HKG Muchuu Design Pitch Follow-up

Well, we were absolutely blown away by the enthusiasm and quality of the work pitched this morning by Visual Communications students in Hong Kong, and we can't wait to share it with the band. I'll be inviting Milky & Gman to join us here, so please leave links in the comments and upload your images to the VCI Flickr group. Again, well done on the first part, let's see what work we can progress further with Muchuu's input.

Wednesday Micro Lectures

Tomorrow morning, beginning at 11:00AM prompt, we're trying something new. Lectures are often long, drawn-out affairs where students go to sleep in the middle and wake up as the lecturer asks "Any questions?".

Micro Lectures are different: We have five different topics, and each one should take no longer than 15-20 minutes. Once one has finished, we'll move swiftly on to the next, and at the end of the session all the presenters will take any questions that you have. You're welcome to attend all five, or stay for the ones you want (we encourage you to stay for all five of course!).

Our topics for tomorrow are: Presentation-Fu! (Robert Sharl); What Is Research? (Balvir Nandra); Online Promotion (BCU Alumni Balvir Nandra); Digital Utopia - Photographs from HK to UK (Graphics Alumni Kwan Chun In); Visualising Information (Robert Sharl).

Muchuu Live Project HKG

The Muchuu project is now underway, and we're excited to see your early ideas. If anyone needs a high quality copy of music tracks for use in their pitch please ask me directly on Monday or Tuesday. Here's the run-down for the rest of the project:

Monday AM: In your assigned groups at Sha Tin and Kwun Tong, presenting initial ideas for feedback.
Monday PM: Working on your ideas, further development, in your groups (attendance not compulsory).

Tuesday AM: Balvir and Robert available for detailed production advice or feedback at Sha Tin. Do you need advice on type, graphics, music industry, web or online? Book a time, or turn up and wait your turn!
Tuesday PM: Production time in your groups.

Wednesday AM: (Sha Tin) Micro-lectures (see posting to follow)
Wednesday PM: (Sha Tin) Group Work on Visuals and Pitches (help available)

Thursday AM: (Sha Tin) Final Presentations

Please post your ongoing ideas and progress to the Flickr group. The band will be taking a look there, so tag your posts "muchuu".

Some useful Links to support the Competition Briefs

Rewind: 40 years of Design and Advertising, Jeremy Myerson & Graham Vickers. Phiadon Press Ltd, 2002.

D&AD, website.

D&AD Getty Images Bloodbank, website.

Young Creative Network Competition Briefs

Ad Asia Online, website for Adasia Magazine.

Adforum online resource for all the major international design and advertising competitions.

The Guardian News Paper, Media Guardian, The Creative Lounge.


Computer Arts, Top 10 International Design Competitions.

Creative Review, Readers Blog.

Hong Kong IVE/SHAPE/BCU Major Project SIG's

Today we worked through a series of exercises aimed at focusing our rationale, filtering our interests, to define our Special Interest Groups on our individual area of practice. The SIG's were then set a short task to develop an Identity/Brand concept to represent their area of practice.

The SIG from class A have defined themselves as follows (Visual work to follow on Flickr):

Branding - "promise"

Nel, On, Po, Alvin

Advertising - "Ad-tive"

Angus, Toshi, Phoenix, Judith

Information - "INvite"

Mandy, Kathy, Fok, Jade, Dino

Typography - "Accurate"

Cherry, Wayne, Zoie, Die

Visual Communication - "SHIFT+"

Maggie, Max, Number (Lam), Pat, Ruby

Specialist Interest Group's B

Information x "ZiP"

Toto, Serena, Tad, Chloe, Alice (Ethical Design?)

Advertising and Branding x "ABout"
Miko, Shiny, Derek, Moe, Enos, Addy

Illustration x "ill"
Saku, Esther, Gigi

Editorial/Publishing/Typography x "In8"
Bee, Mizuki, Lok

Preparation For D Osbaldestin and R Gibb's Teaching Visit

Firstly, hello to everybody studying with BCU and Happy Chinese New Year!

