Working In Digital Media Guest 5

This weeks guest lecturer was Fiona Kelly .

Fiona is a designer and project manager who has worked in the digital media business for the past 15 years and in this lecture she showed us some of her recent work. She runs the website www.glimmer.ie which is a portfolio of her digital projects. It showcases the different websites, adverts and animations she has created or collaborated on.

The first thing that she explained to us was that nothing is truly original and it is perfectly acceptable (if not necessary) to get ideas from other work before we begin creating things ourselves. She gave us this quote to think about by Jim Jarmusch “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from
that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft)
will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.
And don’t bother concealing your thievery
- celebrate it if you feel like it.”

Before Fiona tackles a website she will look at many other websites and take small ideas from them to incorporate into her final design. She uses sites like Smashing magazine, iStockphoto, Digg and delicious to help her get inspiration.

This led us on to some of her recent project and the various steps involved to get to the final product. Fiona obviously has a keen eye for design and I+ really enjoyed seeing how she developed a logo from the preliminary images all the way down to the customer approved  final piece. This is the final design that was chosen for the Scooter Island logo:

Throughout the design process Fiona might buy the some images from iStockphoto that fit the theme of the project, even if she does not use them for the current project they can be put into her catalogue of images and used in future projects.

The next design she showed us was for the Fat kitty Films logo.

This went through many design phases like the previous logo. As you may notice the little star vector in the top right of this logo is the same as the one used in the scooter island logo. As Fiona has the rights to this she can use it wherever she wants in her designs.

Glimmer.ie also makes flash banner adverts (something we recently had a go at ourselves). The success of an advert is based on the number of click-throughs it gets and i think this particular one for MyHome.ie got several thousand.

I really enjoyed this lecture. Fiona gave us a great deal of information about the digital media industry in the short time she was here. Her profession allows her to be creative and have great command over what projects she chooses to do. All this makes a job in this industry sound like a throughly rewarding one.

Working In Digital Media Guest 3

This week our guest lecturer was Ian Cudmore from Chutney Films.

Our lecture was late on a Thursday evening for a change but no one seemed to mind as it was an interesting look  behind the scenes at how an editor works and what projects he has been involved with. He uses the term “editor” loosely to describe himself as he actually is involved in a variety of different things in media production.

Ian’s lecture was like a brief overview of how he became the self-employed editor that he is today. He originally started out in the National College of Art and Design doing an industrial design degree (something i originally had down on my CAO form) and then went on to do a masters degree in Trinity College where he studied digital media. His view on our course was that it gave us a great advantage in the digital media industry by having a wide skill set coming out of it.

Ian got in contact with James Yorkston (a music artist) through MySpace after sending him a short video that he made in his spare time. James was so impressed with his video he asked Ian to make an Electronic Press Kit or EPK for him. An EPK is a short video documentary about the artist that normally goes out to the press when an album is released. To film this he flew to Scotland and spent several days filming James recording music along with a few short interviews. Through making this EPK Ian made connections which led him to make videos for the music artist Lisa Hannigan. Although not getting paid much for the videos Ian said he benefitted greatly from doing this by gaining more connections in the industry. The videos he made also helped Lisa get noticed on YouTube and helped get her an interview on an a big American chat show (i think it was the Carson Daly show).

This is one of Lisa’s videos that was edited by Ian.

Recently Ian has been working on projects for RTE. These include shows like “The School” and web only shows for “We Own The Streets”. He gave us an idea of what its like to be an editor for these programs and some helpful advice to always organize your video files as some shows can have hundreds of hours recorded for just a few minutes of used footage. Somewhere around 1/20th of the footage recorded is ever used in the end.

Ian’s lecture was interesting and felt very personal. It opened my eyes to just how much work goes in to making films, even short films and what to expect working as a free-lance editor.