ARD 604 Creative Futures Student Conference Week 2014

Mon 4^th March 2014

Opening Address: 'Developments in the Creative Industries' -
Dr Stuart Cunningham

The Creative Futures Student Conference Week 2014 began in the William Ashton Theatre with the Opening Address: 'Developments in the Creative Industries' delivered by Head of Creative Industries Dr Stuart Cunningham. 

Dr Cunningham introduced the Conference Week by running through some of the statistics relating to the current state of the Creative Industries in Britain today using the current estimates published in January 2014 by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, - one of the governmental departments that represents the Creative Industries in the UK.  Regarding our future employability within this growth area, he assured us that we were 'in exactly the right place'.

Dr Cunningham outlined the subtle distinction between the 'Creative Industries' and the 'Creative Economy', which latter relates to the actual occupations of those working within the Creative Industries. A person working as a graphic designer performing a creative function within an educational or governmental department for example would not be working within the Creative Industries, but by performing a creative role they would comprise part of the Creative Economy - which is the larger of the two, employing over two and a half million people within the UK, amounting to one person in eighteen with a creative job. A graphic designer working for a design company on the other hand would be categorised as a part of the Creative Industries, in which over one and half million people are employed. One can therefore be a creative person but not necessarily employed within the Creative Industries per se.

Over the last two years employment within the Creative Industries has grown by 8.6% whilst the Creative Economy grew by 6%; both figures are significantly higher than the UK average which grew by just under 1% by comparison. Further trends visible within a breakdown of the subsects of the Creative Economy show a similar growth pattern, although advertising and marketing, architecture and crafts shrank very slightly during this same period. In terms of the value that we contribute to the UK economy therefore, the gross value for the Creative Industries stood at £71.4 billion in 2012. This contribution is currently increasing and is the second largest growth sector in the UK (behind Real Estate), demonstrating that this is a good area to be in at the moment since both finances and employment are looking positive and additionally the government are now heavily backing the Creative Industries. 

The UK also exports a lot of media - such as film and TV - to overseas markets, which contributes to the overall UK export figures. Dr Cunningham said that we therefore need to view ourselves in relation to a broader, global industry - particularly because the government are now beginning to offer tax incentives to practitioners and start-up companies - and the Creative Media sector in Wales alone has doubled over the past year, now contributing 10% to this sector nationally.

Since the role of designer accelerates innovation and acts as a catalyst for bringing ideas to market - such as in branding, for example - Dr Cunningham urged us to understand design as being as much about process as it is about traditional, physical design. Where the return that business gets from investment in the Creative Industries is concerned, figures from the Design Council show that for every £1 invested in design, a business gets around £4 net operating profit, amounting to £20 net turnover within the organisation, so design offers 'terrific value' for money. Culturally embedding a culture of design values and design thinking within a big organisation however can be a challenge because many such business don't see the bigger picture within design, viewing it merely as applying to the packaging of a product without realising the true potential available. People with very defined business roles have a tendency to to shut themselves away and not really communicate with one another whereas a working culture where people are encouraged to collaborate and share ideas always makes the organisation vastly more successful.

In order to succeed within this industry, Dr Cunningham advised us to work hard, to think about how the opportunities are created, to trust our intuition - taking up as many of the opportunities that come our way as possible - and to maintain an attitude of openness to new experiences and new knowledge. Inspiration is an important element that cannot be rushed, Dr Cunningham explained, but he encouraged us to also hang on to our 'bad ideas' as well as our good ones, since they might become useful at some future point in time.

Dr Cunningham concluded by showing us his own 'Web of Inspiration' or 'Influence Board' comprising a series of slides featuring individuals who had inspired him during the course of his life. Many of these were teachers who had helped encourage him during his time at school and college, whilst others were directors and musicians whose ideas had inspired him as his career progressed.

Entering the employment market upon graduation is never easy and at a time when the UK economy is still struggling, Dr Cunningham's introductory talk helped remind us that we are engaged in a positive and growing employment sector. It was encouraging to hear that this view is backed up by strong governmental statistics and this talk helped cement the idea that the Creative Industries offer a valuable contribution not just to the UK economy but to business as a whole. It was also good to see Dr Cunningham's 'Web of Inspiration' demonstrating his awareness of the vital role that good teachers and mentors can make to a student's life.


Keynote Address: 'What is Art?' - Barry Purves

Following Dr Cunningham's talk, our next speaker was internationally acclaimed animator and film-maker Barry Purves who delivered the Keynote Address: 'What is Art?'

Mr Purves has won over sixty major international awards for his work, including Oscar and Bafta nominations. He also directs and animates commercials, title sequences, animated inserts for films and pop promos and commercials, is a theatre director, a university lecturer and the author of several books on stop motion animation.

 

Mr Purves began by explaining that his original background was in the theatre. He studied drama at Manchester University but despite his love for performance he felt upon graduation that his strengths lay more in his ability to tell stories than acting. He views storytelling as essential to human culture and explained that whether through media of myths, legends, morality tales or plays, storytelling 'allows us to talk about ourselves and find explanations for the things that we don't understand'.  The plays of Ancient Greece by Aeschylus and Aristophanes were for example organised storytelling that showed the citizens how to live. Mr Purves added that we are far more comfortable telling these stories at a distance, through a persona or through art, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde who famously said 'Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth (BrainyQuote, 2014)'.

He went on to say that by adopting a red nose, a clown could get away with doing outrageous things and speaking about things that they would be unable to in real life, just as 'Batman could do things that he couldn't do as Bruce Wayne'. Such personae are liberating, their distance from our everyday identities allow us to talk about the things that really matter to us.

Mr Purves had felt strongly that he wanted to talk 'in his own voice' about the things that interested him, which is why he eventually went into the field of animation. He first became involved with animation in the mid 1970's after seeing an article in the Radio Times about the Manchester based animation company Cosgrove Hall (which was in operation from 1976 until 2009) who were at that time making an animated series called 'Chorlton and the Wheelies'.  Mr Purves did not feel that the animated characters in the series were sufficiently expressive, merely 'waving their arms when they spoke and when they stopped speaking they stopped waving their arms.'  Despite having no experience in the field himself, Mr Purves wrote to the directors of the company - 'I lied through my teeth, I'd never touched a puppet in my life' – and on the strength of this eight-page letter about storytelling and performance the directors invited him for an audition and gave him a job. Mr Purves then showed us a short showreel of his work over the last thirty-five years. It was a dizzying array of puppets and animated characters.

Mr Purves described himself during his youth as a 'twisted child' obsessed with creating funeral pyres for his Airfix Joan of Arc figure which he used to stuff with fireworks so that she exploded. He said he had always loved giving life to inanimate objects and this could be the reason why he enjoys working with puppets now.  By animating puppets, Mr Purves said he is able to externalise his thoughts, make sense of his day and gain insight into his internal processes in a way that can be therapeutic. He had brought with him a beautiful stop motion puppet to show us which had been made in the likeness of the Russian composer Tchaikovsky and which Mr Purves had used in a recent animation about the composer made for Russian TV.  Describing puppets as 'the most intimate form of animation', Mr Purves advised that one must establish a relationship with a puppet rather than assume that one can 'tell it what to do'.

Regarding the theme of the lecture: 'What is Art', Mr Purves said that we must never forget the importance of telling stories. We each have a duty to tell our own stories and to make those stories interesting by using the elements of sound, colour and design. He felt that art is not about the literal reproduction of real life, but rather the elimination of the mundane and irrelevant in order to produce something interesting and advised us to 'liberate ourselves from realism in animation and enjoy the artifice'. Structure is one of the most important considerations in the design and storytelling process. 'No matter what element you are dealing with in your art, if it's not there for a reason, leave it out, your work will be much stronger for that. Every story has to have a journey to make it interesting, everything needs structure. If you're ever stuck for a story, think of it in three acts. In the first you are setting up the situation, in the second you are complicating it and in the third you resolve it. The story costs nothing, but it's the one bit that you've got to get right.'

Mr Purves then showed us his recent film 'Plume' which he had created after the death of his mother. 

 

This twelve minute short about surviving trauma featured a naked flying man whose wings were torn off by demonic figures when he ventured too close to the earth, but who adapted and learned to swim instead of fly. It was a powerful, three act story told with great focus and simplicity. The protagonist was theatrically lit against a black, featureless background and always seen to the right of the frame whilst the antagonists were always positioned to the left. The music was also emotionally moving and appropriate to the story. Mr Purves said of this film that 'everything that is in there is there for a reason. People said "shouldn't he have a costume?" but I said no, because a costume will give him an identity'.

Mr Purves concluded his lecture by describing his love for the music and life of Tchaikovsky and went on to show us the animated film of the composer's life which he made in 2011 for Russian TV. 
 

http://www.barrypurves.com/Tchaikovsky

Mr Purves summed up his talk by underlining the necessity for 'passion, process and performance' in animation. One needs passion to tell the story, one has to enjoy the technical aspects of animation and the ability to communicate to the viewer through the performance is vital. Regarding the latter, Mr Purves described how he used to over-animate his figures when he first started and stressed the importance of allowing the elements to read: 'one sound, one controlled gesture, one use of colour..give it time to read, that's the most important thing I can tell you'.

Mr Purves' talk was an absolute delight and probably the one I enjoyed the most during the course of the Student Conference Week. His stop motion animation was beautiful and the understated elegance and passion of 'Plume' in particular will stay in my mind for a long time to come. I found myself in agreement with everything he had to say concerning both the role of storytelling and the discipline necessary to do so successfully.  This particularly applies to the role of the fantastical within animation.  I firmly believe that any animated story that could be just as successfully told using human actors on a stage should probably be re-written as a play rather than animated; choosing the appropriate medium for the job is a vital prerequisite for any artistic project. The 'three act' structure is not a format I have consciously worked with until now and I am looking forward to implementing it within my forthcoming music video for Negotiated Studies Two.  Regarding animation, his precept to 'let it read' is absolutely invaluable and one that I will be putting into practice at the next opportunity.


'The Business of Brands' - Sid Madge

The next lecture that I attended was conducted by Gwynedd based entrepreneur Sid Madge and called 'The Business of Brands'.

Mr Madge set up his design and business consultancy 'Mad Hen' four years ago in Bala. Its name is an amalgam of the surnames of its two original founders Sid 'Madge' and Zoe 'Henderson', and the consultancy's identity was created around the distinctive logo of a hen based on the letters of its name:

http://www.madhen.uk.com/wp-content/themes/MadHen/images/madhen-logo.png

The consultancy aims to improve the overall value of businesses in both the UK and abroad through implementation of several pre-defined steps that identify and then market the unique selling points of a business and its products. Such steps might include the redefinition of their overall business strategy, marketing planning, pointers toward the improvement of their performance and innovation and brand development.

Mr Madge only recently discovered that he was dyslexic and explained that his defiantly successful academic career through school and later during his time at Art College had been mainly inspired by the urge to confound the negative expectations of those around him who said he would never succeed - he encouraged us to develop a similar attitude and go out of our way to prove ourselves capable to those who cast doubt on our abilities. Mr Madge studied graphic design at Birmingham Polytechnic in the late 1980's - where he wrote a thesis on the psychology of colour - and went on to work in London, New York and Amsterdam, finally relocating to Bala some four years ago in order to be closer to his daughter in Chester. His experience during this time included photographic shoots, film shoots and branding. 

Like Ray Worsnop who addressed us at the end of the Conference Week, Mr Madge additionally works as a role model and mentor for The Prince's Trust and Big Ideas Wales which is a Welsh governmental initiative to encourage people aged between 16-24 to consider setting up their own business. Mr Madge said that Big Ideas Wales provides a useful acronym for practitioners to follow whilst working with in the education community: ACRO - which stands for Attitude, Creativity, Relationships and Organisation. Mr Madge explained that this acronym was particularly apt since throughout his career the people with whom he had worked best had a great attitude and they're all incredibly creative; the importance of creating good relationships with other companies cannot be overstressed and organisation is essential to any creative project.

