Professional Practice (Week 10+11)

One to One Feedback Tutorials

This week is coming up to our last few classes in professional practice and for our last classes we are all to be partaking within a mock interview for our assessment and be given feedback for how we did during our mock interview. We will also be getting feedback on the cover letter, CV and business cards we made for our interview.

My interview was on Friday and was something that now looking back I had not prepared for it as much as I thought was needed, I forgot about jotting down some notes and questions and instead tried to memorise as much as I could. However, I did take in the pointers given to me by both Ana and Oisin in my breakout group interview and tried to apply them to this mock interview for our assignment.

I instantly noticed that I wasn’t successful in holding back using the likes of “ah and um” to fill pauses, which I was using to think about questions and to help me handle my nerves. I had fallen into the same habit during my mock interview and I noticed this even with the first question Henry asked me as I went straight to saying, ‘” ah”’ taking a pause, becoming flustered and not knowing what answer I should give to the question. This would have been greatly helped if I had written down some of the questions we had talked about in our past lessons and written down some bullet points summarising the answers I wanted to give. Therefore, preparing me a bit more for the unexpected, helping me relax and answer the questions calmly, in a more confident tone.

Advice I had taken in and had shown during my mock interview, was toning down how much I rambled and making sure I was able to answer my questions in good time. In my group interview I talked too much and took a while to get to the point of my question, however this was different to what route I had taken during the mock interview. As I made myself extra aware of how long I was talking about a certain topic, caught myself if I felt like I was talking too and was able to pull together what I was trying to say to the employer and finish off the answer with a less rambling conclusion.

These strengths and weakness were noticed after my interviews as the feedback which I got from the employers was how I didn’t seem too confident coming into the interview, but that this is something I will gain with some more experiencing taking interviews and that no matter the question I was given, they noticed no question was too much for me and I was able to handle it and give a good answer. I am happy with this feedback as I was very unhopeful when it came to the end of the interview, thinking I had failed and done my worse. However, was happily surprised when everyone thought I did relatively good and were able to give me good feedback for improvement.

In my feedback for my material needed during my interview including my cover letter, CV, business card and portfolio. I got a lot of good positive comments for the material I had provided and also critics that I understood were going to help me and were useful in making my material look for professional and stand out to the employers. The one piece of material which I have the most work on is my portfolio, as actually I had read the assignment wrong and a wrongly taken in that we had a choice between a portfolio and a showreel. I don’t quite understand how to edit a showreel and had done a portfolio once before, so decided that I would have a better chance at presenting portfolio and choose that instead.

This now means that I have to create a showreel and also take in the feedback I has got from Henry about the content included in my portfolio. He suggested that first of all not include any A level work or drawing concepts within my showreel, as A level work is not substantial enough for a professional studio and that including drawings is pointless, as the studio will assume, I am already able to draw.

Henry also suggested that I instead include some character walking cycles I have been working on in university with Alex, as the position I am applying for is calling for a character designer and that this would be something that would interest them. He suggested animation of the characters I had designed and animations of the work I again have produced in class for our group project and to do a wireframe turn around and classic texture turn around for any models I had made within Maya. This will show the employer that I am able to be a mixed media artist and that my work has been constantly updated and I am continuing to improve as an artist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jo3NHYTbsg

In my CV and cover letter I used the same template and style throughout, keeping the consistency and keeping in mind to show both my creative side and professional ability. The background is light, with white clouds and a character design within the clouds, almost guiding the employer through each document. The feedback I had gotten from Henry was that he overall really liked the design I had decided to go for, but there were some minor issues with the text and layout for keeping the document legit and to show some clarity.

Henry also suggested that I can tone down the design to a simpler background, in order to keep the content, the main focus and not confuse the employer too much with how busy the page might be.

Once I had gotten the alignment of all my content positioned correctly and provided more clarity for the reader, next was to focus on the content within the document. Overall, what I had included was good enough, but I needed to pay attention to more subjects rather than others. I rearranged the topics to a way that I knew I wanted the reader to start reading my CV and cut down the personal statement to a shorted introduction to who I am as an artist and allowed myself more room to write down my skills and experiences.

My cover letter would be the top of the three documents my employer would view first, as this would be an introduction into what job I am applying for, who I am and would be changed to personalise with the employer, something I learned within class just how much you need to change the cover letter content for each job. In the design standard again, the design was a bit too much and over crowed the page, not allowing the important part, the text to be read easily by the employer. I added the same character with a different facial expression, my name and below the text with a cloud in behind. Even viewing this myself I knew it was too difficult to see and was going to be a disadvantage for me in the future, so I took out the cloud in the back and changed the style of text throughout all my documents to make it easier to read.

To help the structure of the page appear more legible, I again created a margin and instead of centred text, I aligned it left to right. Keeping up with the other document styles and allowing everything to flow more smoothly and well read. I remembered for the contents of the page to talk about what job I am applying for, why I think I would be great for this role and highlighted any key skills and experiences that I have as an artist that they were looking for as a studio. However, I changed who I directed the letter to, as previously I had “Art Director” which Henry stated was too vague and that for a big company like Aardman studios, I was bound to find the head of character design.

All of these materials were really fun to create as I felt we had way more freedom than a normal CV that I made in school and that the most enjoyable to make was the business card. Such a small document with not a lot of content, but something that will sometimes be the first thing a person may see about your personality and style.

My idea of my business card was to have it in the shape of a cloud with again my character centre and a pink background. As for the content, I included my title, name, email, phone number, and website and had forgot that the back of my card was still empty. I had basically squashed all of this contact information into the bottom, front of my business card and was reminded by Henry about taking advantage of the other side of the card.

These changes and keeping in mind a clear alignment of the content and allowing the card to be easily viewed was all I had to remember for the business card. I myself was happy with the design and happy to hear positive feedback I had gotten from the design.

These last few changes and a reflection on my mock interview was all I needed to close of this semester and subject of Professional Practice. This semester for this course was one that I thought really helped me in all aspects of work, keeping in mind the professional side of things, but also about personal struggles in the workplace and I was happy for the experience.