Professional Practise - Personal Reflection on Project

   I believe after this project, I have successfully completed what was asked of me to a high standard. My group and I have completed what was asked of us and I believe it is work that the charity can be proud of and use promotionally. I feel that we could have completed our work quicker and more efficiently if there was not the problem with the absence of Nick during the first month of the project, and also if I did not focus too much of my attention onto other university projects. I have learnt a lot with how to communicate and work with other people in a professional freelance environment. The amount of responsibility entrusted onto me by Nick and ‘The Friday People’ was a learning point also as I have never been put into that position before. I believe this faith in me was not wasted and also helped me learn about creating a bond with an external employer that helps my work be done more efficiently.

Professional Practise - Other interviews

   As well as interviewing Nick for our videos, we have interviewed a collective of people to see their views on the current state on the job climate, and also comparing and contrasting how it was to get a job back when they were young to what young people in modern day Britain have to face today. We interviewed a variety of people including, a mid 20’s business owner, an elderly gentleman and also a middle aged couple. Interviewing this group of people was very good for our promos as they provide diverse opinions from different demographics of people, which will highlight the problem of young people looking for work even more. All of the interviewees also provided their personal stories on finding work when they were a young person, which gave an insight to the differences from each of there experiences and how they differ from each other and also to the current state of young employment.

Professional Practise - Interviewing Nick

For our promos we interviewed Nick himself. Hearing from Nick himself will allow him to send the message that he wants across to people, and hearing from the people ‘The Friday People’ help, it will highlight the need for the charity, highlighting the problem itself and also explaining how ‘The Friday People help fix the problem.  While interviewing Nick, we discovered while Mark interviewed Nick, it was very useful to sometimes sway away from the listed questions that were on the paper. This allowed us to gain more footage and also get more information about his and the charities ideas and projects. This allowed him to fully explain his intentions with his project ideas, and in turn allowed us to collect a lot of material to work with when it comes to editing. We could get more information than originally planned as well, which helped us with editing.

Professional Practise - My Job

   Nick suggested that Mark, Mike and I work on creating a kind of crowd-funding kick starter video, basically a promo, which would be used as promotion and also possibly for websites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which currently is a very popular form of raising money for small businesses used around the world. By researching videos that have successfully aided in raising money, such as the very successful ‘PhoneBloks’ campaign video, we got a grasp in to what helps promote a business or an idea to make people want to get involved.

   Also, I researched some other charity promotional videos to see what they have done to promote their charity. I noticed the simplicity of most of them by having footage over played with a voice over. I did not feel like this was the right way to go with the promos as these type of charity promo videos are promoting more of a higher seriousness of charity. Charities such as ‘The Red Cross’ would use this to highlight the seriousness of the problem they are trying to fix, the route we should be taking is a bit more light hearted yet still just as informative.

Professional Practise - First Meeting

   Mark Cooper emailed Nick Ward, the director of ‘The Friday People’ to arrange a meeting to discuss what he would like us to do for him. What videos he would like us create, what they have to include, who he would like in them etc. we arranged to meet him at Romney Place, where his office is based in Maidstone. Nick’s work location was a good factor to this project. The fact he was local and near central Maidstone made it easier for us to travel to him, especially with equipment as well incase we had to film at his office. We met up to make a few notes about the finished projects he wanted us to create, so that we clearly knew what we had to create for him and ‘The Friday People’.

  During this meeting, we discovered possible drawbacks that could affect our work. We found out that if at any point the charities funding was cut, the charity would have to be shut down and also Nick was going abroad for 3 weeks as a part of his work, which meant we could not start working together until nearly a month after this initial meeting. We had to accept these factors as they were and be patient with Nick and the charity to get our work done.