Portfolio Review: Alex Bower – Bright Digital

Today I Had a Portfolio review with Alex Bower and his colleague Rachel from Bright Digital in Manchester. It took place in college as they were there anyway shooting on the green screen, and after a shaky start due to my hard drive not working on the laptop, I showed them some of my work from the second year like my Alcohol website, Nando’s flash game and my Dave ident.

They seemed to like my work and asked lots of questions about why I did certain things, we talked about what techniques and methods I enjoy doing and what areas I might be interested in going into after graduation, Alex explained that there company does a wide variety of work and offered a few tips like speeding up the animation in my ident, and not to get to precious over parts of my work that took along time to create; if it is only needed on screen for a few seconds don’t be afraid to trim it down.

I then talked about my self directed project and showed them an unfinished version of my Tomorrows World advert, this seemed to go down very well and I think they quite liked it. I played it a few times explaining each section, as they said some sections weren’t obvious what was happening, which can be a good thing in adverts because it makes people want to watch it again. They said they liked the aesthetic and humour aspect to it and asked me to send them a finished copy when I was done.

I then explained where I was up to on my current project which is for the YCN competition; they had a few tips for me and pointed me in the direction of researching into a few different people like Picasso and Peter Blake.

We talked about getting myself exposed as a designer and that a good idea for me would be to try and meet as many industry professionals as possible and to collect business cards, because then I would have a contact email or number to try and send work to. They also mentioned attending some social events like Northern digital would be beneficial but apparently that is supposed to be just for freelance designers and not students.

Overall I think my review was a success and I think I have gained a lot from the experience, it was useful to see what people who have no knowledge of the briefs I have done to see my work as they noticed things that I didn’t, and they could also offer there professional advice. I think it has given me more confidence in my work and trying to present it to other people, and to have a copy of my work on disk (or any other format) in case of my hard drive not working!!

Johnny Kelly

Johnny Kelly is a designer from Dublin, working in London for Nexus Productions. He created “Procrastination” on his MA animation course at the Royal College of Art and it won the Jerwood Moving Image Award. It is based on the meaning of the word “Procrastination” and uses hand drawn stop motion and live stop frame too. It is a fantastic concept and is produced brilliantly, it doesnt really stick to one style or theme but uses lots of techniques which i think makes it more interesting. Also the voice-over works well, I might look into using one in my work.

His next video is called "The Seed", the one that I saw first that made me want to see more of his work. It is an animation for Adobe featuring the life journey of an apple seed, using 2d animation and stop frame animation it flows effortlessly throughout the stages of its growth. I really like the humour aspect of it like the bird hitting the tree and the worm underground at the beginning, also the transitions between the two styles work really well.