It's hard to believe that this will be the last Creative Futures we will attend, some of the talks we've attended over the last 3 years have been very useful, and others not so much. Some have been entertaining and informative and others somewhat tedious. Still what I will take away from all 3 Creative Futures will be two very important lessons.
Firstly, networking is the most important thing you can do while at university, gaining contacts is invaluable. It has been difficult to learn to approach strangers as I can be quite shy, but I've managed to overcome this on several occasions and I've gone on to meet some very useful contacts.
Secondly I've learned that in order to succeed in the industry a person must me multi-skilled. It isn't practical to specialise in just one field as many employers expect potential employees to be able to work in different departments and liaise with people from other practices.
So without further ado, Creative Futures 2013:
Opening address - What's current in the Creative Industries
Dr Stuart Cunningham
Dr Stuart Cunningham has opened both previous Creative Futures weeks previously and I wasn't expecting the wrestling-style entrance he came into this morning. Flashing lights, music, video and sfx were part of the show, showing the versatility of some of the creative disciplines Glyndwr has to offer.
Dr. Cunningham explained the reasons behind the somewhat self indulgent video was to reiterate that Creative Futures is all about me (well, us students) and as encouragement to be a little self indulgent when we sell ourselves to potential employers.
Before passing on to Sarah Mair Gates, Dr Cunningham explained that the point of Creative Futures is:
1. To give an insight into the realities of working in the industry today.
2. To help improve our employability.
3. An opportunity to develop as students, people and potential employees and to network
4. To meet the requirements of academic study.
Creative and Cultural Skills
Sarah Mair Gates
Part of the National Skills Academy, Sarah (who is the manager for Wales) came to talk to us about what the NSA do. They gather statistics for the creative workforce of Wales across several disciplines including performing arts, visual arts, crafts, design, cultural heritage, live events and literature.
They also look at the national occupational standards, and offer services such as apprenticeships, careers information, training and events to help employees and potential employees have a better chance at securing a job, and keeping up to day with the industries expectations.
Sarah gave some interesting and insightful statistics into the industry. For example, 27'990 people currently work in the creative industries in Wales, the largest sector being performing arts and music. Also that between 2009 and 2011 the performing arts and music industries grew despite the recession.
The NSA also offers a service called Creative Choices that enable young people working, or wishing to work in the creative industries. Similar to that of Helfa Gelf, once a year during the autumn the NSA opens their doors to young people hoping for a glimpse into the industry.
Sarah mentioned that the NSA have a host of 'Meet the Expert' videos on YouTube and played one called 'Under the Sea and Backstage with Kursk' (find the video here). Featuring artistic director Mark Espiner, Tom Espiner, Dan Jones and Ed Collier who all talk about how they got into the industry. One of the things that seems to be common in those who talk at Creative Futures and that is that no one really has a straight forward path into the industry.
It is reassuring to know that there is space in Wales for those who want to continue to live and work here after graduating. It transpires that it is more often who you know as opposed to what you know, and that some employers prefer experience to qualifications.
I found Sarah's talk to be quite interesting, although she talked extremely fast and I found it hard to jot down all the notes I wanted before she moved onto the next slide.
Skillset Cymru
Gwawr Hughes / Dr Stuart Cunningham
Unfortunately Gwawr Hughes couldn't make it to deliver his talk, so Dr Cunningham took his place. Similar to that of the National Skills Academy, Skillset has links to the industry, education, business partners and individuals. They offer training and work alongside the industry to ensure Wales stays globally competitive.
They also offer funding for training, and apprenticeships.
Dr Cunningham also gave us a few interesting statistics. Apparently, those in the creative industries can expect an average yearly wage of £28'700 compared to £32'000 across the rest of the UK. It isn't exactly encouraging really, especially for anyone wanting to stay and work in Wales after graduation.
28% of those in the industry are freelance. This doesn't come as much of a surprise, especially in photography, there are rarely jobs to be found and they often don't pay very well. 83% of companies in the industry employ less than 10 members of staff.
Reassuringly, 13% of employers in the creative industry in Wales currently have vacancies. But also 58% of employers in Wales report a skills gap, especially in communications, management skills and basic business skills.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, one of the lessons that seems to crop up often is the desire for potential employees to be multi-skilled. Something that Dr Cunningham reiterated here.
Some of the challenges faced by the creative industries in Wales are the need to perform at a global level, and to stay fresh and dynamic. To help employees obtain skills and experience at a multi-skilled level, to have good business acumen and leadership and management skills. In order to solve these challenges, Skillset believes supporting freelancers will be beneficial. Freelancers often find it difficult to find the time or funds to train futher, and helping them will help the market stay bang on trend. Also by improving the employability of new entrants into the industry, and to help with this education needs to keep pace with sector developments. Finally to improve access to good careers advice.