Mr Madge then demonstrated to us the importance of branding. He posed a series of questions as to the ways by which we identify a particular brand and the criterion upon which we base our purchasing decisions, asking us to consider whether our recognition of a brand was based upon line, form, colour or sound. 

He began by showing us a slide of an baseball cap that could be expected to fetch a lower price when unbranded compared with the same cap with a Nike 'swoosh' attached, proving that the customer themselves perceives an added value to a branded item.  This was followed by a series of slides showing logos from various well known companies, in which despite the substitution of a different word in place of the brand name – 'God' in this instance – the identity of the original brands were fully recognisable. Calling on his researches into the psychology of colour, Mr Madge then demonstrated how the use of colour plays an enormous part in how we feel about brands, ascribing associations of energy, friendliness, aggression and warmth to red and citing examples such as Coca-Cola, Virgin and a red placebo pill that was apparently perceived to aid pain recovery better than one of another colour.  Blue - most frequently used by financial institutions - signifies safety, security and calmness.  

Mr Madge told us that around ninety percent of the assessment for trying out a product is apparently made on the basis of colour alone and eighty to a hundred percent of our decision to select a particular product actually derives from our emotional response to it rather than our logic. A global agency based in London called Interbrand produce a free, downloadable annual report categorising the one hundred top global brands and this report demonstrates that only thirty to forty percent of the value of these leading companies represents their actual assets, the remainder of their value being based purely on how we perceive the emotional content associated with them - in other words, our liking for that brand.

As well as colour, branding is also based on form and shape – for example the Jaguar logo was repositioned several years ago in order to move the brand away from the older market toward the younger – and also on recognisable snippets of sound, such as the 'Intel' melody familiar from television commercials. Mr Madge spoke of the length to which brands such as M&Ms and Innocent Smoothies will go in order to create 'the theatre of retail' by creating themed shops in city centres and advertising campaigns with a consistent message and colour palette.  He then played us several pieces of video branding in which ideas were being conveyed through the more subtle and complex medium of film, including a Cartier commercial in which a jewelled leopard shakes off its diamonds at midnight to explore a worldwide landscape dominated by images constructed from Cartier jewellery (see video below).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaBNjTtCxd4

Mr Madge cited this as a particularly good example of branding which conveys the quality of the product. Whilst I can appreciate that many people have been awestruck by the CGI involved in the production of this video I felt that this particular campaign was somewhat flawed by the fact that the leopard is by far the most interesting thing on-screen at all times and made the actual jewellery look both irrelevant and slightly tacky by comparison. The fact that the animal looks visibly afraid at one point (presumably of its trainer trying to control the direction of its walk, although ostensibly of the woman in red thanks to CGI) doesn't help, either.  Perhaps I'm not part of the consumer group that this campaign is aimed at.

Mr Madge told us that another important aspect of branding involves making sure that the employee is happy since contented and loyal staff increase a company's values, whilst discontented staff will cost the company money. He showed us a video of Innocent founder Richard Reid describing their employment selection procedure, in which an interviewee's emotional values, intellectual abilities, creative thinking and social chemistry are rated far more highly than prior experience or educational qualifications.

Mr Madge talked about 'engagement wars' and asked us to consider how we go about engaging people in what we do and creating a dialogue between ourselves and the public. In terms of selling ourselves and our ideas as a distinct brand, he stressed the importance of creating and maintaining a LinkedIn profile and use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Mumsnet and Craigslist. Three billion people use Google search every day, and if Facebook was a country it would be the third largest in the world with more traffic in one day than all major brands put together. He showed us a marriage proposal video that had gone viral last year to demonstrate the power of social media to share ideas, saying that this was an example of the kind of platform by which we might sell our own creativity and help people to understand what it is that we do (see video below).

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_v7QrIW0zY

Social media is particularly important since according to the Socialnomics statistics website only fourteen percent of consumers trust advertisements, whilst seventy eight percent trust peer recommendations (Socialnomics.net, 2014, items 30 and 31), something to which social media is ideally suited. 'The more human our commercial communications, the more likely people are to trust what we say', he told us, adding a quote from Intuit founder Scott Cook: 'A brand is no longer what we tell people it is, it's what consumers tell eachother it is.'

From personal experience I would tend to question whether social media such as Facebook adds the amount of value to a brand that popular opinion thinks it does. Navigating two continuously updated news-feeds together with a sidebar filled with advertisements is not conducive to building any kind of brand loyalty in my opinion and contacts who blithely repost video commercials in their timeline are often 'unfollowed' by their online friends in order to prevent such tedious content appearing in their news-feed. This subject has been addressed in an article by Forbes which suggests instead that the powerful technologies behind the development of social infrastructure (a euphemism for legal, online data harvest) are the way forward for marketers seeking to regain control of consumers.

Mr Madge said that the success of sites like Craigslist and Wikipedia go against all the traditional ideas of successful branding but in so doing they demonstrate that people don't buy 'what you do' so much as buy 'why you do it', because two thirds of the brain – the limbic part - is responsible for the emotional logic which dictates our purchasing decisions; great brands tell great stories.

Returning to the theme of how we intended to engage with potential employers - how we will go about differentiating ourselves from everyone else in this marketplace - Mr Madge asked us to think about the 'one word' we could use to describe what it is that we do and the value that we would bring to an organisation.  In this, he was asking us to examine ways to demonstrate the 'why' of what we do - our own 'brand' in effect - rather than simply presenting the facts. He showed us a series of small and large brands that have proved very successful, demonstrating in each case that their marketing has been designed to have an emotional appeal to the consumer over a logical one, their tactics ranging from straightforward humour, to appealing 'amateur style' photographs of their product. 'A great brand knows what it is and how to describe itself.' he told us. 'Whilst brands have to be relevant and also keep their design consistent..[a brand] can make up a completely new category for itself.'

Mr Madge recommended several books that we might find interesting to read on the subject of branding, such as:

Designing Obama by Scott Thomas, 

Grow by Jim Stengel,  

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner and

26 Ways of Looking at a Blackberry by John Simmons.

This was an interesting lecture from a man who understands his subject inside out and clearly loves his job. A lot of what he spoke about builds directly on the content of Robert Ball's talk: 'How Not to be a Designer!' during last year's Creative Futures Conference and provides a depth to many of the concepts originally outlined. 

Although I don't share either speaker's enthusiasm for the branding process itself, this presentation has provided me with an additional set of skills by which to understand the language of advertising. As someone who finds the whole issue of branding faintly sinister - verging as it does on a form of societal control that can damage both the natural environment and the wellbeing of those who are exploited for the sake of a limitless, consumption-based economy - I nonetheless have to admit to wanting my purchases to make me feel good about my life and as a visual storyteller I am aware of playing to an audience's emotions in order to engage them with my work.  I therefore cannot adopt too much of a moral high ground when it comes to branding. Nevertheless, the idea that a group of behavioural experts are quietly watching us sleepwalk our way through the shopping mall selecting items on subliminal command leaves me with the feeling that this is not an industry in which I could work without an untroubled conscience for very long. 

I do think the points he made about selling ourselves as a 'brand' are interesting however and worthy of further consideration.  When I think about my own work under the 'Infinite Sky Productions' brand for instance, I can see that it sends out a broad set of messages which are somewhat lacking in focus, the most singular element in the whole thing actually being my identity as a person, which was not my intention.  I am therefore now thinking about methods by which I can clarify the message and re-direct it away from myself and into the images.  I think that the most straightforward way to achieve this would require the establishment of a particular style and a cohesive range of subject matter.  I am aware of a couple of photographers on my course who already seem to be taking such an approach and after Mr Madge's lecture I understand why it is working so successfully for them.


'Participatory Arts and Arts Education' - Alexis Johnson 

The final talk that I attended that day was delivered by artist Alexis Johnson on the subject of 'Participatory Arts and Arts Education'. Ms Johnson is a consultant on arts management projects, as well as a current director for Walk The Plank in Salford. She recently relocated to the North West from London, where she had been an arts management consultant for many years whilst also teaching at Birkbeck College.

Ms Johnson began her lecture by describing a little of her background. She had studied for an art degree in Swansea and after graduating became an Artist in Residence at a college where the challenges presented by teaching a group of 'very, very naughty teenagers who didn't want to learn' developed her interest in education through the medium of art. She then progressed up the career ladder through formal FE colleges, eventually running the A Level and National Diploma Art Department within Oakland College in Hertfordshire.

Throughout this time her fascination with the transformative properties of art education was deepening and after deciding that she wasn't happy with the way that formal art education was going, she eventually 'jumped ship' and moved across into 'Gallery Education' – Arts Education as it is now known – becoming Head of Education for the Institute of the Contemporary Arts in the Mall in London, where she developed a 'Learning Department' that specialised in the field - highly innovative at that time - of Arts Education. After many years spent working there she left to set up her own company 'AKArt' through which she has worked with many different groups and sponsors on multiple creative projects ranging from small-scale grass roots and community-based projects to quite large and expansive ones. 

She recently moved back to the North West and started work at Walk the Plank which specialises in outdoor art aimed at large audiences (around ten thousand per performance) such as parades, processions, large scale outdoor puppets, music, pyrotechnics and aerial dancing. Ms Johnson describes her role within Walk The Plank as providing continuous support for the professional artists who undertake projects there, from the point of their graduation to their ultimate development as fully fledged art practitioners in their own right.

Ms Johnson showed us a series of slides from her portfolio illustrating the breadth of her work within the field of Arts Education over the years, beginning with the 'Passport to Pimlico' project which was concerned with community cohesion and lasted about two years. It served two purposes in that it engaged people with art and also unified people from diverse backgrounds - who might otherwise have been in conflict with one another - working under the umbrella of this shared purpose. In another project in Bournemouth several schools came together to dance on the beach whilst an audience watched from the pier. 

In 'Salvage Monologues', immigrants to the UK recounted their journey here as part of an installation and in a project with Transport for London, graffiti artists worked together to examine the meaning and purpose of graffiti. Many more slides of such activities followed – too numerous to detail here – but the underlying theme that ran throughout all of these activities was the transformative engagement of marginalised or conflicted groups in projects that would enable communities and participants alike to re-evaluate their relationships both with one another and with art itself, building communication skills and self confidence amongst the individual participants in the process. A number of well known organisations such as the Royal Philharmonic, the ICA and the V & A Museum also became involved with many of these projects which not only raised the profile of such projects at the time but also encouraged more people to join in the activities on offer.

Having revealed the wide range of disciplines involved in such projects, Ms Johnson explained that if we intended to work in Arts Education ourselves then it was very likely that we would work in disciplines that were different to the ones we originally trained in since it is a very broad, diverse and exciting career path that embraces many different art forms, ranging from film-making, puppetry, dance and theatre to fine art.

Describing in greater detail what Arts Education actually entails, Ms Johnson said that one can have a career actually creating Arts Education activities and that it is 'a little like being a curator since what you do is you come up with a concept, you think about who your audience is going to be and which are going to participate, you commission artists to work with them to produce a piece of work with that community – whether it's a painting, or a production – and it's incredibly creative and full of invention, but the process of doing that is that you're helping people along the way.' 

She described her role as that of an interface between the artist and the audience, wherein a careful balance needs to be achieved between the artist, the group they are leading and the needs of the potential audience to see something that will engage them. Drawing an audience in is every bit as important as the participation from the communities involved and encouraging people who don't traditionally engage with art to take part in an arts project has been proven to be the best way to engage such an audience. Arts Education additionally benefits any organisation hosting the project by creating a demand that increases the funding available to that institution, it benefits the art form concerned by stimulating an interest in it, it helps to transform the communities and localities involved and it publicizes the work of the artist themselves, increasing their overall profile.

