Business Card

Written Self Assessment

When we first began this module and were told what we would produce, I was really looking forward to it. I thought that having a module where we could produce things that we are going to need anyway, and get a mark for it was great. I am really interested in developing myself as a brand and getting my name out there for the industry to see. I wanted to use this distribution module as an opportunity to learn how to market myself properly, rather than trying to produce everything myself with no guidance or advice. 

I am a really organised person who likes to make a lot of lists, so I began the module by looking at the brief and the powerpoint we were shown in the first class and establishing exactly what we were required to produce. I then started to think about branding myself. I knew I wanted a logo that I could put on my pieces of work to identify myself. I played around in Photoshop with different styles of writing my initials. I came up with a few that I liked, then narrowed it down to one final logo design. With this logo, in black, white and dark pink, I now had a theme for the rest of my visual work. I used this when designing the opening and closing of my showreel, and then extended it to my website. 

I knew that the website would be the most challenging task in the module, as I only have a tiny bit of experience in website design and have done nothing for almost 6 years. I therefore thought I would start planning my website early on, so I would be as prepared as possible when I actually came to producing the site. I looked on the website Themeforest at a number of different themes for websites. After looking at a few, I had a rough idea of the kind of style I liked and I knew from my planning, how many sections and tabs I was looking for. There are hundreds of themes on Themeforest so at some point I had to stop looking and just narrow down the ones that I had already seen. I started with almost 10 and after narrowing it down to a few and asking my tutor and peers, I eventually chose the Bella Studio theme. I liked this theme because it was fairly simple and minimal but had lots of room for images and had a central layout. Once I had decided, I made a note of the name of the theme, ready for when I wanted to purchase it.

With my website planning done I turned my attention to my showreel. I keep all of my finished work together on my home computer anyway so it was easy to find all of my pieces when it was time to go through and decide what was going to make the showreel. Looking back over the last 3 years worth of work, I realised that the majority of my work was not of a high enough standard to go on my professional showreel. At first this made me nervous, thinking I wasn't going to have enough work to put a showreel together. But knowing that the showreel was only 60-90 seconds long and would feature only a couple of seconds of each piece of work, I thought I would be able to edit together something with the work I had. It made me realise how far I've come and how much I've learnt while I've been at university, which is always a good thing to feel. I chose the pieces I wanted to use and edited them in Premiere Pro so I had the best bits of each piece of work. I then put them all together in one project and put them in order from the best work to the worst. At this point I had almost 3 minutes of work! And I hadn't even added my photography compositions, opening and closing clips. I knew I was going to have to be a lot stricter with what was going to make the cut and what was going to be left out. In terms of my photography, I needed to think of a good way to show my photography and not just a dull slideshow. I did some research online and looked at how photographers had put their showreels together. There were some really complex compositions, but eventually I came up with an idea to use a split screen and show four photographs at a time, with an animated camera moving around and zooming in and out of the photos. I used After Effects to produce four comps using 16 of the best photographs, however only two made it into the final showreel, again due to timings. With my photography added to the showreel, I produced a simple opening and closing credit with a fade in and out at the beginning and end. Some people in the class were producing complex openings, but I thought that a piece of spectacular visual effects wouldn't represent myself and my work as this is not the area I want to work in primarily. I also thought a black fade was the most professional, as almost all of the big companies used a black fade on their own showreels for example Moving Picture Company and Double Negative.

At this point, with my showreel almost finished (there were a couple of shots from my final major project that needed to be put in before the final render), I decided that I wanted to get all of the other pieces of work finished before I started my website. This included my standard written CV, a creative CV and signing up to the required social media and online video channel sites. We needed YouTube and Vimeo channels and 2 social media sites. I already had a YouTube channel, a Vimeo channel, a professional twitter account and a LinkedIn account. This meant that all I needed to do was to put the four links onto my blog. With regards to my CV, I have had a standard CV for years, so I used this as a template and replaced the work experience and skills sections with work experience and skills that are relevant to the film industry as aposed to the retail industry where I currently work. In terms of the creative CV, this was an optional extra on the brief but I decide that I wanted to produce something for it. Thinking back to a class we had towards the beginning of the module on InDesign, I thought about using a slideshow tutorial for the software to produce a creative CV that you could flip through using interactive buttons. The way we had completed the tutorial was to use JPEGs and insert them in order to create the slideshow. I thought it would be best, and easiest to follow the tutorial as closely as possible, so I used Photoshop to create each section of my CV as a separate page, a separate JPEG. The difficulty in getting the InDesign document done came down to the availability of the computer rooms that had InDesign installed. I had one opportunity to use the computer and get the CV done, but I was short on time and the computer kept crashing. For a while I thought I would just wait and try again another time, but as I started developing my website I realised that I could create a different creative CV on the CV page of the website. I therefore decided to abandon the InDesign idea and just create something simple on the website.