Skillset have started several schemes in order to face the challenges. These includes a Welsh Bacc (principle learning qualification in Creative Media for 14-19 year olds), apprenticeships in creative and digital media and fashion and textiles and the Skillset media academy in Wales.
Dr Cunningham had added a few slides of his own to the end of the presentation. These were about growing in the creative industries and how to get graduates and those qualified in creative fields to stay in Wales.
The creative industry is worth £36 billion per year to the UK economy, 1.5 million people are employed in the industry. By increasing support for the industry the government show that it is an important and valued field. There are tax breaks available for those in film, TV, animation and games. There is also growing support for super-local TV and radio stations.
It is also important to sell the industry as well as yourself. There are several minorities, the elderly, households with low income, and social housing tenants are less likely to attend arts events. It is up to us to come up with the ideas that will engage these minorities and draw them into community based arts events.
Lastly, Dr Cunningham showed us a video, which was part of a TED talk by David Kelley (founder of IDEO and d.school in Stanford) who talked about Doug Dietz who went on their programme at d.school. Doug is a designer of medical equipment and was responsible for the way the MRI scanners looked. He learned that 80% of all young paediatric patients felt they needed to be sedated to take the MRI scans. This upset him quite a lot and so he redesigned the scanners.
Keynote Speech
Painting Over the Cracks
Professor Paul Haywood
I would like to say firstly, that I struggled a bit with this lecture and its actual point. Also it had no real links to film or photography and some of the arty terminology meant I found it hard to pay attention at all times.
Paul is the vice chancellor at Salford university and studied at Nottingham, Reading and Goldsmith. He was born and bred in Rochdale and attended the 'good art school' that they apparently have there.
He went on to talk about Plato and how he was said to have stated 'all art is useless' which seems a little counter-productive to me. I got very confused here when he started talking about images of chair and chair-ness and different tiers of reality. Perhaps you have to be an artist to 'get it' but I didn't.
Continuing he talked about how his experiences at art school changed and transformed from drawing greenhouses and pigeons to drawing with different light sources.
After leaving art school he set up groups, and projects. He was part of a global networking group that communicated via snail mail to create projects such as logo design and performed in front of cinema goers. Then skipping from this Paul went on to talk about tax evasion, and how artists such as R Kelly owe millions in unpaid tax (Kelly owes £5m) what this has to do with art exactly I'm unsure?
Going back to one of his projects, Paul spoke about how he worked with some local youths who had been vandalising fences in a local area. They saw it differently saying that they were playing a game called Manhunt and the fence was simply getting in the way. Often art can be the connection between people on different levels and can bring people together.
Moving on to another project, Paul talked about Guns to Goods (website here) which is an organisation that utilises guns that have been seized by the police. It was started in Mosside in Manchester where gun-crime is very high and common. They turned the melted-down guns into ingots to be changed into other metal products including a commemorative coin. Oddly, they found those interested in purchasing the coins (that cost in excess of £200 per coin) were mostly families of those affected by gun-crimes.
In order to make the organisation more accessible to more people they started Show Metal, which is a social enterprise to manufacture products and creative solutions and ideas for low volume products. Products that relate to the campaign, to actively try and reduce gun crimes in the areas.
The next project Paul talked about was Colour Edge. Which started at the Littleborough arts festival. Colour Brand took colours from the landscape and turned them into a palette. An example given was the red brick commonly seen in Salford. Salford is well known for its red brick buildings
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Above is an example of the colours of the landscape taken as part of Colour Edge. They got involved with local young people who wanted to make photo-chromic nail varnish, which is clear until it is subjected to UV rays when it changes colour. They couldn't do this due to licencing and cost, but they did make several paint samples from the colours of the landscapes.
Next was Secret Gardens, a year in the making it brought together 50 cultural events over several fields in Salford. It was spread over two weeks in June 2012 and culminated in MediaCityUK with a 2 day showcase of the areas undiscovered talent. (More info here).
Finally Paul talked about Islington Park Towers, a somewhat grim looking scattering of towers. Mostly social housing, they are considered a difficult minority to reach. This is because the reputation of the estate is very poor. However there is a positivity magazine that is distributes around the area that contains, predictably, only positive happy news.
As part of the project called Tower Twinning the Islington towers were lit up like an equalizer as music is played. More information on the project can be found here.
Paul finished his talk with images of him de constructing a brick and turning it into paint, advising us that bricks don't make great paints. If I'm honest I had mostly switched off by this point and after struggling with most of this talk, his ending seemed mostly pointless.
