Graded Unit Submission!

Today is the day I have finally submitted my graded unit (development stage) after months of graft.

My Graded Unit can be found on my website.

Creating a promotional material package for myself was a good experience, and I will continue to use the skills I have learned on this course to progress in the Creative Industries. Over the course of the Graded Unit, here is a track of changes which happened throughout the development stage:

• Vimeo Channel - Once I created an account, I found that there were upload restrictions such as file size caps of 2GB a week, unless you set up a PRO account... For just now, I will stick with Youtube's player although I intend on building an HTML5 video player to show my media.
• My showreel ended up at a duration of 1 minute when I had originally planned 2 minutes. But after a peer review, I found that my showreel was too short and needed more material in it.
• Overall, I followed my week by week schedule (which I was very surprised about!). 

Next step is to sum up my Graded Unit in my Evaluation, this is the last section of my course and I can get my grade from there...

MikeStruthersMedia Tshirt!

Hi folks,

I thought it would be a cool idea to create my on t-shirt with 'Mike Struthers Media' on it. So when I made image in Photoshop, it looked great with reflections etc, but when I uploaded a tiff to the t shirt printing company 'StreetShirts', it came back saying the image was too large. So I settled for a Jpeg which printed out not so good...

The image had much more colour depth and the reflection I made didn't show up very well, so its back to the drawing board. More research must be done to create a better T shirt, but here's what I have learned.

• Make the image a reasonable size, so there is less room for error when it is printed.
• Try and find a t shirt printing company that prints higher quality images.

More on this soon.

Cheers

Graded Unit 2 Peer Review

Hi folks,

Today was an important day in the Graded Unit Process; showing our promotional materials that we have been creating over the last few months to be reviewed by the class, to give criticism to improve next time. Here's what happened...

I presented my material (which can be viewed here) to the class and received good feedback overall. They found that my website was a good way of promoting myself, my CV was well laid out and was good at highlighting my strengths. In addition to this, I received some pretty useful criticisms that I can take on board:

• My showreel was very short - Initially, I had planned in my Planning Stage Document that my show reel would be between 2 and 3 minutes, but after some thinking, I thought it would be better at a shorter length in order to keep an audiences attention. But, I realise now that one minute is too short and as long as I keep the flow of the showreel correctly, it should turn out fine. If you haven't seen my showreel, it can be seen here.
• A section of my CV could not be read - One of the headings on my CV couldn't be read easily, which is an easy fix, but crucial to make a good impression to a potential employer.
• Change video player on my website - When the website was being coded, I asked for my videos to be embedded through Youtube. There is nothing wrong with this choice at all, however, there are more stylish looking players such as Vimeo (but the problem with this is unless you subscribe to a PRO account, all your material will be downscaled to 720p, and there is a cap on how much can be uploaded). But, since I have been researching into the new technology HTML5, which builds great looking players, I will pursue this which will be updated in the near future.
• There was no definition of specialism in my CV - I hadn't put at the top of my CV the specialism I intended to get into. This was a good point to raise, now it will allow me to make changes to my CV to make it better and more tailored to the VFX/Motion Graphics Industry. 

Overall I enjoyed the peer review as I thought it was very helpful to find all the loopholes in my promotional material, and to also have a fresh pair of eyes look at it to improve to make me more employable...

Well that's another post done.

Cheers