Civic and Economic Recovery (Placement year)

Our aim

Third year in Ulster University was my chance to interview for a placement in a company or sector that would give me to most experience and provide me with useful experience for the future.

This however was post poned due to the current situation and we were given the course ‘Civic and Economic Recovery’.

We began this course around October and were automatically placed within groups and told what our course was going to entail. We were given a task to present and create a start up ‘Northern Ireland Animation and Game Festival’ and tally out task within our group, so that we each had a role in what needed to be done to create our local festival and present this in an end of term presentation.

I was allocated the role to focus on what activities and workshops we were going to have running throughout the festival for our guests and what topics these would include. I was happy with this role as it gave me a variety of directions to go in, to include activities that would both appeal to the audience and any professional animators, connecting everyone and allowing them to enjoy their favourite animation and games.

My First Thoughts

In order to get my brain thinking about what types of activities and workshops we as a team could host at our festival, I needed to understand that they needed to be situated around gaming and animation and be both educational and fun for our guests, as we wanted our festival to be a great space for connecting with others and learning new skills.

I’ve been to a few festivals in the past like the ‘Comic Book Festival’ hosted in the Millennium Forum, Derry, the ‘Vegan Festival’ in England and had just attended 2021 ‘Belfast Film Festival’ for local animations and short movies. These were all great help in getting me to know what audiences gravitated towards and want to experience while they were at a local. I also made a note of what activities and workshops I really enjoyed at each festival, to take inspirations from or to develop more onto. I documented things I wish the festival had included or that I could change and make more exciting or specific to games and animation.

Inspiration

Within many festivals there was a few similar events such as relaxed events with different speakers and subjects, livelier activities where people could connect and participate within different exercises and a bigger main event to close off a day and have everyone be in excitement to attend. The vegan festival had loads of activists come along to host panels and presentations about who they are, their journey and what they are currently creating, and I thought this would be a good way to highlight Northern Ireland designers and advertise their work. It was also allowing the audience to get to know the creator and their journeys and hopefully attend a after show panel that the audience could then ask more questions that they may have been inspired to.

I thought an interesting idea of a bigger, end of festival event would be maybe to host a popular game launch or animation that everyone has been anticipated in seeing and we could show case this at the festival and have the creator say a few words, building hype for what the creator has made.

One more idea I had to perhaps close off the festival would be an end of week panel, maybe a separate game and animation one and then a combined one. This could include all the creators who are available and in attendance to all get together to talk over the festival, share stories and talk about what everyone enjoyed and maybe speak upon a 2022 NI Game and Animation festival, to build immediate hype for the upcoming year.

Research and active research

In my own experiences of attending festivals this helped in my research on what we should include in our own festival. So the next part was to research what speaker we wanted to incorporate into our presentations and workshops, and they had to be a mix of both game and animators and would be good if they were local to Northern Ireland.

We as a country are very lucky to have to many local companies working on new and exciting projects every day and most, I was already familiar with throughout my time studying animation. These included companies such as Italic Pig, Dog Ears, Jamm, ALT Animation and Taunt to name a few and we also have many past students from Ulster University members of these companies and who have started companies of their own.

We thought it would be a great idea to have past students who have graduated our own animation course and who have ventured into a successful career, to come speak to the audience where many ulster students will be in attendance and inspire some 1st, 2nd and final year students to what they can achieve.

We were able to gather information on a few artists who have provided talks and classes for our own course over the last few years and have decided to include Anna McCraith and Jordan Bradely, along with others in our festival panels.

Creating presentation

Once all the research and discussions were carried out by my team and I, we then needed to work separately in creating our topics slides in our animations and recording the presentation.

My two slides where ‘Activities and Workshops” and ‘Advice and Presentations’ and in both I made sure to keep the information sparse, as I didn’t want to clutter the slide and I wanted to be able to express my ideas and articulate them better through a voiceover. However changes were made last minute to my slide and I wasn’t able to make up or the information taken out of the presentation, that I didn’t think to include in the voice over.

In my first slide I included what activities would be included on the day such as business card making, portfolio design and helpful tips on self-advertising. My second slide I highlighted two speakers that could potentially be our headliners, as one focuses on animation and one on games and are a great representation of the talent in Northern Ireland.

In conclusion although I was looking forward to doing placement this year and have reached out to some art galleries, in hopes of picking up a placement in January. It was enjoyable to get connected with my class and tutors again and create a festival with our different ideas and energies. Hopefully a NI combined animation and game festival could possibly happen, as the local ‘Belfast Film Festival” is always exiting to attend.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/8535eb_93f8a4165d72486cbd8863da20e09908/1080p/mp4/file.mp4