 2.1 in which we were all very pleased with.
Another project we put together in this year in the same group of four was another short film in which we had the task of trying to tackle scriptwriting. We wanted the narrative of the story for our short film to be about a girl who met a boy at a bus stop and they got talking and the girl could read his minds and others. The story continues with the boy and girl walking round town and the boy asking the girl what people around them were thinking. We wangted this short film to be humorous so we spent a lot of time and effort on the script. Unfortunately for us we came across a few major gliches with the production of the short film due to actors letting us down at the last min, and the film set surroundings being practical to film (traffic. general noise in background when filming). The lecturers were aware of all our problems and so took this into conmsideration when marking the piece and I think we ended up getting a 2.1 for this piece which was great!. After all the difficulties we encountered when putting together this short film I learnt a lot about myself, one that I work well in a team, I am quite creative with ideas that I have for narratives. Finally I have learnt I can cope well under pressure, kepping focused on the job in hand to complete an assignment or task on time.
My final project for my second year was a broadcast module in which myself and the other two members of my group decided to put together a radio show. The radio show that we made was probably one of my biggest achievements as when we were all deciding roles I opted for presenter as I thought my personality was better suited at this role and I don’t see myself as being very technical. However I was picked to be the producer in my group and at first I was a bit shaky and nervous in this role with a bit of practice in the role I ended up being fine. The concept of my groups radio show was a fictional show called ‘cloud 9 FM’ -brought to you from just beyond cloud 8. We decided to look at greeks gods and goddesses with funny names to incorporate into the show as well as mystical and cosmological characters such as ‘fate and destiny’.The show is presented by Claire Voyant, and features items such as ‘win a date with ‘destiny’ and her twin sister ‘Fate’, listen to ‘Destiny’s decisions’ (horoscopes for listeners), and features ‘the planets’ (girlband) new song ‘orbiting you’. The lecturer Shelly loved the concept of our show and because we had advertisements included in it as well as different voice actors reading the news and sport it featured a lot of variety. We achieved a grade first for this radio broadcast module in which I was very happy about and the broadcast module was one of my favourite modules that we had on our university course. I am still awaiting a copy of my radio show as I think it will be good to show future employers, but I do have the website we made which features some of the inserts we made for the show and other things such as photo galleries on.
http://cloud9fm.webs.com/listenagain.htm
During this module I started my work experience placement at Mercia FM a local radio station in which I had the oppurtunity to work firsthand with the presenter and producer of the breakfast show. I was able to polish my editing skills in the studio as well as going out and interviewing the public for inserts in the show. I was lucky enough to gain some great oppurtunities through working at mercia with being featured on the news accompanying an insert they doing about mercia six year old agony aunt Elaina. The news footage is featured below I am the first person to come on to put my dilemma forward to Elaina.
Also through working at mercia I was able to get a paid position working as a mercia thunder, basically promoting the radio station at events at coventry and warwickshire.
In my third and final year at university in my group of four we have been working on our final project. We decided to choose the theme of dance and movement photography but add some depth into the theme by looking at ‘How we take movement forgranted’. For this, we interviewed a fellow student of ours called Terry O Brien who has arthogryposis which means he’s wheelchair bound and he describes how little things that we do every day like walking and dancing he can’t do and describes how we just dismiss this and take it forgranted. We wanted to create stop motion footage of a dancer dancing around whilst we played Terry’s interview over the top to add meaning to the piece. We also took a few pictures of myself and Charlotte (member of the groups) sisters as they are dancers to put on the walls to display within our degree show. Our research for this theme of work is found on this blog under 311mc and also some of our photographs are on here too.