Describing the various jobs connected with this field, Ms Johnson said that one could adopt one of several roles within Arts Education. These could range from co-ordinator, administrator, fund-raiser, artist facilitator, trainer, interpreter (helping people to understand the art form they are watching in order to increase the audience's confidence) access (ensuring that the art is accessible to all) to presenting talks to the public. There are also many different environments in which one can work, such as leisure and shopping centres, galleries, museums, theatres, schools, festivals, public spaces, youth centres and health services settings, the most important aspect of working within these settings being the need to bring in an audience who will later return to that centre as it will be associated with a positive memory. Referring to health services settings, Ms Johnson described a project in which musicians gave batons to dementia patients enabling them to 'conduct' their performance, whilst for an example of accessibility she described a 'Touch Tour' of sculptures recently organised by the Tate Gallery for the blind and partially sighted. There are many arts organisations that support visual arts who will train, work with and develop artists - such as Engage, a visual Arts Education organisation that works within galleries and acts as an advocate for visual literacy - who promote Arts Education because it unlocks creativity and brings cultural empowerment.

When asked about funding for such projects, Ms Johnson admitted that art is not considered as important in the UK as it is in other European countries, that funding has reduced in recent years and that also most of the funding primarily gravitates to London, leaving little for the rest of the UK, a point independently reiterated by Vice Chair of the Film Agency for Wales Ms Wyn Hughes, later on in the week.

Ms Johnson told us that arts organisations have been slow to adapt to digital media – such as phone apps – but are gradually catching up as technology becomes cheaper and in fact the Tate Gallery is currently developing an app that will enable users to point their phone at a location where an art work was created and be able to read about its history. Interactive galleries are also being developed and the role of arts educators within projects such as this would be that of facilitators to ensure that the interactive tour flows smoothly. One can also help people to connect with art by allowing people to touch objects or watch restorers working close-up as well as watching a 'tour' of an historic exhibition performed by a costumed actor describing what life was like at the time. On the subject of costume, Ms Johnson added that many galleries and museums now have a 'hat box' because they have discovered that if someone is provided with a hat to try on they will relax and engage with the exhibits more deeply. Ms Johnson said she didn't know why this was, but it reminded me strongly of Mr Purves' quote (above) from Oscar Wilde and proves the inhibiting effect that the awareness of our own identity can have upon our outward responses to the experienced environment.

Ms Johnson also described a recent development within participatory arts wherein the audiences who are engaging with the artwork produce interpretive art of their own that other audiences can then engage with. Despite the fact that museums and galleries have traditionally resisted this because such work is produced by amateurs rather than professionals, this type of process and play-based activity has been found to foster a sense of connection and belonging and institutions are gradually becoming aware of its value. On a recent visit to the Museum of Liverpool, I noticed a wide range of exhibits fashioned by children were on display and I thought it was a wonderful idea that young people had obviously been given the opportunity to imagine themselves living in Liverpool during earlier times since it is exactly this kind of activity that fosters empathy, understanding of others and a respect for history.

In the Participatory Arts, Ms Johnson says that one is handing over some of the creative control so that the artist and participants become co-creators and collaborators on the project, and the artist is merely the guide and facilitator. This is important because at the end of the project the participants – particularly those from disadvantaged situations - will need to be left with some kind of leadership and vision too 'otherwise you've just picked them up and then thrown them down'. Collaboration – with other artists and audiences and participants - is also far more likely to attract public funding, she told us. Ms Johnson read us a relevant quote from the Arts Council in 2005:

'Participation in the arts often provides people with an enhanced sense of freedom to explore opinions, feelings, needs and wants without the pressure of having specific knowledge or the need of correct answers. The arts are a a creative and accessible tool for development of transferable skills such as teamwork, conflict resolution, confidence building and basic skills attainment. Creating something unique is at the heart of the arts activity and brings about creative opportunities for people to explore issues that are pertinent to them and their local area. The nature of the participatory arts activity encourages ownership and empowerment, and enhances pride'.

During the Question and Answer session which followed her talk, Ms Johnson was asked about the connection between Participatory Art and Art Therapy.  She replied that a lot of Participatory Artists are motivated by the urge to make things better for people.  Whilst it does have a therapeutic effect and is all about making art meaningful and fun, it should always be clearly differentiated from Art Therapy because secondary trauma can easily be transferred to the empathetic artist on the project and there are none of the support systems in place to counsel a Participatory Artist that an Art Therapist would be able to access.

Ms Johnson felt that a PGCE is helpful for an artist who wants to work in schools although there are other routes into the field such as through community projects, so although a PGCE is very valuable it is not at all essential and she recommended that in order to train in the field one should ideally shadow someone else who is doing it. She said that she would advise any artist who wanted to work with young people or special needs groups to undertake a Level One NVQ in Social and Health Care as this would be more valuable under the circumstances than a PGCE. Opportunities to enter this profession can often be found through artists' networks such as Community Arts Northwest 'who do fantastic support and training' and indeed, Ms Johnson herself plans to set up such a network in the future.

I am very glad I attended Ms Johnson's lecture as this is an area that I have contemplated entering for some time, but thought I was under qualified for without a PGCE. She explained the underlying ethic behind such projects in far greater detail than I have heard before and I am pleased to have learned so much about the subject from her talk. This is definitely an area of employment that I will be considering after graduation and I hope that her North Western Network will soon be up and running.  I have thought for some time that I would love to work on a photography project with disadvantaged adults because I believe photography is a medium that most people feel very comfortable using for self expression, more so than art, which can sometimes be daunting for those who feel they cannot draw. 

Ms Johnson's talk has definitely opened my eyes to all the opportunities available in this field.  It is a very great shame however that so much funding is centred on London and I feel that greater awareness needs to be raised amongst members of the public with regard to this particular issue so that pressure groups can be formed to influence the government to redress the imbalance.

Tues 5^th March 2014

'A Film Editor's Story' - Peter Hollywood

The first lecture that I attended on the second day of the Conference was called 'A Film Editor's Story' and was presented by film editor Peter Hollywood.

 

Having worked as a freelance film editor for over thirty years on films such as The Neverending Story, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Superman III and with famous directors such as Ridley Scott and Terry Gilliam, Mr Hollywood described the talk he was about to give as representing a timeline of the film editing process which began back in 1903 (around a decade after the invention of film-making) when then employee of Thomas Eddison, Edwin S Porter became the first person to cut celluloid film and splice separate pieces together to create a story containing narrative tension.

Mr Hollywood played us a clip that he had edited from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen at a point in the production when the money was running out and the director was under pressure. When the clip was over, Mr Hollywood explained that the two scenes we had watched – the passengers and a horse firstly aboard a sinking sea boat and subsequently onshore - had been shot in two different locations. The shoreline scene had been filmed in Almeria in Spain (also the location for most Spaghetti Westerns) whilst the sinking boat (for which a water-filled tank had been used) had been filmed in a studio outside Rome which is also where the Baron on his rearing horse had been shot against a bluescreen.

Mr Hollywood showed us a reel of celluloid film – the first reel of Baron Munchausen in fact – and demonstrated that every cut in the copy had been made by him personally with a splicer and stuck together with tape. His love for the medium was evident 'You know, it's something really wonderful' and he described how one could look at this film and understand how long a clip was, how one could touch it, cut it and smell it. Mr Hollywood pointed out that this medium had remained essentially unchanged since the advent of Edwin S Porter's 1903 film 'The Life of an American Fireman' which in its time was a revolutionary concept that inter-cut clips from real fires and firemen at work with shots of actors, creating an exciting story. Although this had never been done before, it set the standard for the technique of film editing thereafter and it was really only in the last ten years that we had moved across to digital techniques for filming and editing. Even films that are currently made using 35mm film are now scanned in to be digitally edited. He described working on a bench with the very same 35mm film he was now holding laid out in front of him and a separate synchronised soundtrack laid alongside it, making cuts that had each to be very carefully considered since there wasn't another copy if things went wrong. Today we have the opportunity to try things out and duplicate things, but with film 'you only ever had 'one Reel One' which was being worked on and added to on a continuous basis a bit like Google Docs..people would go and get it out and write things on it and then put it back.'

Mr Hollywood first learned about film as an assistant, which he described as 'labour intensive but very interesting.' He started out as a projectionist working first in the Odeon Cinema and later in a movie theatre in Soho where commercials were produced, moving on in 1968 to work as a projectionist running the daily rushes on Sir Richard Attenborough's 'Oh What A Lovely War' and then later to the cutting room at Twickenham.  After this he worked on the Beatles' film 'Let It Be' which they had made towards the end of their career as a group, hoping it would bring them back together under a unified purpose. They had been filmed by several cameras but without a clapperboard to sync the soundtrack with the film reels the result from a film editor's point of view was chaotic. Mr Hollywood arrived to a cutting room piled high with cans of film through which he had to sift for many weeks until he was able to accurately match up the visual components with the audio tracks.

After this he worked on 'A Clockwork Orange' by Stanley Kubrik, whom Mr Hollywood described as 'a paranoid obsessive' who refused to fly and kept all the master tapes for the production beneath his bed.

Following negative test-audience reviews for Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner', Mr Hollywood next worked in the cutting room with a team attempting to clarify various elements of the plot, adding both the film noir style voice-over and also the clips of mountain scenery at the end that had been taken from Kubrik's 'The Shining' in order to create the impression of a slightly cheerier ending. This remained the standard version until Scott issued his Director's Cut many years later. Mr Hollywood's opinion on the latter version was that too much time had passed since the original film had been made and consequently Scott's Director's Cut was not necessarily any better than the original. 

The issues surrounding the initial preview audience's reaction to Blade Runner raises many interesting questions regarding storytelling. Mr Hollywood expressed the concern that the growing sophistication with which film companies will be able in the near future to measure their select 'guinea-pig' audience's reactions to what they are watching would stifle creativity and people's storytelling ability by tailoring plots to the majority taste in order to bring in more profits. Interestingly, within a few days of Mr Hollywood's comments on this subject I found myself invited by an online survey company to which I am subscribed to watch a feature length animatic for a proposed film, respondents' feedback apparently providing the necessary guidance for the the ultimate ending that would be selected. A bar was kept open along the base of the viewing pane, upon which I could slide my cursor between 'engaged (green)' and 'unengaged (red)' during the entire course of the animatic. This was something I felt quite uncomfortable doing; whilst I readily accept my role as a 'consumer' of films, I don't necessarily trust the voice of the lowest common denominator to be the arbiter of a film's plotline and view the democratisation of creativity as an unwelcome development.

Mr Hollywood regaled us with some amusing anecdotes from his time in the industry including an unexpected invitation to take tea with Nelson Mandela, a couple of incidents in which he was clearly subject of a case of mistaken identity and his - ultimately unsuccessful - screen test for the titular role in the movie 'Santa Claus'.  Mr Hollywood described the live reindeers used on this film as having 'cold, dead eyes' and since 'the eyes are the most important part in a movie' it became necessary for the film-makers to bring in animatronic reindeer heads to deal with the problem, which he found fascinating to watch in action.

Mr Hollywood wound up his talk by stressing that it is not always easy to plan one's future and a lot of career breaks happen simply from being in the right place at the right time. Networking and websites featuring showreels of our work are advantageous to have especially since it is necessary in this day and age to have an online identity that people can find and relate to, but it is important that we regard this as 'a back up and not a substitute for being creative in your own right'.

He felt that the two most interesting areas to work in film at the moment were animation and documentary as they both offered the opportunity to take full advantage of digital technologies to enable us to tell our stories. Mr Hollywood said that the one thing that enables a creative person to survive is this ability to tell a story, much as the painters of cave art over thirty thousand years ago were recording their own stories with paintings of hunts on the stone walls. To tell such a story, Mr Hollywood said that one only needs two shots cut together, citing the Kuleshov effect - a Russian experiment (one that he admits he was never fully convinced by) in which a close-up of a man's face with a neutral expression was variously coupled with shots of a woman in a coffin, a child holding a teddy or a bowl of soup. When the test audience were shown the silent, joined pairs of clips they drew their own conclusions as to the meaning of the man's expression, praising the sensitivity of his performance as he showed sadness towards the coffin, hunger towards the soup and happiness when gazing at the child. 'We create the third shot' said Mr Hollywood. He ended his talk by describing a not-too-distant-future in which he foresaw that the QWERTY keyboard and mouse would be rendered obsolete and film edited using gesture alone, applying tags by voice.