I knew that there would be a lot of things that I wouldn't know how to do when producing my website in Dreamweaver, but we had had a class on changing the basics so I thought I would just dive in and give it a go. I bought my theme from Themeforest and downloaded it. There were a lot of pages in the file so I went through them and chose which ones had the best layout and design for each of the pages I wanted to put in. I then started changing the colour theme and all of the text and doing as much as I could by myself. I surprised myself with some of the things I managed to do, seeing as I had such little experience, but eventually I came to a stand still and had to make a list of all the things I needed help with. I hoped that my tutor would be able to show me how to do everything on my list, and I hoped I would remember what she told me! I was really pleased when she was able to show me how to do everything on the list and I was really encouraged when I learnt how to read the coding and realised it was simple to work out one you knew what you were looking for. I powered on and finished my website within a couple of days. I am really pleased with my website and think that it represents me as an artist as well as my work. Early on during my planning stages I researched domain names to see what name I could buy for my website. I used a website and found that www.hannah-saul.com was available, so noted that to purchase when I am ready to put my site online. I was hoping to get my website online as soon as it was finished, but have since realised that there are a couple of things that need changing before I can put it online. There are two pieces of work on my website that I produced for university projects that feature mainstream music. This is fine for projects but I will not be able to use this music on my website, as this is against copyright laws. Luckily my brother is a talented digital musician and has agreed to produce a couple of tracks to replace the copyrighted music which I can then switch on the videos before it goes online. I am disappointed that this cannot be done before the deadline date but there is too much work to do for other modules in the next few weeks.

Overall I have really really enjoyed this module. I think it has got us all thinking about our future in this industry and what we are going to do with our work and our profiles once we have graduated and are looking for jobs. I like to think about my future and what I am going to do to carve a career for myself, as I am confident in myself as a person and in my abilities. I think that this distribution module has been one of the most useful module we have had over the last few years and I have fully taken advantage of the opportunity to produce the work that I will use to distribute my work and my name once I have graduated after my MArt next year. I really do feel that I couldn't have done anything else when producing all of my work for this module, as I examine every piece of work and see the best work I am capable of. 

Website Update

After my last post, I spoke to my tutor and she helped me work out how to do everything that was left on my list. Once it had been pointed out to me, I realised it was really simple to manipulate and change things on my website. I spent the next couple of days uploading all my work to my YouTube channel so that I could link the videos to my website, and finishing off everything to complete my website. I a really pleased with the final result and can't wait to get it up online. I will speak with someone who hosts websites for some students and get my site up and running once I have changed the music on some of my pieces of work, as some work features music that I don't have the rights for, and therefore I don't want to feature it on my website. I will sort this out after the deadline date, as it is not a requirement for the brief for the site to be online and I have too much work to do for other modules as well at the moment.

The last thing I need to do to complete this module is to write my self assessment report.

I am also going to design a business card, as we were told it would be a good idea to have business cards.

Website

Over the last couple of days I have been working on my website. I have been really looking forward to making my website because I think it'll be nice to have a professional platform to display my work and information.

When I started the site in Dreamweaver I realised it wasn't going to be as simple as I initially thought. There are a lot of things that aren't obvious how to edit and I am not familiar with Dreamweaver...infact I've never used it before!

I have done everything I am capable of doing and have made a list of everything else that needs doing so that I can ask for help from the tutor next week. I think I've managed to get quite a lot done considering I am a website making virgin. I have changed the colours and text content of every page and have linked my pages together.

I am hoping that my tutor will be able to show me how to do the rest of the things on my list so that I can finish my website off quickly.

Showreel

Today I animated the camera in my photograph compositions so that it panned around and showed all of the photographs, before revealing the 4 photo split screen. I managed to do this fairly quickly and added these shots to my showreel. However my showreel was way too long so as a way of cutting the time down I chose the best two compositions and just kept those ones. I also edited some of my other clips and took some things out to get my showreel time down to 1 minute 30 seconds. I still have a couple of shots left to put in of my final major project at the end of the semester before the hand in but I have done everything that I can do on the showreel so far.

I spoke to my tutor about my website template and also clarified some points about the creative and written CV.

