Ok, so I’ve just finished my first week at QD Media in London’s West End. Luckily I know someone who works there which was how I got the placement in the first place – however, she has now gone on holiday and left me to fend for myself! Its quite a small company with about 20-25 people working there. One of their biggest clients is HMV, infact thats all they ever seem to do!
Every morning they have a meeting for about 5-10mins so that everyone can discuss progress of jobs they have active and to receive any new ones that have come in. I was told that I don’t really have to attend this meeting as its not really directed at me, however I said that I wanted to go so that people in the company could see my face and just get a better feel for how they work as a group. In addition to that, it would give me a chance that should a piece of work come up that I was able to do I could volunteer myself directly.
I started off making my own version of a campaign called “My Inspiration” which was featured in my professional studies presentation at the end of term an example of which is below. For mine I simply used images from a Goggle image, which in actual practice wouldn’t happen as QD would be supplied with the photograph and text but are then free to make touch ups. However, these need to be agreed before going to print.
P!nk
These “My Inspirations” I found quite easy to put together as it was using both Photoshop and InDesign, which are pieces of software I use on a regular basis for the Nerve Magazine so it wasn’t too challenging. Following this task, another member of the team came to me with an unofficial job to brand a company called Chameleon Business Solutions. This presented a couple of issues when trying to brand them because the nature of the company is quite serious and needs to be professional, however the name is quirky and playful.
For this task I was introduced to Illustrator, which I have used once before hand but actually found that once you get your head around it, its actually a really good program to use. I however, can’t draw to save my life as some of my drawings revealed. Currently I don’t have any examples of this work to present here in this blog entry, although I have asked to keep a copy of the work I produce for my portfolio.
I found that the I was just trying to learn how to use Illustrator at the beginning of this task and so as just experimenting with the the tools etc. On the second day I started work on it again and spent most of the day coming up with various bits and pieces. At the end of the day, there were aspects of my designs that I really liked and others that were going in completely the wrong direction. By this point it was the end of the day and so I decided to call it a day and start fresh on it the following day.
On the 3rd day I was to get the opportunity to volunteer myself at the morning meeting and produce my first piece of actual work. This was merely to put together 4 template powerpoint slides for HMV for a presentation within stores to their staff members. Even so there weren’t really staff in the company that had used Powerpoint before so I said that I would do it having used Powerpoint at both school and university. Initially I wasn’t able to make the slide background colours the specific colours they had asked for, but sure enough after I had played around with a few features that I hadn’t used before I found what I was looking for.
This set the scene that I was able to fulfil a job that had come into the company and so I was then given more live work to complete. After then I was asked to complete MEOs. These are small, approx 40cm long, posters that go on top of the shelving units in store on the special offer ends. Most of them were for kids films using some fantastic images from Scooby Doo and some Cartoon Network characters that I’ve never heard of! Some of these I was quite proud of, one of them however, a Bob the Builder one I think wasn’t that brilliant. But they all got sent to HMV on Friday in one batch, so I will find out what they thought on Monday.
At the Friday morning meeting I heard in conversation that they had received a brief to make an interactive Flash advert to go in an online magazine, which would be the first of its kind from QD. This made my ears prick and I was a bit cautious about volunteering myself too quickly as my Flash skills need some work on them. When I finished my other work and there was no other print work to do on Friday afternoon I asked about the Flash project and started investigating some of what was required with putting a video trailer on and trying to find out about image scaling. I got a version of the video playback working and want to try and develop that further, however I couldn’t at the time get the image scaling to work. I have since looked online over the weekend and managed to get some code to function so that when the user rolls over the image would get bigger and smaller once they moved away. I’m hoping that it will slot in nicely when I go into the office on Monday.
I’m finding it slightly difficult to adjust to this work as its been a while since I went into Flash in this depth, plus our most recent Flash project was written using AS3 whereas this needs to be written in AS2 so I’m trying to remember back to first year work.
I think thats about all I can say for the time being about the work that I’ve been doing. I’m at QD for another week – so I will continue to “Tweet” about things that I’m doing and then I’m aiming to write a blog entry everyday/every other day about how I’ve got on rather than do this to you poor people again! Follow me on Twitter if you will @cpaveley. All in all I’m really liking the company, I’m just hoping to make myself fit in there and quite indesposible so that I’m more likely to be called back again even if it is for more work experience. One of the young girls that works there started on a placement just like mine as part of her course so there is always hope. And as it is I’m doing more exciting work than the other 2 work experience girls that are there.
Next week I’m trying out a different office in the building to try and get a better feel for the place as I’m currently sat in the Basement (which means you get the most exercise having to walk up 1 flight of stairs to the printers and 2 flights to the kettle!!). They tend to do a lot of Cinema 4D work down there for all the new HMV ads that are around now – they look pretty cool so keep an eye out for them. I’m just kicking myself that I didn’t go to the workshops that Will ran during our game production unit…all becuase my group chose to do Flash and I thought I wouldn’t ever use it in my line of work – maybe I will be able to squeeze in on some of the second year workshops next year if it fits in with my 3rd year timetable to learn a few basics about making objects.
I also want to try and get myself onto a Flash course somewhere local to me in Essex or Bournemouth so that I can further the skills that I have. If QD are going to end up doing more of this Flash online ad work then it would be ideal for me to have the skills ready to go and then they can employ me after I finish – bit of wishful thinking, but you never know!
T.T.F.N