This was an entertaining talk from someone with first hand knowledge of the feature film industry and I feel privileged to have been there. Mr Hollywood's deep affection for his craft was clearly evident and whilst I'm not sure that I learned very much by way of information from his lecture - although the fact that 'the audience creates the third shot' will remain with me - I nonetheless experienced a deeper sense of connection to the storytelling aspects of video editing as a result of being there.


'Versatility - Your Key to Standing out from the Crowd' - Abbie Carter

The next lecture I attended was 'Versatility - Your Key to Standing out from the Crowd' presented by former Graphics student Abbie Carter. 

 

Ms Carter had studied for a Higher National Diploma in Graphic Design and Illustration - at NWSAD - thirteen years ago and has been working for the last eight years for a Community Media Company called Archant, which is based in Norwich. This company publishes advertisements but includes a bespoke design service for each advertisement, which means that the customer is not charged twice, as they would be had they gone through a traditional agency. Her talk centred around our future employment, specifying ways by which one can make oneself stand out from the crowd in the jobs market upon graduation and whilst many aspects of her presentation were applicable to everyone present, I felt it was mainly aimed at younger graduates with little or no direct experience of employment and for whom the prospect of obtaining employment within their chosen field was quite daunting.

Ms Carter advised us that when we leave university there will be a lot of people graduating at the same time and therefore competing for the same jobs. If it is not possible to obtain the position we require at first then she suggested that we should consider taking up employment in a field that we would enjoy.  Doing so would offer us the opportunity to increase our skills in many different ways – for example in communication and customer service – and additionally ensure that there are no gaps in our CV. If we are unable to get paid work, we should consider voluntary work, also for the reasons outlined above.

Ms Carter then took us on a whistle-stop tour of her employment history, starting with her first job working as a bookbinder for a friend's publishing company. When that position closed after five months she became a cleaner for an outdoor pursuits centre working for sixteen hours a week over four months. From this she moved on to cleaning an Elizabethan house for the National Trust and then to working as a team leader on a free auto-trader type magazine. When this company downsized and she lost her job she then worked in a shop for sixteen hours a week whilst also buying and selling second-hand horse tack for several months online. After this she honed her CV and applied for many different design jobs, until finally obtaining her present position.

In retrospect, she considers that her portfolio probably let her down because it was 'a bit samey' and she strongly advised us to get someone professional to look at our portfolios and suggest areas for improvement. Ms Carter said that it was important to organise one's portfolio with care, showcasing our best work and demonstrating our creative breadth by varying the type of work included. Everybody has a style, she said, but no employer or interviewer wants to see the same thing over and over again. Make it interesting to look at and target it with an eighty percent relevance to the job you're applying for – if it's a printing company make it eighty percent printing work for example – and allow the remaining twenty percent to demonstrate your style and personality. As someone who used to work in a fabric shop Ms Carter also includes a couple of textile pieces in her portfolio in order to make it look interesting. She advised us to include elements that reflect our personality and creative design skills over something that did get actually to print, but is quite boring.

She also suggested that we incorporate some photographs of our work into our CV, treating it like a mini gallery, provided the work included is relevant and doesn't make it look overcrowded. Our CV should be short and to the point, no longer than two pages at the most, or three with images.  Ms Carter stressed the importance of conveying one's personality in our covering letter. Rather than merely listing our occupations 'I was a cleaner and I worked behind a bar' we should describe ourselves and our skills: 'I'm very versatile, I have good customer service skills, I will do pretty much anything'. Ms Carter said that 'a well-written covering letter is a joy to read at the end of the day and will make you stand out.'

Having had over nineteen jobs, Ms Carter no longer includes the earlier, less relevant ones in her CV and refers to her periods of employment in the gaps between her design jobs of substance with a single line at most. She added that one's CV 'should really sell you and not just be a list'. Don't lie in it, she advised, but you can be creative with the truth to get the job you want. Like me, Ms Carter had created two CVs, each tailored to different types of employment. She then detailed the types of transferable skills that one uses in everyday working life – such as the patience necessary for dealing with an irate public – and demonstrated how one could utilise these skills in the CV, highlighting key words such as 'my customer service skills are excellent' or 'I'm used to having face-to-face contact with clients' when one has been a shop assistant, or 'I can sell!' for telesales. Cleaning can be viewed as increasing one's abilities in time-management, account management and organisational skills. Factory work puts one in contact with other people and provides insight into how things are manufactured.

Rather than always providing a hard copy CV and portfolio, Ms Carter suggested that one can instead create a PDF or eBook portfolio with Adobe Acrobat, various links leading the viewer to different areas of content. A website is also a good idea, but she reminded us of the importance of including contact details on the website, since so many of people leave this essential element out. People will judge you by your website, she cautioned, so make it a good one.

One should dress smartly and appropriately for an interview in order to demonstrate that one is taking the job and interview seriously, but she advised us not to be afraid to put a little bit of personality into the ensemble. Answer questions honestly but positively, be confident but not arrogant and maintain eye contact throughout the interview. Be positive about everything one can do and treat all interviews as experience. 'Personality is seventy percent of the successful job interview' she told us, 'and the other thirty percent is the portfolio. You have to get on with others and come across as a nice person to work with, so if there's something you dislike, keep it to yourself!' One is likely to be asked what has been studied and where, but only very rarely will an interviewer asked about qualifications.

This was a nice talk, filled with helpful content from Ms Carter's direct experience of job-seeking and she was an engaging, energetic and enthusiastic speaker. Although much of the advice she delivered was already known to many of the mature students present it is always refreshing to be reminded of these useful tips - especially during a time such as this when competition for jobs is so high - and her suggestions for taking a creative and original approach to the construction of one's covering letter and online portfolio are something I had never considered before but will now put into practice.


'Mackinnon and Saunders Animation' - Ian Mackinnon

After lunch I attended a talk given by Ian Mackinnon of 'Mackinnon and Saunders Animation' - the team behind the creation of the beautiful Tchaikovsky stop motion puppet shown to us by Mr Purves during his Keynote Address the previous morning.

Mr Mackinnon is half of the duo 'Mackinnon and Saunders Animation', one of the world's leading puppet animation companies. They specialise in the design and creation of characters for films, commercials, TV series such as Postman Pat, 'Bob the Builder', 'Raa-Raa the Noisy Lion' and 'Pingu' to name but a few and they also designed, constructed and animated the puppets for several feature films such as 'Fantastic Mr Fox', 'Corpse Bride' and 'Frankenweenie'.

Mr Mackinnon began by telling us that animation has many diverse uses and can be found in music videos, TV commercials, computer and phone apps and games and he greatly enjoys the variety of challenges offered by the many different projects in this field. The UK has now some six hundred animation companies employing nearly five thousand people between them; the UK animation industry is currently turning over annual revenues of about £300,000,000 and is one of the largest growth sectors in the UK economy.

He then showed us a short sting commissioned by Tim Burton to accompany a display of his artwork at the Museum of Modern Art. This sting had taken just three and a half weeks to make from concept to completion. 

Mr Mackinnon said that he worked with a wide range of people that included animators, designers, script writers and prop, set and costume designers. Mackinnon and Saunders has never consisted of one fixed set of people he told us; the staff are constantly changing as people come and go, working with the company for different periods of time on different projects.  Over the last twenty years Mackinnon and Saunders have worked on over eighty animated childrens' series, many of them running from between fifty to one hundred and four episodes. They have also worked on eight feature films and countless TV advertising campaigns.

Ian Mackinnon first met Pete Saunders twenty years ago at Cosgrove Hall in Manchester, at that time one of Europe's largest animation studios and unusual in that they specialised in both stop frame and drawn animation techniques. Working there provided a wonderful training ground for animators. Mr Saunders had been working on The Dark Crystal with puppeteer Jim Henson, whilst Mr Mackinnon had worked with Gerry Anderson. Together with two other colleagues - Paul Berry (who later worked on Tim Burton's 'The Nightmare Before Christmas') and Colin Batty - they decided to produce their own short animated film in 1992 – The Sandman - which received an Oscar nomination and won several awards, giving their work a great deal of exposure (see video below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjgHbRrnjhU

This opened doors for them and encouraged the pair to form their own animation studio when they were made redundant from Cosgrove Hall. Mr Mackinnon recommended short film projects - such as The Sandman - as a very good way to get one's work noticed.

When approached in 1995 by Tim Burton's producer, Mr Mackinnon and Mr Saunders initially thought they were on the receiving end of a practical joke and took some convincing before they were willing to travel to New York to meet Mr Burton, who had been impressed by The Sandman. Since that time they have completed three films with Tim Burton, the first of which was 'Mars Attacks' which they greatly enjoyed due to the novelty of working on a live action film as opposed to an animated one. Mr Mackinnon took a team of sculptors to work on the set in Los Angeles, where they created stop motion puppets for the film, but after about a year a CGI company took over both their designs for the characters and their subsequent production.

After this they concentrated on producing animations for the pre-school age group, such as 'Bob the Builder' and 'Postman Pat' - with which they have been involved with for the last twelve years, working on the latest 'Postman Pat' episodes for the last three.  More recently they recently bought the rights to a 2D flash animation show called 'Frankenstein's Cat'.  They have also been working on a series for the pre-school age group called 'Raa-Raa the Noisy Lion'.

http://www.mackinnonandsaunders.com/headlines/raa-raa/

They are currently developing a silent comedy featuring two shipwrecked sailors and a friendly penguin on an island.

They enjoy working on feature films;stop motion doesn't have the biggest box office returns compared with Pixar movies, but Mr Mackinnon said that it was thanks to people like Tim Burton and others that the feature industry keeps going. Feature films generally take about five years to go into production, around three to produce and involve hundreds of people in their creation. Tim Burton's 'Corpse Bride' for example took twelve years altogether to go into production. The feature projects were all shot at Three Mills Studios which no longer exists, having since been turned into an Ikea village.

Mr Mackinnon then showed us clips from Tim Burton's 'Frankenweenie' - which had initially been rejected by Disney who felt the black and white format wasn't in keeping with what they were doing at that time. It was back in 2006 that Mackinnon and Saunders first constructed the plasticine models for 'Frankenweenie' from Tim Burton's original sketches. Over the course of many months, these models were turned first into maquettes and finally armatures that were covered in a silicon skin. After the prototypes had been created they then had to make between twelve to fifteen copies of each character. The characters' hair was individually punched in - using real hair after discovering that nylon hair reflected the light too much 'it was full of tiny sparkles, like a glitterball'. The characters were mainly suspended on rigs which were later digitally removed in post production. Burton was concerned that the finished film shouldn't be mistaken for CGI so during the design process the designers sought to capture the drawn quality – the grittiness and energy - of Burton's original sketches which is why a lot of the surface detail isn't smoothed off. Many of the motifs and patterns in the film were also taken from Burton's back catalogue of sketches.  All but two of the characters in 'Frankenweenie' are stop frame puppets. To give us some idea of the processes involved in the filming of the 'Frankenweenie', Mr Mackinnon then showed us a filmed montage of the characters being manipulated in the studio. 

Much of the filming was done against greenscreen in order to cut away the rigs more easily and also for the scaling of the sets: the small dog was the central character which meant that the puppets for the adults would have had to have been enormous for correct scale, which was not practical in terms of either filming, moving the puppets or their overall balance.

 

The heads for both the 'Corpse Bride' and Frankenweenie were often no larger than ping-pong balls and contained elaborate facial mechanics that allowed the animators to alter their expressions using an allen key which fitted into the ear to make the character smile whilst another in the head would make the jaw move up and down.

