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One of our final assignments in the first year on the Interactive Media Diploma was to produce an advert, suitable for broadcast on television, to be no more than thirty seconds in length and to incorporate the fake brand name ‘Zero’ in a sporting context.

Well, I have to say it was an absolute blast! After several days of narrowing down the possibilities, I settled on ‘Zero Sports’; a subscription based sports channel that is essentially another Setanta. Having worked with Mr. Paul Stevens, the star of the advert previously and having him as a close personal friend, we had an absolute ball and filming took place at his (new) house in Headingley, Leeds.

The dialogue was almost entirely thought up on the day; I took a rough set of script notes with me, and between us we came up with a script that made sense given the shots that I had planned. Hilarity ensued and it is a small piece of work I’m very proud of.

As we were tasked to work alone on this assignment, the entire production was my responsibility, although I have to give Paul the usual credit for his wonderful creative input and honest opinions.

NB: This film was used during the 2008 end-of-year show at City College Manchester as part of the Multimedia Showreel on display to prospective new students and their families.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

When I was first presented with a list of the assignments we were going to be working on in the first year, the ‘Newscast’ assignment was certainly the one that caught my interest the most. I do have a strong interest in factual/documentary programming, and watch/keep up with a lot of news.

For the assignment, we were put into teams of four and tasked with creating a news broadcast including a minimum of one interview, one use of chroma-key and every team member had to produce an individual report, as well as contributing to the main group effort and the overall effort. We quickly built up a momentum and got a vast amount of pre-production out of the way, leaving us plenty of time to shoot and edit.

We were plagued somewhat by very poor quality sound equipment, difficult weather conditions and various other issues but overall I was pleased my own contribution; including my (fidgety) news anchor cameo appearance!

My responsibilities here were team producer, writing and shooting the Afflecks Palace, breaking news and sport reports as well as sharing overall planning, editing and graphics.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Killer Appliances was my response to our animation assignment, mid way through our first year on the Interactive Media diploma. Prior to creating this, I had no experience with traditional animation; only (somewhat limited) experience with Shockwave Flash content.

From the word go I wanted to to go with a surreal, Python-esque theme; especially as we had watched the wonderful Killer Cars by Terry Gilliam during our first few lectures on the assignment. I have always had a love of anything Python-esque, and Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python’s Flying Circus made their mark on me from an early age.

Thus, I embarked upon my labour of love, carefully creating backgrounds and foreground objects from digital scans taken from magazines and travel books dating back to the early 1900′s, before enduring the painstaking process of taking approximately 1500 photos in the studio to create my 12 frames-per-second homage to Gilliam and my first ever ‘proper’ animation. Cut-out animation is hard work indeed, but very rewarding!

As I was working on my own for this assignment, I was therefore responsible for all aspects of it’s production.

NB: This film was used during the 2008 end-of-year show at City College Manchester as part of the Multimedia Showreel on display to prospective new students and their families.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

This was a short film conceived very late into the ‘City Shorts’ assignment. Initially we had planned to shoot a Clerks-esque film in a local Blockbuster video; only to have them withdraw access after initially saying yes. Don’t rely on difficult locations if you’re an amateur film maker!

After that, we attempted to shoot another Clerks-esque film near the college; however rain and general concerns about what we were doing put a stop to it.

Therefore at the 11th hour my team mate Darren and I grabbed a couple of Sony hand-held cameras, shunned the offer of a tripod and went and shot a short film about a student (Luca, one of our fellow Interactive Media gang) who ends up being late for a date with his girlfriend; aka Jodie (also on the course) the Pigeon Lady.

The end result was a short film that, although isn’t exactly outstanding, had several good shots and provided Darren and I with an opportunity to simply improvise and get some hand-held experience; I particularly enjoyed my chase-cam running behind Luca as he moves down the stairs!

My responsibilities for this assignment were jointly planning, shooting and editing.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

During our NCFE Art & Design basic training, prior to starting the BTEC National Diploma, we were tasked with creating a ‘Soundscape’, a short film using still images and sound to create a narrative.

My team mate Raj and I had an idea right from the beginning to produce a surreal piece of a man walking through a park, using sound to increase the tension as his experiences become more and more eerie; leading up to a twist at the end as the character becomes more and more frightened.

The visuals were totally experimental, as was the use of the builders clothing from the store cupboard in the studio at City College. In the end, our tinkering with the visuals without any pre-determined style paid off as the piece has a very surreal look and feel.

My responsibilities were as follows: Planning (joint), photography and audio/visual Editing (joint).