Creative Futures - Day Three

Building a Portfolio- Jason Minsky

This lecture given by Jason Minsky, a glass blowing, TV advertising, photographing, sculpture building wonder kid, focused on how to build a portfolio and become more desirable to potential employers. He encouraged us to try new things and never turn down an opportunity, to work hard for what we want and to be open to new ideas. He gave examples of how he had gone to university to study glass blowing yet whilst there met a blacksmith and started another course at the same time to study both subjects, resulting in him being a qualified glass blower blacksmith and being able to make sculptures and furniture.

He also advised us to believe in our work, but to only send the best of it in a portfolio. Instead of sandwiching a weak image between two strong ones just get rid of the weak one. This advice, although good intentioned, seemed to fall on deaf ears as sadly Jason Minsky doesn't seem to be a natural speaker and his words lost meaning, and the attention of his audience. A fair amount of his lecture had been recycled information we had previously heard earlier in the week - although this wasn't his fault, just unfortunate that the audience had already heard it.

On top of this his portfolio was not very captivating, being mostly furniture designs, photos of rugby players doing unusual things, seemingly pretentious gallery installations and abstract pieces that nobody seemed to be interested in. I feel like i learnt nothing in the shape of actually building a portfolio like the lecture advertised, however, his advice was useful on being open to anything, and if this advice was being given earlier in the week too, then it must be good advice.

Two of Jason Minsky's pieces of 'art'

This concluded my week of lectures as after this the lectures got much more animation, fashion and sculpture based. This week was ultimately very good and interesting, with a lot of useful insight and advice being offered. It gave me a chance to see what industries were like and reassured me that there are many different paths i can choose, inside and outside of the games industry. Although there were some lectures that were much less useful that others, the creative futures week event was much better than last year as there was a wider variety of lectures to attend and more game related ones than last year, which seemed to only focus on sculpture and fine art.
     The lecture that provided me with the most advice and inspiration was definitely the character design lecture given by Jonathan Edwards who had created his characters from mere doodles and now they were dolls and toys, being sold for high prices. It made me think that if he can do something like that, then perhaps i could too. Other useful lectures included John Allison's lecture on comic books and Karen Cheung's lecture on freelance animation. Both these speakers were very inspiring and i took away a lot from their lectures too, from Allison's, the need for perseverance, and from Cheung's, the importance of humour and friendhsips that she swears have gotten her jobs other people were more qualified to do.