Mr Mackinnon then talked a little about the kinds of qualities the company looked for in potential employees, listing commitment, enthusiasm, motivation, fastidious attention to detail, an overactive imagination, a distinct personality, the ability to work as part of team in a structured environment as being foremost on their list of requirements. Mackinnon and Saunders consider creativity and a commitment to animation necessary even for the production assistants and administrative staff.

Regarding the unsolicited submission of work to Mackinnon and Saunders, Mr Mackinnon advised students to only send their best, completed work as the staff there were always extremely busy with projects and had 'hundreds of applications from people coming through, year in year out'. Lacking any kind of HR department or support team to answer letters and emails, they had neither the time to reply to everyone nor to 'go through 'three years' worth of someone's sketches..If you don't hear back from us, please don't take that personally' he advised, 'give us a polite, gentle nudge in two or three months' time.'

Mr Mackinnon said that there is no clear pathway into animation and his own company usually takes students from the animation courses at Manchester Metropolitan University and Glyndwr University. He advised students interested in joining the industry to send out lots of emails and submit only their absolute best work in a showreel in order to get people to sit up and pay attention. Echoing Ms Carter's lecture earlier in the day, Mr Mackinnon suggested that graduates should be prepared to work in other fields to bring in some money whilst waiting to get into the industry and showed us a slide which listed the former occupations - in fields completely unrelated to animation - of current members of the Mackinnon and Saunders team. 

He additionally cautioned the audience to avoid ever being rude to the person who answers the phone at a company they are trying to get employment with, since that person will mostly likely be responsible for getting one's CV to the bosses' desk. He read us a lovely, highly complimentary email sent from an applicant to Mackinnon and Saunders describing his admiration for their work..but Mr Mackinnon then pointed out that this individual had clearly also sent this email to many different animation companies at the same time, inadvertently using the CC function rather than the BCC!  He stressed the importance of using spellcheck and ensuring that whatever is sent to a company looks as professional as possible. Sending out work from team projects is fine, but the applicant should describe precisely what their role was in the production. An animator working for Mackinnon and Saunders would tend to be working freelance.  Although the studio tries to keep it's staff through 'feeding' them creative work on a continuous basis, the work of the studio is usually project specific and it is necessary for animators to have future work in the pipeline for when the current project they are working on is completed.

This was a fascinating talk that offered insights into elements of the animation industry that I was completely unaware of, such as the problems that can be encountered when scaling figures or the necessity for rigs.  Mr Mackinnon clearly valued the team members that he worked with and I was deeply impressed by his apparent lack of ego, despite a prodigious amount of talent. Although I struggled at times to follow his diction, I enjoyed attending this lecture and feel I have not only gained a deeper understanding of the work that goes on within an animation studio working on a stop motion feature film but additionally feel inspired by Mr Mackinnon's love for the genre to continue working on my own stop motion animations back home after graduation.

Wed 6^th March 2014

'Community Engagement and Installation Art' - Carol Ramsey 

The first lecture that I attended on the third day of the Conference Week was called 'Community Engagement and Installation Art' and was delivered by artist Carol Ramsey.

A natural draughtswoman from and early age, Installation Artist Carol Ramsey originally trained at NWSAD in 1987 for an HND in Illustration, having already spent an initial year studying Visual Communication with the intention of becoming a graphic designer before changing courses on the advice of her tutors. Upon leaving Wrexham she returned to her home town of Liverpool and took up the Enterprise Allowance Scheme – a Tory initiative to award unemployed people £40 per week if they started up their own business and invested £1000 of their own funds into it (a similar scheme was introduced in 2010) - which enabled her to take a studio in the Arena Gallery there and spend two years as a self-employed illustrator. As this predated the widespread adoption of the internet, Ms Ramsey worked with an agent who was based in London in order to reduce the amount of time wasted with illustrations and corrections being posted back and forth between herself and her clients. This however only worked for a while because of the amount of travelling involved and after obtaining an agent based in Stockport she spent many years designing greeting cards which apparently became very popular in Denmark. Unable to continue paying rent on her gallery studio she then took up employment in an office and worked during her own time in portraiture – all her commissions being obtained solely through word of mouth - which brought in an extra income. 

 

After becoming a mother she realised that she no longer enjoyed creating portraits since most of these were made by working with photographs supplied by the client because people no longer wanted to sit for a portrait. Ms Ramsey felt that the resulting portraits were impersonal and eventually concluded that 'if you've got a photograph, then why not just keep the photograph?'. (Having done similar work from client photographs myself I can fully sympathise with her on this - it can be pretty soul-destroying if done too often.) She therefore attended life drawing classes at Wirral Met where she re-discovered her love for 'real art and drawing and not just copying from a photograph.' 

Whilst there she was encouraged by her tutors to pursue a degree in fine art and despite actually only needing a one-year top-up to obtain the degree, she elected to study for the whole three years, enabling her to socialise successfully with younger undergraduates. Having erroneously assumed that she would need to do little for such a course other than draw, Ms Ramsey discovered within her first few weeks that her interests actually extended to abstract and collage, incorporating three dimensional forms. Initially reluctant to step away from her safety zone of illustration, she eventually embraced 3D practice, using the oak parquet flooring tiles of a recently demolished dance floor that she had seen in a skip to create a ceiling installation wherein the individually suspended floor tiles swung in time to music and 'the dance floor became the dancer'.

http://www.carolramsay.moonfruit.com/communities/0/004/011/888/670//images/4592997327_404x305.jpg

When this needed to be taken down she converted the same dance floor into a chair with speakers set into the back that can play music from an i-Pod. Ms Ramsey doesn't make art unless it's from recycled materials and coming from a musical family she bases much of her artwork around music. In subsequent projects for her degree she took apart a discarded radiogram and suspended the pieces so that it looked as though it was exploding and for her final show she suspended fragments of music books that were being sold cheaply by her local library in furls and cones. 

http://www.carolramsay.moonfruit.com/altered-books/4576746207

This latter exhibit was subsequently recreated for a company in Southend on Sea who were holding a 'Book Art' exhibition. They contacted Ms Ramsey after reading her blog about it, for she had blogged incessantly throughout her degree, diarising everything she did and becoming thereby one of the top read blogs on The Artists Newsletter, her work eventually featuring on the front cover of The Artists Newsletter Degree booklet.  Ms Ramsey incidentally recommends the insurance offered by The Artists Newsletter which comes free as part of their subscription package and has also signed up to their more expensive - but more extensive – version which she described as 'really reasonable'.

Initially she didn't need to find work to undertake because her blogs were at the top of the Google lists for art blogs, as a result of which she received many commissions from readers in the art establishment. 'If you Google 'butterfly art' for example, mine is one of the firstblogs to come up' she said. Having deliberately taken time off blogging for the last twelve months she has not obtained any of the commissions that she has applied for during this period and has concluded that these two things are closely connected, so much so that she has decided to return to blogging in order to boost her online presence.

At the same time as the Southend exhibition she was invited by one of the Artists Newsletter editors to exhibit work in the Electric Works in Sheffield. This newly constructed set of office conversions was not attracting as much interest as the promoters wanted and it was their idea to raise the profile of the properties by bringing in artists. She described it as the most amazing building she'd ever worked in, where access from the top floor to the ground floor was via a helter-skelter. For this exhibition she submitted a piece of site-specific work constructed from maps, detailing her route between Liverpool and Sheffield. Her next piece featured site-specific work for the Bridewell Gallery as part of the Liverpool Biennial, creating a roundhouse prison - based on a local dockland lock-up for drunken sailors - from out of date legal books donated by Liverpool Law School who had been following her blogs. 

http://www.carolramsay.moonfruit.com/communities/0/004/011/888/670//images/4592998467_423x560.jpg

 

This proved a successful and popular exhibit and several commissions followed in similar vein.  One such was an 'exploded music set' composed from donated instruments, much of which she took apart so carefully that recordings could be played through the speakers as patrons walked through it.  A local band was even able to use the installation to perform and to create a live action music video.

From this she went on to do a Master's Degree in Fine Art, Site and Archive Intervention in Preston. Whilst her main project focussed on a park in Preston, she was advised to make a second, smaller piece of site-based work for her second term and she found a small nature reserve within a mile of her house that she had not ever heard of before called the NewFerryButterfly Park.  The park consisted of a small area of enclosed ground at the back of the railway station which bordered on the railway siding. The park owners were receptive to her suggestion that she make them a piece of art, but it quickly became evident that what they actually needed was seating and publicity. Ms Ramsey soon became deeply involved with the Butterfly Park and after deciding to base all of her MA projects around it she became their voluntary Artist in Residence creating functional art, starting with a bench made from a railway sleeper with a back made vaguely in the shape of a butterfly's wing. In addition to this she illustrated around twenty-five different species of butterfly on perspex sheets to be hung from trees around the Butterfly Park, the main cost and labour for this being supported by a local industrial plastics etcher who wanted to support his community.

She also gave a talk about the park at a local school. The children – many of whom had no gardens and had never been to the countryside - had been unaware of the park's existence and were eager to become involved.  They began by establishing an edible vegetable and salad allotment from donated plants that in addition to providing flowers attractive to butterflies and bees would provide a source of fresh food for the children's families.  Originally this allotment was intended to be mobile, but the extreme weight of the earth-filled cart used for the purpose precluded this option and it rapidly became a stationary fixture.

As the park had no electricity and no visitor facilities Ms Ramsey refurbished a 1970's caravan for her final MA Project, fitting it out as a Visitor Centre - in keeping with the needs expressed by both the local community and the park owners - with tables and chairs, butterfly books, colouring sheets and art materials, models and a library, all of which were donated. Ms Ramsey admitted being 'terrified of insects' and said that the whole project had been 'a real eye-opener'. Presumably to help encourage ownership, Ms Ramsey also worked on a project with local school children in which they created splot paintings of imaginary butterflies, giving each one an imaginary latin name and these too were situated within the Visitor Centre.

Having now completed her MA, Ms Ramsey wished to continue her association with the park and decided to invite more artists to join her – for no funding - for the construction of an Art Trail, which proved very successful and popular with visitors. 

 

Exhibits from the NewFerry Butterfly Park Art Trail

She also set up a Twitter and Facebook account for the park which has helped raise public awareness of its existence and has increased the number of people who are now involved with it on an ongoing basis. The park has suffered several recent setbacks, including the vandalising of the Visitor Centre Caravan at one point and the landowner's desire to reclaim the land for building at another, but overall the park has gone from strength to strength as a result of Ms Ramsey's close involvement.  From having around a hundred visitors per year during its first fifteen years it now has around four thousand each summer, all due, she said to the power of social networking. She added that it is vital for us as artists to have this online presence and has been presented with so many wonderful opportunities and met so many fellow artists and gallery owners as a result of social networking that the effect on her career has been enormous. She herself tweets and posts to Facebook under several different identities: as herself, as the NewFerry Butterfly Park, as the director of various studios and as 'JackdawandJay' which is her craft-based jewellery business. 

 

As a director of the Arena Gallery Ms Ramsey is also responsible for fundraising.  Using this connection she was able to combine her interest with the butterfly park and community projects to set up a six month series of workshops that made use of empty shops as pop-up galleries and studios, offering residencies to artists who were able to create community-based art centring around nature and the butterfly park.

After describing some of the artists who had become involved with this and the wide variety of community projects and workshops they had undertaken, Ms Ramsey went on to talk a little more deeply about installations that she has created within the butterfly park, including one she made for St Luke's Church in Liverpool  which had been bombed during the Second World War.  She constructed this work in the form of an Anderson Shelter and filled it with local people's reminiscences of the bombings and the search for refuge, all of which were inscribed by hand on luggage labels suspended from the walls.

http://www.carolramsay.moonfruit.com/communities/0/004/011/888/670//images/4593001136_408x529.jpg

Because Ms Ramsey recycles everything, she had made this installation using wood from the butterfly park and had deliberately clad the exterior with shingles like the microscopic scales of a butterfly's wing.  This was done so that when the exhibition came to an end, she could move the hut to the park as a sheltered space in which volunteers could have a cup of tea and children could have workshops.

