Creative Futures Week

During March our university had a 'Creative Futures' week. During this week a host of different professionals from the creative industry gave a selection of talks and workshops. I had to decide on the most relevant talks to go to as they ranged from animation to crafting jewellery (not something I really do). The week definitely proved to be useful. Mostly in the aspects of building a portfolio of work and being able to present it correctly for different potential employees. The week got me motivated to start work on my new website which is near completion now ( I have a registered domain name and last touches to make to the site before it goes live).

I will briefly cover the talks which I found the most useful and inspiring that I attended during the week.

 Harriet Buckley, a freelance animator gave us a short talk on her work for the recent film 'The Illusionist'. Certainly the most stunning 2D animation I have seen in the last couple of years. She explained that it had been the highlight of he career but not necessarily her favourite project that she had worked on. She worked on cleaning up frames so that they could be fully coloured afterwards. We she described as difficult be important work. She then followed on to give a talk on how to find work as an animator. Unfortunately she didn't give a particularly enthusiastic portrait of the animation industry which definitely was a little off putting but at the same time she did give some very useful advice for creating showreels, stressing that they shouldn't demonstrate editing skills but should just focus on animation.

 The next talk I found particularly interesting was from Paul Gravett. He gave a really enthusiastic talk about the state of the comic and graphic novel industry. He listed some of his favourite examples of work and also gave us a insight into different international comic book events, he stressed his favourites were in Paris and Japan rather the much more well known comic con hosted around the world. He also gave an interesting opinion on the state of 'Web Comics'. He had a love hate relationship with finding that they are creating a throw away attitude towards comics but at the same time delivering constant innovation in artwork and humour. It was really refreshing seeing Paul talk about the industry, he clearly had a passion for it and he definitely knew his stuff. I could quite easily listen to more talks from him.

The last talk I want to mention was from Lee Carter, a freelance concept and illustration artist. He had built up a incredibly impressive portfolio of work from working at the now sadly shut down 'Bizaree Creations' (which are responsible for a couple of my favourite gaming franchises, Project Gotham and Geometry Wars). He enjoyed his work at Bizaree but he stressed that it wasn't his proudest achievement understandably. As he is now lucky and talented enough to be now working for 2000 AD on a new Judge Dredd comic. Which he didn't fail to mention was his favourite comic book hero. He gave a brief tutorial on how he worked in photoshop, combining digital painting with 3D modelling, using models as reference. After the talk he showed his physical portfolio, which was surprisingly only A4 size (a good thing in my opinion). His work was ridiculously cool and impressive. I can only hope that I will be able to draw like that some day. 

 Overall the biggest thing I took from the creative futures week was presentation of my work. I need to make it easily accessible and varied to show that I'm not a one trick pony. But also only show work I'm proud of, because if I don't think it's good, it's likely a employer wouldn't either.