How not to be a designer (By an expert)
Robert Ball
Following the mornings talks I hoped that this would be a little easier to digest. I wasn't disappointed, Robert did a great job of explaining himself in am easy to understand manner. Even though the talk was mostly aimed at design students it was the best I went to today.
Robert started by talking about how he got to be a part of The Partners design agency. In 1990, Robert was making computer games, he was a part of the team responsible for Robocop 3. He changed from illustration and obtained his graphic design degree from Preson unversity.
Eventually, he found himself working in a ticket office and took on a 2 week placement at The Partners who took him on. The Partners are the most awarded design company over the last 30 years.
The first (under the slide title 'How not to promote a gallery') the National Gallery in London approached The Partners 8 years ago for a re branding that would draw in more customers. The building isn't the most exciting or inviting from the outside.
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To combat this, The Partners came up with the idea to write 50 words that were inspired by the contents of the paintings displayed in the National Gallery. It was called the human experience in 50 words. They used no images to advertise the gallery. It was the most counter intuitive way to solve the problem.
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Following the rebrand, The Partners also worked on a poster campaign for the National Gallery. They took the famous paintings to the streets of London. It took 18 months to plan and Robert was one of those walking the streets & asking shop owners if they could make use of the wall space outside their shops. They put up 48 replicas (full size!) for 6 weeks.
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How not to take the p*ss
Robert moved on to talk about how interesting jobs can often come from strange places. Perhaps my favourite and most inspiring example was from Thrislington Education, a company that makes toilet cubicles for schools. Hardly the most thrilling of projects to work on, but The Partners came up with the idea of printing their brochures on a lined school book style booklet.
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This is what the outside of the leaflets looked like.
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The final example we were shown was for a screen saver that had been commissioned by Deloitte a company that offers services surrounding corporate finance. The screensaver itself was actually just a blank page, but the PlanetSaver screensaver has helped over 22'000 computers and laptops to reduce the amount of energy used when they are idle. It was also the biggest digital green initiative of that year.
A bit about you
How not to write a CV
Robert finished his talk with a bit of helpful advice about how to make yourself stand out to potential employers. He advises that you send out samples of your work, and not to bother with your interests and hobbies unless you have an interesting or unique one.
The people who receive your CVs are often very busy, and to keep this in mind when you send them out. Don't send anything digitally that will take a long time to load. Some of the things he mentioned were fairly obvious, like making sure your portfolio is clean, and neat before taking it to an interview, and to enter competitions as even if you don't win it looks good.
Finally he said to look for inspiration in strange places and to show your work to people, and ask for their advice if you're stuck.
There were some interesting and useful points in Robert's talk. Many of the points however were common sense. During some of the talks it's easy to feel a little patronised as most of the talks are aimed at those who've not previously worked before coming to university. I did enjoy this talk however, and the clever branding ideas make it clear to see why The Partners are as celebrated as they are.
Business Start Up Support
Judith Alexander & Liz Wallens
The final talk I attended today was about the grants and start up help available to new businesses. Unfortunately Judith wasn't coming and Liz was late.
To be perfectly honest, it wasn't the most useful of talks for me because even though I am starting a new business, it won't be in Wrexham and the help available differs from county to county. Also, the 6 part course that Liz talked about is the same one I've already attended in the Conwy business centre.
Both Liz and Judith are business advisers for Wrexham. They offer help and support to start up businesses and ongoing support once you've set up. They hold a 6 part course that deals with the basics of setting up including how to raise finance, tax and marketing. It is funded by Business Wales.
Liz mentioned the graduate bursary scheme, which I learned about during my time on the course at Conwy. It's a grant of £6000 available to graduates who've left higher education within the last 7 years. However it is not really much use to many as you have to have a projected turnover of £80'000 for year 1. There's talk that this might be lowered soon.
We also discussed approaching banks for funding and what is required to do so. A realistic cash-flow forecast (where you predict the incomings and outgoings for the first 1-2 years of the business) and a business plan (an outline of how the business will be run, and grow, where you expect to get the funding and what your aims are). It is the same for approaching companies and organisations for grants.
This talk was probably quite useful for those who are setting up and a great way to advertise and promote their courses. It wasn't very well structured and Liz said a few minutes of introduction before opening up to questions. However, most of those interested in setting up their own business have little idea of what to ask. It could have worked better if it was a little more well structured.
Day 1 summary
The opening address was much the same as last year, except for the opening which I quite enjoyed. Although I've picked up several important and useful hints and tips, again it seems there's a common vein running through creative futures. My favourite talk from the day was by Robert Ball from The Partners. I enjoy being able to see visual examples of work as it helps me to absorb what is being said.