In 2013 Ms Ramsey needed to undergo major surgery and had to give up a lot of her work, which she missed a great deal. Whilst recovering therefore she decided to turn the growing popularity the small handmade gifts that she habitually made for friends and family each Christmas to her advantage and set up her own craft business, JackdawandJay. Since October she has been travelling around craft fares selling artwork (primarily sculptures) and handmade jewellery – all constructed from recycled materials such as books and wood - and has actually made more money doing so than when she was employed in a managerial position in an office. She has therefore decided to remain self employed working in her craft business alongside her fine art career. Despite disagreeing with those in the fine art establishment who look down on craft work as being inferior to fine art, she has nonetheless had the foresight to keep these two identities completely separate, so that people Googling her name in response to her applications for residencies, exhibitions and commissions will not become confused and dismiss her out of hand. She says that trading separately as JackdawandJay will in effect pay her bills and allow her to pursue her fine art career without having to take an office job, meaning that she can stay in her studio and enjoy being creative. She admits that maintaining two separate identities is quite difficult but feels it is worth it because the alternative is working in less than inspiring office jobs, since there isn't frankly a great deal of money in standard fine art installation as a career.

She hopes to continue in education and to one day undertake a PhD and gain teaching qualifications, describing this point in her career as 'just the beginning..I think I'm on the cusp of a whole new career for me and it's quite an exciting time.'

I very much enjoyed Ms Ramsey's lecture; her infectious enthusiasm for visual art filled the room and I admired her energy, the strength of her conceptual imagination and her sense of focus. Her installations looked wonderful - I would have loved to experienced them in situ - and it was very encouraging to see a recently graduated fine artist (especially a mature student) making a such a success of her career. Her observation that the number of commissions she received could be correlated with the amount of work put into updating her reflective blog is something that I have made note of for my own online journal and I will ensure that I keep it updated after I have graduated.

Ms Ramsey's work with the Butterfly Park exemplifies good collaborative practice in that the artist and the venue are effectively boosting one another's public profiles beyond a point that either could achieve alone within the same time-frame. I think the success of this dynamic however probably relies on the fact that despite the deepening relationship between the two, one remains in the role of the artist whilst the other stays as the client. This clear distinction between the two allows Ms Ramsey to develop her ideas in response to the needs of the park without hindrance, although this does raise the question as to the extent to which Ms Ramsey can be reasonably expected to continue to offer her services for free, now that her MA has been completed.

It seems to me that until we have a national government willing not only to value the arts as an essential cultural element of society but to invest properly in Arts Education within schools and colleges, creativity will always be undervalued and artists themselves will always be on the back foot when it comes to asking to be paid for their work. That Ms Ramsey should have to hide her career as a maker of crafts from the serious art establishment is testimony to the inherent snobbery which still infects the art world and does it absolutely no favours, reinforcing the class schism that makes the ordinary person feel unentitled to - and often afraid of - fine art, perceiving it at a remove from ordinary experience and as a status symbol for the wealthy. These negative attitudes from both the art establishment on one side and the general public on the other further inflate the price of art placing it well beyond the reach of most and so the cycle of attrition continues. This is one of the reasons that I have chosen to make photography my current field: people know what a photograph is, they are not scared by it and it is not necessary to price oneself out of the market in order to maintain credibility. 


'Creating Visual Concepts for Music Videos' - Keith Williams

After lunch I attended 'Creating Visual Concepts For Music Videos' - a Skype interview conducted between part-time Glyndwr film lecturer and host of The 80's Picturehouse website David Robinson and visual conceptualist Keith Williams, who is based in Los-Angeles.

Mr Williams has worked in London and Los Angeles in music videos as a concept writer for artists such as Elton John, Lionel Ritchie, Billy Idol, Donna Summer, Supertramp, Tina Turner, Olivia Newton-John and many others, in addition to working as a script and feature writer.

In answer to Mr Robinson's first question - as to how he got started in the music video business - Mr Williams replied that in 1978 he was working as a script writer for feature films in London when he was introduced to Australian music video director Russell Mulcahy, with whom he gelled artistically and maintained a successful working partnership until 1983.  Mr Williams subsequently came up with the idea for the opening shot of the very first music video to be shown on MTV, Mr Mulcahy's video for The Buggles 1979 song: 'Video Killed the Radio Star'.  From this early beginning they went on to create videos for bands such as ELO, Spandau Ballet and Elton John, to name but a few. When Russell returned to Australia in 1982 to direct horror feature 'Razorback', Mr Williams moved to Hollywood where he did a couple of further videos for Mr Mulcahy whilst he was 'waiting for Razorback to take off'. As a freelance video conceptualist, Mr Williams was doing something unique at that time and his name began to become known around music video companies in Hollywood. Although he was writing outlines, treatments and scripts for narrative videos when requested, the majority of his work during this period was based primarily around performance concepts. He obtained his first big Hollywood break in 1983 with Billy Idol's 'Dancing With Myself' (see video below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1NrQYXjLU&feature=kp

From that point onward he continued to make music videos in Hollywood for the next five years whilst also being a house writer for Mr Mulcahy's company back in England, since English directors were coming over to Hollywood and needed someone to write for them. He only returned to feature script writing on his return to the UK in 1987. In a side anecdote on the ways of Hollywood, Mr Williams described how he is still making money from a film script written over thirty years ago; he wrote it in 1982 and pitched it to Burt Lancaster's company who optioned it and the money from this enabled him to remain in Hollywood and begin to make music videos. He said that every time someone options that script they take it apart to see how it works, but each time they put it back together again in an edited version it no longer works because it only works in a certain structure – the one that he wrote. Over the course of the last thirty years he has re-optioned this script six times - to Warner Brothers, Joe Silver, and Walt Disney amongst others - it's currently in the hands of a German company and each time the script is optioned, Mr Williams gets paid, even though it has never actually been turned into a film.

Regarding the process of arriving at an initial concept for a track, Mr Williams stated that the first idea one came up with usually turned out to be the best one to develop, even if it seemed quite incongruous at the time. He cited the development of the Sony Walkman personal cassette player in the 1980's as an element that had assisted him to arrive at better concept ideas because it offered one the opportunity to listen to a track in an outdoor or otherwise unusual setting.  This had enabled him to become inspired by things he wouldn't normally have thought of had he been 'stuck at home or in the office' listening to that same track. He told us that an idea could often come from anywhere.

When presented with a job, the two primary questions he would ask were what the budget for the video was – since this could limit what it was possible to do – and whether the band or artist concerned had any particular ideas for this track. He said that his heart used to sink if the latter were the case, since musicians often come up with concepts that are 'literalisations' of their songs, which is very limiting.  Mr Williams liked to come up with ideas that were the least obvious and most unexpected, although he stressed that he wouldn't recommend developing a narrative that ran completely opposite to the theme of a song.

The concept of counterpoint is key to Mr William's method for developing music video ideas. He cited Supertramp's 'It's Raining Again' (see video below) as an example of a track where the idea of 'showing rain would be obvious to be seen coming up on the chorus of 'it's raining again'. But at the same time, you couldn't be too demented and not show any rain'. His solution was to not show the anticipated rain until the very end of the video, where it would have greatest impact.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZUE4_PtOk0&feature=kp

Concerning budgets, Mr Williams feels that today's access to the internet and video editing software means that videos really can be made for next to nothing using one's own camera for filming and YouTube for distribution – which he strongly recommended to us as the best platform for showcasing our work and getting it seen - but in the 1980's people had fewer resources at their disposal and often relied upon neon lighting to make productions look much more expensive than they really were. 'It just takes tricks of commonsense and imagination to make things look like they've had a bigger budget than they've really had', he told us.

Because Mr William's song concepts were closely tailored to each song, he very rarely kept a rejected concept for re-use elsewhere and has only recycled a video concept 'on a couple of occasions' such as in his video idea for Tina Turner's 'Let's Stay Together' 
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0hCmJtDn9Q

which had actually started life as a concept for a Bob Dylan song before the singer abruptly decided that he would prefer to be filmed singing the song live onstage instead. 'If the song is very good it will give you the concept and that's what should be generic [sic] to that particular track..you can have a crap song and if it gives you absolutely no ideas then you can drag out one of your really good concepts, but it will never have the same effect as if the track had given you the concept.'

When constructing narratives for music videos, Mr Williams advised us to remember that one is dealing with a three or four minute song into which a ten minute narrative will need to be fitted, because a music video gets watched over an over again and therefore one needs to construct a story that will maintain the viewer's interest. 'It has to lend itself to repeatability – how many times can you watch it before you get sick to death of it? But if you layer it with a lot of information that you don't necessarily 'get' the first time you watch it - you think 'what the hell was all that about' at the end - when you go back to it and start to put it together in your own mind you realise that there is a narrative there, but it's been highly condensed.' Mr Williams cites this as the reason that most video directors who then go on to direct feature films 'come a cropper': they are used to dealing with the headlines rather than the build up of each scene so they turn out thirty three-minute videos stuck together because they lack the expertise or awareness of how do make one ninety-minute structure where things would build up to a punchline, 'they are only trained in doing the punchlines'.

To construct a narrative one needs to pay attention to verse and chorus breakdown and write the action to that particular verse or chorus. Mr Williams once wrote too much narrative for a song which meant the recording company had to extend the track for the video because there was no other way the narrative could be fitted in!

Whilst in Hollywood, Mr Williams cleverly realised that he could utilise unusual filming locations as a means to seeing a bit more of the world and says that the reason Bonnie Tyler sings 'I Need a Hero' in the middle of the Grand Canyon for example is because he'd never been there and thought this would be a good way to go and see the place (see video below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVtaVrUAPK0

Another director wanted to set a video in Berlin but Mr Williams didn't particularly want to go there and – using the fact that something at the beginning of the song sounded like water – convinced him to film it in Venice instead!

On the subject of linking-structures – particularly where a band wants to integrate live performance with narrative shots - Mr Williams said that during the 1980's there was a growing tendency for feature films to promote their soundtracks and theme song. Realising the publicity available from exposure in the music video industry, film studios often therefore wanted footage of the artist singing the song integrated with clips from their film. Rather than simply placing the singer on a stage with footage from the film projected onto a screen behind them however, Mr Williams preferred to create an overall concept embracing what both the film and the song were about and then devise a structure that permitted one to cut between the two at specific points. He cited the example of a video he worked on in which Phil Collins sang the theme to 'Against All Odds' (see video below).  For this video he created the concept of Mr Collins singing against a wall of water which was coloured either red, green or blue, subtly signifying the 'love triangle' theme of both the song and the film.  The colours represented individual characters within the film who were then briefly shown in a clip from the movie when the appropriately wall of coloured water dissolved behind the singer to reveal them. He said that ninety eight percent of the MTV viewers probably 'didn't get it' but that this didn't matter since the video worked at a subliminal level.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVjEcIANv1o

Mr Williams advised us to avoid 'being obvious' by creating a literal onscreen version of the lyrics when arriving a music video concept, because to do so is to make something that is on the same level as the music one is listening to. The narrative is far more interesting if it engages you at the same time as the music, but in a different way. Once the video is in the hands of the director however it can be taken in a completely different direction and there are cases of music videos Mr Williams has created concepts for that have been tampered with or remixed beyond recognition. Mr Williams said we would be lucky if thirty percent of the video concepts we arrived at still resembled what we actually wrote by the time they were finished; out of fifty or so videos that he made during a five year period only five or six came out the way he had intended them to and there are no ways to enforce control over this.

When we are working with a solo artist, Mr Williams suggested that we cover the entire song in one take as a medium shot (from the shoulders up) so that if one is doing anything else and find that there's a gap or one gets stuck, there's always this master shot as a safety net to which one can return. The most important thing of all, he says, is to be able to handle the artist – to help them to feel that they are comfortable and enjoying themselves - in order to get the best possible performance out of them without their throwing a tantrum that can ruin the whole production and cost the unit a lot of money standing around doing nothing while the star is sulking in their trailer.

