Not entirely sure what I’m doing with my hands in the foreground here…

Zoe led a very carefully put together skill workshop for her specialist discipline, design. Zoe seems to put a tremendous amount of effort into everything she does, so unsurprisingly this was a workshop full of information, clever structure and fluidity. I chose to take on this workshop as I’ve never been able to compare my design efforts against someone who does it professionally and knows what they’re talking about! It was valuable learning standard techniques from a basic level in Photoshop and -especially- Adobe Illustrator (which I often struggle to master!). It was good to learn where I had been going wrong in each programme, and also find more convenient ways of achieving an effect. For this part of the workshop, we were asked to think of a film/book/etc that we enjoyed and write a list of words or senses that we associated with the work. I chose a favourite film of mine – The Future, and used words such as comforting, dreamy, thoughtful/considered, funny, cute, gentle, purr, inspired, altruistic, conflicted, minimal, airy. We then used these words and feelings to create a Post-It note poster. For mine I kept it simple to reflect the uncomplicated storyline – simply a cat’s paw stretched into the negative space (the cat being a pivotal character in the film, and the outstretched paw reaching out in recognition of time, space and the unknown – themes prevalent throughout the feature) with ‘The Future’ typed legibly into the top right corner. A poster I’d like to recreate properly and at full scale in my free time at some point! In addition to this, we also got an introduction to using InDesign for creating books. I’ve used InDesign for picture books so it was good to see another function for the software. Zoe offered us a wealth of helpful links that included the Creative Commons, I Love Colour, DaFont and Font Squirrel to take away and explore.

Zoes’ top-tips:

– Try using limited colours

– Less is more

– Make sure font is legible

– Line up objects and text

– Try to limit yourself when using fonts

– Never stretch a font

Last week, to prepare us for the editing of our interviews for Gold Award, Paddy explained how to extract the sound recording from a video – change from stereo to mono, equalise, and flatten (take out the fuzz) the audio, and amend the noise profile (noise reduction, frequency smoothness and attack/decay time) ready for video editing. We then looked at Premier Elements video editing software which unfortunately ran over so I had to leave early – however I have used other video editing software before so think I could get the hang of it. It was a fast-paced insight to video editing but based on my prior experiences, I feel I am now capable of putting together a good interview.

I’m excited to practise using some of the skills I’ve acquired over the past two weeks!