How Not to be a Designer - Robert Ball
Robert Ball started off his talk with a noticeable quiver in his voice and was clearly very nervous. Sometimes we would speak too quickly, other times he would stutter or miss out words, but slowly he became much more confident which was good because his talk was one of the most interesting.
Ball explained that he had become interested in design by creating the cover of the 1990 game 'Robocop 3'. This inspired him to join an illustration course, however at the time he thought that the course wasn't going anywhere so instead turned to design. He admitted that in hindsight the course actually seemed very creative and experimental, something he would later focus on in his career, so the illustration course could have actually helped him.
After leaving university he was unable to find a job in design so worked in a ticket office instead. Luckily one of his friends managed to get him a two week job placement with 'The Partners' a well known design company, after which he was hired to work full time.
Ball explained that whilst he was there he learnt the importance of branding and advertising and how what works for one product might not work for another, for example a sign with 'fresh eggs' hand painted on it looks natural, but a sign with 'flying lessons' hand painted on it wouldn't seem so trustworthy.
Ball then started to explain how not to be a designer. He said that his most famous designs have come from breaking away from the expected. His examples were an advert for The National Gallery of art in which he included no art work, instead he simply used descriptive words on posters and trailers than expressed some of the emotions portrayed in the art. Another of his famous designs became a campaign to save more electricity. Instead of creating a screensaver for Deloitte, he decided to save the company money and energy by creating a campaign called 'Planetsaver' in which employees were encouraged to put their pc into sleep mode.
Ball finished off his talk by saying that an idea shouldn't be dismissed just because it seem silly, good ideas can come from anywhere and might be good no matter where they come from. I found this talk particularly inspiring because it was encouraging us to think outside of the box and to try to stray away from designing the expected. It was also refreshing to see such bold ideas from his portfolio that seemed so creative yet obvious at the same time.
How to Motivate Yourself - Denise Chilton
Oh the irony... As much as i liked this lecture it's hard to actually motivate myself to write about it. This talk by Denise Chilton was all about how to motivate yourself - or at least it was supposed to be. Instead of learning how to motivate yourself to do tasks we were told to just do what we liked doing instead, as we didn't really need motivation for that - not good advice if you like Youtube... However Chilton did also give some other good advice that was much more useful to me.
Her talk was basically a large pep-talk for us all. She asked us all to write a list of our positive characteristics to begin with and then instead of asking us to make a list of negatives tols us to ignore the negatives and focus on the positives to harness their full potential. She explained that a lot of the time we see other people's positive characteristics then compare them to our negative characteristics which makes us think less of ourselves. She then told us to give ourselves the same advice we'd give friends, as we are usually much more supportive of them.
Chilton then had us do a little activity in the lecture. She handed out sheets with a wheel on them with 8 branches sprouting from the centre of the wheel. These 8 branches each represented something: Friends/ Family, Physical Environment, Health, Career, Relationship Status, Fun, Personal Growth and Money. These branches had ten notches in them and we had to grade each of the branches out of ten for how well we thought we were doing in that particular field of life. My highest ranking fields were fun, money and family and my lowest was health.
We were then asked why we graded ourselves low in some fields of and how we think we could make the grade better. Then we were asked why were we not making them better? This really made me think and was a very simple concept but very realistic - if i wasn't happy with something and i knew how to make it better than why would i not make it better? She finished by saying that every journey starts with one step - don't be afraid to take it. This was a really inspiring talk and has really helped me to prioritise what i want from life and where i need to improve.
Master Reboot - Sarah Crossman
Sarah Crossman, a game designer, talked to us about her first game that is scheduled to come out later this year. Crossman explained that she has always been into puzzle games and psychological horror games and was heavily influenced by Monkey Island, Silent Hill, Fatal Frame and Day of the Tentacle.
Her game, entitled 'Master Reboot' takes place in the future where people's consciousness is stored in computers. The character you play as wakes up in this computer memory bank with no memories of who she was or why she is there. The aim of the game is to find out these two questions by exploring several levels that represent important events in the character's life and recovering the memories associated with them.
This game had a very unique style and was pretty to look at but was also quite dark and twisted which is exactly the sort of game i like. However, the flashbacks shown when the character finds a memory were done quite badly in Photoshop which really let the game down. Hopefully this part of the game will be revisited before release as it was the only negative i could see. It was nice to see someone chasing their dream of creating their own game and it looked like the dream was very nearly a reality, the only downside of the talk was that Crossman only had a limited time to talk and couldn't explain everything in detail.
Soulfinity - Dojo Arcade
Soulfinity is an upcoming game being developed by Dojo Arcade. The game is based on the idea of sacrifice and the player will have to kill themselves repeatedly to progress through the various puzzles. This idea was very interesting and seems like a unique concept that i've never seen before.
We were treated to a demonstration of the game and although it seemed to get a little tedious after a few puzzles, we were assured the game would have more features upon release which is still a long way off. Dojo Arcade explained that they wanted a lot more puzzles that varied in skill and design to jazz the game up a bit.
This talk was again far too short and i would have liked to have heard a lot more about the game, but from what i did hear and see it looks like it will be very popular upon release.
The British Guide to Showing Off - Jes Benstock
I was one of only a handful of people who went to this talk as most people expected it to be a boring talk about documentaries. Although the talk was about documentaries, it was far from boring and was my favourite talk of the both festivals because it was so funny and interesting.
Jes Benstock has been a documentary filmmaker for over twenty years, but only started making his own films around ten years ago. Benstock was full of character and told a lot of jokes throughout his talk. He told the audience that his films are all personal to him, his first film 'Orders of Love' looked at mental health but also featured a lot of comedy. Another of his films explored his Jewish ancestry - he joked that any self respecting Jewish documentary filmmaker couldn't skip making a film about the holocaust. But Benstock was there to talk about his most recent film 'The British Guide to Showing Off' - a comedy on the outrageous Alternative Miss World competition which sees men, women, robots and animals compete for the title of Alternative Miss World.
Originally Benstock helped work on the show before trying to find funding to film a documentary, he eventually got it because of his previous successful titles. He then showed us some clips from the documentary which were hilarious! I really wanted him to just show us the rest of the film because it was just so bizarre and interesting. Benstock explained that he always wants to film 'real life' so nothing is ever staged in his films and he advises the cameramen not to get to know the stars of the documentary in case they start acting differently towards them. He wasn't interested in any on-screen personas which took the stars of his latest documentary a while to get used to because they expected that it was how he wanted them to act. Benstock finished by saying that democracy doesn't work for filmmaker's outside of the planning stages. After that it is a dictatorship and the director is the only one who can decided what to do - he reinforced this point by saying he had often missed out on crucial conversations in scenes because the cameramen would talk to the characters or start filming something else.
Although i am not particularly interested in becoming a documentary filmmaker this talk was very entertaining and quickly became my favourite talk of the festivals. Benstock not only made documentaries about things that seemed interesting and unusual but he also injected his documentaries with humour. This lecture may not have inpired me to start making my own documentaries, but it has shown me that you should do what you love doing, because someone will be interested in it, even if it is something as obscure as the Alternate Miss World competition.
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