In terms of filming a live performance, solo artists are generally much easier to create a concept for than a band, since usually only the lead singer of a group has any kind of striking visual presence or acting ability and yet the rest of the band need to be represented, leading to the problem of what can be done with them to make them interesting. Regarding possible conflicts resulting from collaborations between band members and the video maker, the decision as to whether the band should be allowed to influence what goes into the video ultimately depends upon who's paying for the video, because the person paying for it is the customer and one has to do what they want, even if their ideas seem inferior to one's own. Ideally one needs to get the band or artist to agree to the pitched concept beforehand so that one can later point out that they had already agreed to the ideas 'and then they won't have a leg to stand on'.

Although able to pitch a music video concept in a single, spoken sentence, Mr Williams found that directors didn't like this and preferred to see something written down. The method he eventually devised consisted of a single, typed A4 page with the track and the name of the artist written at the top and the location and set beneath followed by a brief outline of the concept. Only if they decided to take the idea further would he then ask for a lyric sheet and match the action to the lyrics in chronological order.

In terms of getting ahead in the industry and working with bigger bands who have larger budgets, Mr Williams recommends making friends with bands and showing one's ideas directly 'to the people who have the power to say yes'. There's no substitute for networking he says and the more powerful and influential the people one can meet, the more likely one is to get the gig and get it done the way one wants it. When pitching an idea he suggested spending around ten minutes making small talk with the producers before beginning the actual the pitch. He recommends that we be visual and act it out, but only give them ninety percent of the whole idea - if one leaves a gap somewhere saying 'oh, and..I'm not too sure about this idea here..what do you think?' and they introduce an idea for which one then shows approval they will then be far more likely to accept that ninety percent because they feel that they have contributed something. It does come down to social mingling, he says; 'get out into the world and meet people and get your name known because that is how the work will come'. Mr William's final advice to us was that we should never say 'no' to any opportunity that arises - firstly because we never know where that opportunity might lead us and secondly because we often try harder at things we don't want to do and consequently turn out our best work. Like Mr Purves, Mr Williams says that structure is of paramount importance because it is a foundation – 'once it's correct don't mess around with it' he told us. 'Then mix what other people do best with what you do best.'

This was a really interesting session, packed with great ideas and valuable information. Mr Williams was an engaging speaker and as a result of this interview I now feel far better equipped to undertake making music videos for bands. His method of arriving at a treatment for a music video and then pitching the idea was particularly useful.  I also liked the fact that his main message was essentially a very simple one: to make a good music video, one needs to avoid the obvious and adopt instead a subtly contrasting or adjacent theme to the one in the song.  (I do remember noticing back in the 1980's that the song and the video often didn't seem to 'match up' - thanks to Mr William's talk I now know the reason why!)  This 'counterpoint' element is one that I will definitely try to put into practice in the music video I am currently making for my Negotiated Studies Two module.

I also think the Skype interview format worked really well and Mr Robinson's questions were always pertinent to our development as film students.


'Life as a Media Photographer' - Melissa Cross

The final talk of the the day that I attended was called 'A Life as a Media Photographer' and was delivered by press photographer Melissa Cross.

Ms Cross has been a freelance and media Photographer for six years. She is the Senior Staff Photographer with local newspaper 'The Leader' at NWN Media Ltd.

Ms Cross started out by working in various offices before eventually deciding to attend university as a mature student. For one of her course assignments she accompanied the Stoke Fire Service to an RTA call-out in which a young child had lost his life. An angry onlooker who strongly objected to her presence there grabbed her camera, tore out the film and verbally abused her, after which she decided that she did not ever want to work as press photographer. Following her graduation in 2006, Ms Cross initially worked in Northwich as a freelance and portrait photographer and when a press photography vacancy arose in a Northwich newspaper called 'The Guardian' she was not even sure that she wanted it after her previous nasty experience at the Stoke RTA, but she accepted the job because photography work is generally difficult to come by. She was made redundant a year later and then moved on to work full-time for The Leader in 2008.

The Leader has three editions, the Flintshire Leader, The Chester Leader and the Wrexham Leader and has a staff photographer to cover each area - Ms Cross covers the Flintshire area. Ms Cross and her colleagues don't work from an office but travel about by car, using their iPads to send their downloaded images FTP to the office. The photographers have an online diary that they each log on to every night to see what their assignments for the following day will be. Ms Cross also checks this diary in the morning to check whether anything new has been added. Each photographer initials the jobs that they have done throughout the day so that everyone knows who's doing what, which also enables them to help one another out when one of them is absent. Sometimes the photographers will go in to the office to assist on the picture desk - for example when the picture editor is away - and this entails their putting all the pictures that come in into different folders for each edition of the paper so that the newsdesk can see the images and correctly relate them to the stories that they are running.

Ms Cross then showed us a series of slides illustrating the many different categories of stories that she photographs for the newspaper, explaining a little about what is required for each one.  For schools, the photographers cover awards ceremonies, eisteddfoddau, fun days and new playground equipment. Each Wednesday the newspaper runs a double-page spread called 'Schools in Focus' so they have to make sure they have pictures every week for this, even if it's just of schoolchildren playing. She tends to do around five or six shots each time she visits a school, from which the pictures editor can choose what to use. They cover GCSE and A-Level results as well, which can be rather hectic since all the schools release all of the results on the same morning which means she has to get to four different schools between 8.30 - 9.30 and take pictures very quickly before the children go home with their results. Every year they also photograph the new starters in Reception Class, which Ms Cross described as 'the bane of my life' because between the end of September and November each year she has to go to over sixty-five schools photographing two or three classes per school. The reason this is done is because the newspaper earns money whenever the parents go online to buy the images. In the last two years they have also begun to photograph Year Six students who are about to go on to secondary education - these groups however she poses less formally.

They also photograph celebrities attending gigs and charity functions and visiting politicians - the latter she described as difficult to photograph because of the restrictions put in place by their security. They photograph funerals provided they have obtained permission from the family first, but even so, Ms Cross is careful not to intrude. 'It's a basically [a case of] put on your long lens and get what you can from a distance' she says. 'It's all about showing emotion..you want pictures of people crying and grieving.' Once people have entered the church or crematorium Ms Cross says she goes over to the undertakers to photograph the floral tributes and cards because 'editors love seeing sad stuff like that in the paper'.

If the photographers get an unscheduled call-out it will usually be to attend either RTAs or fires. Although she says she will often introduce herself to the emergency services present, Ms Cross uses a long lens for such occasions and tries to stay out of the way, citing the fact that despite what people think, it is in fact legal to take photographs from any public road. If there is a fatality involved then one's pictures will generally make the front page and therefore Ms Cross tries to make sure that her pictures are the best she can take under the circumstances. She is also expected to photograph the grieving families affected by such accidents. Under these circumstances she tries to be sensitive, chatting to the family members beforehand and trying to obtain a little information from them, which then helps her to set up the right type of shot. Ms Cross additionally photographs seriously ill and terminally ill children in hospital when the newspaper requires her to.

Features and business pages are normally a double page spread so she needs to obtain four or five pictures over the course of an hour or so, meaning that her visits are less rushed than she is usually required to be. Ms Cross showed us examples of images she took for a recent such feature on a company that trains dogs for drugs searches - which she said she found very interesting - and a newly opened climbing wall in Queensferry.

Other than one-off charity sporting events, Ms Cross does not take many photographs of sports fixtures because the newspaper has its own dedicated sports photographers, but since the newspaper does cover children's football every weekend for a double-page spread she is required to photograph this event one weekend in five - the pictures editor and freelance photographers sharing this burden with the three full-time photographers.

Ms Cross then went on to talk about the visual content she had helped provide for the coverage of the rape and murder of Mold based Irish vet Catherine Gowing in 2012, beginning with photographs she took for the initial appeals by Ms Gowing's sister when she first went missing and pictures of the search teams at Ms Gowing's house. The next set of photographs featured the various locations in which the victim's dismembered body parts were eventually found. Because local newspapers were in competition with one another to run pictures of each find, Ms Cross said she had to try her best to get a good photograph of each event 'even if this meant driving half a mile a way and putting your long lens on' otherwise her editor 'would not be happy'. She described how she had once walked around the side of a quarry in order to obtain pictures; as the the only photographer present she was concerned that the police would send her away if discovered and hid herself in the bushes at one point in order to evade detection. As the only person to obtain pictures of the events that day, her paper sold her photographs on to all of the other newspapers including the nationals. (Because the photographs belong to the newspaper however, she does not get paid any extra for such images when this happens.)  After the murderer came to trial Ms Cross photographed members of the victim's family entering and leaving Mold Crown Court Court, 'again you've got to show emotion..because that's what the editor wants to see in the paper.'

Although she really loves her job, Ms Cross admitted to finding some aspects of her work difficult. If someone has died and the newspaper doesn't know their address then she and a reporter have to go out a do what they call 'a death knock' where they have to knock on every door in an area to find the relatives of the deceased in order to get a tribute - this is not something she enjoys doing; she dislikes working in rough areas where she feels at risk and also worries at times about getting into trouble with the police for trespassing in order to take photographs. She sometimes finds the most relevant part of her pictures has been cropped out in order to fit them into the editorial and occasionally a photograph submitted by a member of the public supplants those provided by the staff photographers, both of which she finds frustrating. Despite trying to maintain a professional distance whilst working, Ms Cross says that she has sometimes found herself becoming emotionally involved and upset - particularly when covering stories of accidents and fatalities happening to children of a similar age to her own family - and that a week covering deaths and funerals every day could be very draining.

In answer to a question from the audience as to what makes a good press photographer, Ms Cross said that in addition to competence with the camera one is using - which in her case belongs to and is insured by the newspaper - one needs to be confident and able to approach and talk to people, with a sound understanding of what works best in lots of different situations. Good communication skills are very important: 'I've got to know a lot of people in the community now such as councillors and schools and when you go back and see these people all the time - when you know someone - they'll work with you to get better pictures'.

The description given in this talk by Ms Cross of her job as a press photographer was fascinating and provided a detailed insight into what the job actually entails on a daily and weekly basis. It is thanks to this that any thoughts I may have harboured about such employment as a result of my work with the North Wales Film & Photography Collective over the last eighteen months have now been firmly set aside since much of the subject matter that she covers is highly emotionally charged. Although the challenge of trying to obtain good photographs of subjects from a semi-concealed or distant viewpoint certainly sounds quite exciting, I think that to be a successful press photographer one needs to be sensitive toward people's emotions but not so empathetic that it interferes with one's focus (a little like nursing, perhaps) and I suspect I would find it impossible not to be negatively affected by the tragic stories that a press photographer has to cover on a regular basis. I take my hat off to Ms Cross as a brave and strong woman who has had to undertake some quite nerve-wracking assignments as part of the job she clearly loves. 

https://scontent-b-lhr.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/t1.0-9/1979609_10153895275735564_1804703303_n.jpg

 Image of Ms Cross and audience courtesy of Senior Photography Lecturer Stewart Edwards. Copyright S.Edwards 2014

Thurs 7^th March 2014

'Social and Community Arts Projects' - Rhiannon Wyn Hughes

On the final day of the Conference I attended two lectures, the first of which was given by former council leader Rhiannon Wyn Hughes on the subject of 'Social and Community Arts Projects'.

Ms Wyn Hughes is Vice Chair of the Film Agency for Wales and former Vice Chair of the Arts Council of Wales, Chair of ECTARC European Training Organisation and was a Councillor for Denbighshire County Council for twenty two years. She commenced her talk by saying that she hadn't prepared a presentation because wanted to engage in a 'conversation' with us, rather than delivering a lecture as such. 