Showreel progress

In this weeks class I started thinking about how I was going to display my photography within my showreel. After looking at a few photography showreels like the ones below for ideas, I decided I would put my photos into groups of 4 and do split screens that I would then animate a camera to move around and zoom in on. I thought this way it would be more interesting than just a normal slideshow but wouldn't be too complex that it took away from the piece of work themselves. During the class I decided which photos would go together and put them into a composition in After Effects. Next week I am going to animate the camera and then export the pieces so that I can add them to my showreel project in Premiere Pro. After that I will just be waiting on the final pieces of work from my final major project to go into the showreel, then I will export the finished video and put it onto my website, ready for the hand in.

Social/Professional Media Links

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/HannahSaul5


Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user10502990


LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/hannah-saul/42/6b0/a52/


Twitter: https://twitter.com/HannahASaul

Creative CV

Below are the JPEG's of each page of my creative CV. This CV will be put into InDesign where I will make it into an interactive slideshow that will then go onto my website.

Website Template

I have finally decided on which template I am going to use for my website. I have gone with the Bella Studio template. I chose this one because it is clean and simple but has just the right amount of sections for text, stills and video. I like how the branding and tabs are central and there is a large space for a showreel or in my case a slideshow of stills/screen shots right in the centre of the screen. It makes it very easy to introduce a visitor to your work straight away without them having to do too many clicks. I also like how the website isn't too long, meaning you don't have to scroll down far to get to the bottom of the site. In my opinion there's nothing worse than a never ending list of things to look at, the user will get bored and will click off the site. Tabs are definitely a better way of sectioning work.

I am excited to purchase this template and start replacing everything with my work!

Homepage

Porfolio page

Contact page: I really like having a ready made form for contacting as it makes it so much easier for the user to contact you and therefore they are more likely to do it!

InDesign

Today we looked at Adobe InDesign. This software can be used for online publications and interactive text and image. We did a few tutorials in order to learn the basics that we then can apply to our own work. I think the most useful tutorial for me was the slideshow tutorial. i think that I will use this to create my online creative CV that will go on my website. I like the idea of having each section of the CV on a separate page that you can navigate in between. I think it adds something extra and a little different to what is usually a very dull word document.

Three different states of a slideshow and the navigation buttons.

Showreel progress

In the last class we looked more into editing our work for our showreels. I had already roughly chosen the sections of work that I liked so I started making them smaller so they would fit into the 60-90 second time requirement. I also used my logo and branding to create an opening and closing clip for the showreel, including my contact details. In order to finish my showreel I need to work more on the transitions between my clips and decide on how to display my photography.

Website Templates

INHAPPYHOUR

BELLASTUDIO 

PORTDESIGN

MONTREAL

MODELISH

Creative CV layout

Progress

In the last few classes we have been starting to think about how to put our showreel together and what work will feature in it, how we are going to brand ourselves and whether we are going to create a blog or website to display ourselves online.

I showed my work to Danny and he helped me pick out which bits of each piece of work would work well in a showreel. I then went home and edited all of my pieces of work so that I had a small clip from everything that I can continue to work futher on during the module to create my final showreel.

I then started to think about how I wanted to brand myself and what kind of logo I wanted to produce to represent me. I picked the colour theme black, white and burgundy which will feature across all of my media, from my website and logo to showreel and blog. I played around on Photoshop with different ways to write my initials and name and came up with the final logo below.

In the most recent class we looked at blogs and websites and what the benefits and negatives of both are. I decided I want to create a website for my professional online presence because I have used blogs all the way through university and I feel a website would be more professional and a step up. In the rest of the class we looked at how to change templates in Dreamweaver to feature our text and images. It was a little difficult to grasp the coding at first but I think I will be able to understand it as I produce my website.

Since the class I have been looking at templates on Theme Forest that I might want to purchase for my website and have been thinking about what content I will put on each page of my website. I am looking forward to putting all of my ideas into action and producing my site.

Presentation: screen shots

First Class

In our first Distribution Methods class we were told what the module was about and what we were going to be producing for assignments. This module is about getting our name and our work out there for the industry to see. We are going to be producing a showreel, a creative CV and a website/blog where we can put down everything about us that we would want future employers to see.

I am really looking forward to working on this module as I really like blogging and I think it will be so useful to create something for the assignments that we will then have as our actual portfolios when we graduate and start applying for jobs. I cant wait to start designing my portfolio website and start thinking about how I want to portray myself to people in the industry. Also having a ready made showreel will be really helpful as well.

In the next class we have to present the work we have done at uni so far, so that the tutors have an idea of our skills and also to help us get used to presenting and talking about our work. I'm not really looking forward to it because I'm the type of person that cares what people think and don't always have a massive amount of self confidence, but I've put together a presentation and hopefully it will go well.

I think this module will be one the most useful modules we have done over the last 3 years because what we produce actually applies to the real world and could help kick off our careers.