Brief and Risk Assessment

We were set a brief last week which concludes of re branding of an product. These products are Blue Nun, Mateus Wine, Spam, Skol Lager, Brut Aftershave, Hai Karate, Babycham and Milk Tray. Our group which includes me, Tomas, Milly and Jodie will be meeting on Wednesday in the library to discuss which product we will be re branding. After we meet up, we will individually working on rough visuals for our chosen product. However we need to research this product fully visually and contextually, this will help us with our re branding.

We need to pick a medium which we will be using. I would like to do print marketing campaign as an advert for either a magazine or newspaper. As I believe that this would be the most successful, however I will have to discuss this with the rest of my group and see if they like the idea of this. I will be writing in my journal over the coming weeks to write about our progress with our re branding.

Today's session included a talk about risk assessment which was presented to us by the technician Anthony Hunt. This talk was quite interesting, however some of the information I already knew. I learnt how to fill in an risk assessment form which is something I had never done. We completed our risk assessment in my friends flat. The talk itself lasted three hours. We was shown several videos on health and safety which we had to guess whether they was real or not. The video that shocked me the most was the live t.v broadcast of Anthea Turner being injured. I thought that this video was fake however it was because everyone was given the same signal, major lack of communication. This could of been a fatal accident. We was also shown a clip which I believe was from final destination to show the risks in the home, we had to say what we risks we seen within the clip. This proved to be easier than I first thought. We were shown another photograph and again we had to identify the hazards which proved again to be easier than I thought. Overall I thought that this presentation was interesting and I will taking what I have learnt away with me.

Digital Media in Visual Marketing

This session concluded of getting into groups and looking at the task we were set last week, which was to produce a piece of pre production on any piece of digital media. This could include anything from a t.v series to a magazine. I decided to do a poster which would be for a music festival. My target audience was between 18 - 25 year old's and my poster needed to be vibrant, legible and the composition had to tie in with my festival. I completed this task, however I miss understood some of the brief as it was vague. I did what I thought was asked. However I hadn't completed the task fully.

The next stage of our lecture was to go over our  major brief which is re branding one of the products gave to us. We have to work in groups and present of ideas and final outcome on the 9th January. My group consists of Me, Jodie and Tom. At the moment our group aren't sure what we will be re branding as we haven't discussed our ideas properly yet. However I'm sure that we will meet and go over the brief together. I quite like the idea of re branding spam as it has such a bad name. It classed as cheap and nasty and I would love to re invent this, however it depends what my team want to do as well.

The final part of our lecture was some Photo Shop CS5 tutorials which in this case was image correction. This was something which I had already learnt in college. However it was good to re cap as I haven't been on Photo Shop CS5 for a while. I would like to do more tutorials as I love practical based work. We all learnt how to correct an image as a class, which we followed as Jane went through it on the projector. I found that some people had never used Photo Shop and we was asked as a group to help others who didn't have much knowledge. This is good team building as we will be doing this in a job environment.

Overall I felt that this lecture turned out well apart from the fact that I hadn't completed last weeks task completely and also I'm not too sure about our brief. However I will be looking at this on the staff web website for reference as soon as it has been uploaded.

Technology growth through the years.

This session included a short lecture about the digital time line, which started from 32,000 BC and finished in 1985. I learnt about how the technology has changed and developed through the years. Starting with the cave paintings which were the first type of visual communication. It continued with the development of technology in 1445 with the printing press being invented by Johannes Guttenburg. From this time the technology that we take for granted today developed slowly over the next 100 years. We had the arrival of television in 1925 which was invented by a man called John Logie Bird and in 1943 we had our first computer. After the computer and t.v was invented, digital media boomed. Apple Mac came out in 1984 which was soon followed by Mircosoft windows a year later.


After taking all of this into consideration we was asked to preform a task. The task involved working in groups and researching a piece of digital equipment of your choice. However we had to use only the library to find our information. We was given an hour to produce a short presentation to present to the group about your chosen subject. Our group which included me, Jodie and Milly and we chose radio.

Our next step was to go to the library and research the history of the radio. However we couldn't find any books on this subject which was helpful. We decided to do the apple mac instead, by this time we was running out of time. We searched for books on the mac however the books that we found wasn't very helpful. So sadly we reverted back to the Internet, I have forgot the name of the website I used to collect my information. However we all managed to get a bit of information to present to the group.

Our presentation didn't last long, but I believe that the information that we presented was relevant to the task we was set. The task asked us to use books as our point of reference and we didn't do this. If was to do this again I would have liked to be able to use the library as we supposed too. I felt that's the only issue that we had as a group. Other groups had managed to find relevant information from the resources in the library but I think we didn't as we changed what we was planning to research and this drained some of our time.

The second half of this session consisted of a short lecture on planning for digital media. There are three main stages which include: Pre Production, Production and Post Production. This lecture related to our next task which will be to produce a short power point on an piece of pre production of your choice. I will start thinking about this in the next few days.

Presentation on 2D animation

We was given a task last week which we had to produce an presentation on either Adobe Photoshop, NTSC, 2D animation, 3D animation or digital video editing. Our group which included me, James and nick and we chose 2D animation. We discussed which parts of 2D animation we would research so we could come back and put the information together in a power point. I chose to research Walt Disney as his the most famous 2D animator to date. We was meant to meet in the library on 04/10/11 to put the power point together, however I wasn't feeling very well so I emailed my information to Nick so he and James could put the power point presentation together. I felt bad about this, as I had let the group down so I arranged to meet in the library the next day, we meet and discussed who was saying what and in what bit of the presentation. I felt that we worked well as a team as we all researched our own part and didn't let each other down.

We kept in contact throughout the week to discuss the work we had to produce. The presentation itself I thought was a success, we didn't over pack the power point with too much information so that our audience wouldn't get bored. I felt that I should of looked up more whilst reading my information out to the group and because of my cold my voice wasn't very loud and don't think people at the back of the room could hear. I felt that the other people in my group explained there parts quite good. The rest of the groups presentations were interesting and more well thought out than others.

Overall I thought that our presentation was alright for our first presentation, however there are a few elements I would change which would include looking up at my audience when speaking as I have already mentioned in the previous paragraph, but however I believe that was my only problem.