 

After introducing herself, Ms Wyn Hughes began by saying that 'we are very much what our lives have dealt us'.   She cited the fact that she had been unable as a child to pursue an interest in dance and music - both for financial reasons and also because she was considered to be expressing aspirations above her social class - as providing the motivation to spend her adult life championing arts opportunities for others who would not otherwise have the chance to engage with them. Similarly, upon leaving school, Ms Wyn Hughes wanted to be a fashion designer but lacking the formal qualifications that might have allowed her to train in this field she was instead guided by careers advisers into employment options considered more suitable for someone with her level of academic attainment. 'Those blockages for me' she told us, 'were the driving force for me championing the arts in my political life and also in my personal life, because to me, the arts are about changing people's lives. It's always a struggle and there's never enough money, but you must never let that stop things from happening.'

She said that she discovered a couple of years ago at a seminar that she was an entrepreneur. 'I'd always struggled a bit, the way I work, some people didn't get it, you know. But I'm an entrepreneur and a risk-taker - a lot of what I do is about risk to make things happen. I'm an ideas person as well and I have a lot of ideas. But what I try and do though is I have people around me that pull me back, people that are into finance and people that are into organisation..it's important that I have people that will say "that idea's rubbish, you musn't carry on with that idea".'

She then went on to tells us of two major Community Arts Projects with which she had been involved, beginning with a Youth Arts Festival that she had set up in 1997 in response to the young people of Prestatyn vandalising the town. Asked why they were behaving this way, the young people responded that 'they wanted something to do in the town' so Ms Wyn Hughes set up an event for twenty-five young people over one weekend which eventually built up to a series of twenty competitions that took place over nine days and involved over two thousand participants.

The second project she spoke about was the Scala Cinema Arts Centre in Prestatyn. When the Prestatyn's original Scala Cinema was demolished in 1999, Ms Wyn Hughes - a local councillor at that time - assured the community that she would make sure they had a new cinema to replace it. After nine years of work they were still £1,000000 short of the full funds necessary to complete the project and Ms Wyn Hughes eventually lost her leadership of the council following a vote of no confidence after she pushed through legislation making the ratepayers of Prestatyn repay a loan to cover that deficit, for the next twenty years. Despite this, she says that she would do it all again.

Although there was no funding for such a project at the new complex, Ms WYn Hughes ran an international film competition at the Scala - obtaining participation by promising to showcase film entries from the various countries raking part, as a result of which the Scala Arts Centre is now part of an international youth film festival network.

Describing herself as a volunteer, Ms Wyn Hughes went on to say that our own best opportunities would come about through volunteering. 'Nobody's going to hand you a career on a plate. Doors aren't going to open - you're going to be hammering on doors. If you want to make lots of money you're looking at the wrong career - don't look at the arts to make money; some will, but very few. But do - where you can - be a volunteer: it gets you your foot in the door, it brings you into contact with people and it is all about networking and meeting people and having those informal conversations with people who'll say "Oh I know so-and-so, why don't you go and see them?" It's about widening your network and you'll enjoy it - you'll get a lot more out of it than you put into it.'

She became a councillor 'to try and make things happen for the community' and says she frequently 'got into trouble' because of her views. She told us that she has appeared on TV, met the Queen and had dinner with Prince Charles as a result of her work. 'You go and get involved with things and you end up in all these weird and wonderful places. And what you do is you meet people you would never meet otherwise and your life is enriched as a result.'

During the question and answer session which followed this introduction, a number of people enquired as to how they should best go about funding their projects, to which Ms Wyn Hughes replied that we should 'go and get advice off the Arts Council.  Find out who your local adviser is and then make an appointment to go and see them and then they'll be able to tell you what's available'. She added that each local council has a Voluntary Service Council attached to them and these bodies have access to funding.

She told us that local government sees the arts as 'an easy hit - there was a problem with the Arts Council with the Lottery which took seven or eight million pounds out of the Arts Council budget over a period of years' - in effect, the London Olympics negatively impacted upon community activity in Wales and even now, ninety percent of the arts funding is centred in and around London. In this, she confirms the statements made by Ms Johnson on the first day of the Conference (see above). Ms Wyn Hughes added that whilst the Arts Council in Wales is funded 'quite well' by the Welsh Government, local councils don't value the arts and prioritise other services ahead of it without perceiving the damage this does to the community, citing the closure of Wrexham Leisure Centre as a prime example of this kind of thinking.

In relation to the development of Arts Centres and pop-up shops, Ms Wyn Hughes said that one has to justify the venues 'by making the buildings work better and putting lots of things in them'. She advised us to personally write to the councillors who are closing down the libraries, Community Centres and arts venues in our towns, because if we don't, the local councils will think that nobody cares and that their closure doesn't matter to the community.

She described other European countries as being very far ahead of the UK in terms of the amount of arts funding that they apply to from the European arts pot - 'they have people working in offices five days a week writing out funding applications every day'. She also mentioned a related upcoming funding programme called Erasmus Plus which offers European money to organisations providing educational opportunities in various select fields, but said that this programme is going to need 'lots of people attending lots of meetings' and applications for funding from it will have to demonstrate collaboration between different countries on projects - so that there is some level of cultural exchange going on - in order to be successful.

As the remaining question and answer session was mainly anecdotal or otherwise generalised in nature it is not worth recording in any detail here. Ms Wyn Hughes ended her session by saying that she had often envied those who felt there had been one special teacher at school who had changed things for them; the quality of education that she herself had experienced was poor and this was not something she could recover from in her life. This is what has prompted her to make it her mission to improve the quality of Arts Education for others. She told us that she possesses no professional qualifications or any kind of title - 'I just DO IT' she said.

I am filled with admiration for the kind of persistence - not to mention the sheer vision - that it must have taken to establish an Arts Centre such as the The Scala and Ms Wyn Hughes is clearly an asset to any town lucky enough to have her on their council.  Whilst she was a lovely speaker with a great personality, at the end of the hour I didn't feel that I had gained much by way of increased knowledge about either Social Community Arts Projects or how to go about obtaining the funding to support them. I'm not sure her idea of 'a conversation' with us actually achieved as much as she had hoped - perhaps because as students we were not yet undertaking such projects ourselves - and a properly illustrated presentation on some actual Social Community Arts Projects that have been run at the Scala Arts Centre - how they were funded and the objectives that they set out to achieve - might have been more useful to us. 
 

'The Accidental Photographer' - Ray Worsnop 

The final talk of the conference that I attended was delivered by entrepreneur Ray Worsnop and was called 'The Accidental Photographer'.

Mr Worsnop left school without qualifications or indeed, very much by way of formal education, but became a successful businessman able to retire at the age of forty seven and he now mentors people who hope to become self-employed. Despite the intriguing title of his lecture, Mr Worsnop announced at the outset that he was not going to speak about his photography since it was only one of many different things that he did, such as working as a role model and mentor for Big Ideas Wales, The Princes Trust and Business Wales.

He asked us if we knew of any entrepreneurs and said that it was very difficult to describe what an entrepreneur actually is. Describing himself as 'a photographer who sells his stuff all over the world and does weddings and portraits and dogs and cats and stuff like that', he qualified this by adding that he shouldn't really call himself a photographer but rather 'someone who takes pictures' because he had not had any formal training. 

Housebound in 2007 following a leg injury whilst on holiday in Turkey, Mr Worsnop had begun taking snaps of the view from his window with his point-and-shoot camera out of sheer boredom; apparently until this point he had 'never really noticed the sunsets before'. At the request of a local friend he then sold some of these pictures in an exhibition held at Rhyl library in order to raise funds for the local branch of the Citizens Advice Bureau (for which he volunteers) and has since begun selling his work online.  In so doing, Mr Worsnop told us that he was demonstrating entrepreneurship because he was transforming the disadvantage of the enforced leisure of his convalescence into an opportunity to make money. An American woman who had viewed his photographic images online sent him a poem she had written in response to his pictures and they subsequently collaborated on a self-published book - her poems accompanying his images.  They are now working on their second book together.

'Across the Pond - You Hear What I See eBook: Ray Worsnop, Mary Shafer'

Mr Worsnop asked us to consider what is meant by the term 'role model', saying that David Beckham had 'discipline' which is what had made him into a successful athlete and also a role model for young people.

Mr Worsnop then talked about his life, starting with the fact that he had been so successful as an entrepreneur that he had been able to take several holidays each year in Florida and also retire at the age of forty seven to live off his fortune. Having spent the first four years of his life in hospital and remaining very ill for many years afterwards, he had been unable to attend school on a regular basis, leaving at the age of fifteen with no formal qualifications and poor levels of literacy. Rather than feel sorry for himself however he took up work in markets, selling window-cleaning squeegees (alongside their inventor), for which enterprise he had needed to get up at half past four each morning.  Working on stalls enabled him to develop the ability to arrive at sales pitches to engage the public in his wares. He had then gone from market trading to selling life insurance and eventually to training salespeople in the TSB bank.  After this he set up his own financial brokerage, which he then ran until his retirement. He now mentors people for two years at a time to help them become self-employed and showed us a slide of words that he lives by: 'It's not what I've been through that makes me the person I am, it's how I got through it that makes me the person I am today'. 

Mr Worsnop said that the organisations he worked for could give us advice on starting up a business, but that he 'wasn't allowed to'. Returning to the theme of working in a market, Mr Worsnop successfully challenged us to think of something that he wouldn't be able to sell on a market stall, saying that a market set-up was a great way to test out an idea without committing oneself to the outlay that a shop entails.

 

He told us that The Princes Trust - for whom he mentors - enables young people up to the age of thirty to set up businesses and that for people over the age of fifty an organisation called Prime Cymru has been established, adding that he would be mentoring for them too, at some point in the near future.

Mr Worsnop then spoke briefly about networking explaining that 'everyone in this room has networked from the age of five, because that's when we went to school which is where networking begins..it's very simple, there's nothing complicated about it.' He added that he pays an (un-named) company a thousand pounds a year to attend 'speed networking' events where he gets to pitch his ideas to seventy people in a single session. He doesn't have a website, but relies exclusively on social media such as Facebook to sell his images. 

Mr Worsnop concluded his talk with a description of how he went about establishing Rhyl Market, meeting each and every one of the council's objections with a response that enabled the idea of the market to progress, only to be informed by the council at the very end of the process that they wanted someone other than Mr Worsnop to run it.

I'm sure Mr Worsnop meant well, but cannot in all honesty envisage myself selling prints of my photographs from a windy market stall to passing shoppers, despite his evident enthusiasm for such venues as places where anything can be traded if you have the patter. His resilience in the face of adversity and relentlessly upbeat attitude to life however can only be admired and his talk has encouraged me to try to think about new and inventive ways I can publicise and sell my photographic work once I leave university, such as through local galleries, Kindle books and online sales.  I was also unaware of the existence of Prime Cymru and after I graduate I will contact them for advice about running my own business.

Evaluation

Each year's Creative Futures Student Conference Week that I have attended has offered fascinating insights into employment within the Creative Industries and this year's Conference was no exception.  The range of speakers and subjects on offer was as large as always and this year in particular, care had been taken to ensure that presentations relevant to particular pathways didn't clash on the timetable, which made choosing which lectures to attend a great deal simpler. 

I have benefited in many ways by attending these presentations.  The lectures which have stood out for me this year were those that related directly to my areas of interest, most notably Mr Purves' wise advice on the creative process and Keith William's concise description of the methods by which he conceptualised music videos. Carol Ramsey's proactive dedication to her creative career has helped re-inspire me as an artist, Ian Mackinnon's enthusiasm for his craft assisted me to rediscover my own love for animation whilst Alexis Johnson's talk on Arts Education clarified the steps I will need to undertake should I wish to enter the field of Arts Education upon graduation. 

As a result of attending the Creative Futures Student Conference I feel that I now have a clearer sense of the entrepreneurial direction to take upon graduation and the areas that I will consequently need to work on in the coming months, such as networking, the development of online publicity within social media, the establishment of a website and the sourcing of sales outlets for my work.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the staff of NWSAD who have worked so hard to put together these Creative Futures Student Conference Weeks during the three years that I have been studying at Glyndwr University - they have been the highlight of each academic year and have delivered glimpses into the reality of working in the Creative Industries that I really could not have otherwise obtained.  

_______________________________________________________________

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