We are very excited about our teaching visit and are looking forward to working with you and your tutors on your Major Negotiated Project module.

In preparation of our visit, we require all students to post a visual representation of your last Negotiated Study Project work online, for review and possible selection for a Portfolio based exhibition later in the week.

N.B. This request is mandatory for all students.

Please upload your work to Flickr, making sure that you label it and post it to the Viscominternational group.

The deadline to post your work to Flickr is Sunday the 8th of February.  We will be compiling a shortlist from these online submissions (by BCU and Shape staff) for a one day portfolio exhibition as part of the core teaching and learning methodologies for this teaching visit.

Best regards,

David Osbaldestin and Rob Gibb

Hong Kong Schedule For This Week in Full.

Well, the reports from Clive are good and it sounds like Monday was a success! Thanks to you all for your enthusiasm and participation. Thomas and Raymond (and Sabrina) have performed miracles with room bookings and we can now release the full schedule for this week for you to download. In short, all students are at Sha Tin on Tuesday and Wednesday, working unsupervised on Thursday, and at Kwun Tong on Friday. We'll release the full details for next week as soon as possible.

Hong Kong Teaching Visit Details

Hello again to everyone studying on the Visual Communication programmes in Hong Kong. Over the next two weeks (November 10th - 21st) you'll be working with two of my colleagues who've contributed enormously to the programme in Birmingham and Hong Kong over the last few years. Clive Colledge is Subject Leader for Graphic Communication here in Birmingham (read Clive Colledge's profile on Hello Digital) and is a highly experienced creative director and graphic designer. Dr. Jonathan Day is a musician, an expert in world art and popular culture, and brings many years' experience of helping students to undertake credible research activities as a part of their studies in Visual Communication.

We have a few things left to finalise in terms of room bookings and available staff for the visit, but you can expect the next two weeks to cover:

• Creative Thinking and Idea Generation
• Developing your Negotiated Projects in Special Interest Groups
• Integrating Theory & Practice for the Dissertation module
  

We'll be asking you to engage in a number of activities, including:

• Working in groups to develop work for the D&AD Competition Briefs
  
• Presenting your research material to date (assessed at 10% of the final dissertation mark)
• Presenting visual material developed for the Negotiated Project module

Some of the sessions will be conducted as large group meetings, some in smaller groups, and we're working to distribute the sessions across the spaces that we have at Kwun Tong and Sha Tin. The atmosphere in the groups sessions when Andrew and I were there in September was great, full of energy and enthusiasm, and I'm sure you'll all see to it that this two week visit is even better.

I'll get the full schedule to you as soon as possible, so check back here soon. You'll be starting at Sha Tin at 10:00AM on Monday morning for Clive's introductory talk. Bring your sketchbooks, pens, laptops and your enthusiasm!

Hello Hong Kong

Hello to all the students in Hong Kong that I'll be working with from the 10th to the 21st of November.

My names Clive Colledge and I'm Subject Leader of Graphic Communication in the School of Visual Communication in Birmingham, UK.

I'm looking forward to meeting you all. 

Welcome New Students!

Earlier this week about 60 prospective students met at SHAPE's Sha Tin campus to take part in our first ever pre-launch event for BA Visual Communication in Hong Kong.

I'm Robert Sharl, Course Coordinator for our Hong Kong Viscom programme, and I want to thank you all, on behalf of your visiting tutor Kelvin Wong and all the programme staff, for taking part and for the enthusiasm which made the event a success.

Over the next weeks and throughout the summer we'll be posting here to challenge you with informal summer assignments, to help ready you for your studies, and most of all to inspire and encourage you in the pursuit of your goals as creative designers, film-makers, animators, and artists. We're excited to be working with you, and hope you'll feel a real part of our international final year student community at this exciting time.

More soon, but if you have any questions or comments I welcome your emails at robert.sharl@bcu.ac.uk. I look forward to meeting you soon!

All the best for the coming year,

Robert

Time Based Media students at SHAPE

Just a reminder of the short Progress Report I'm asking TBM students to produce for me by the beginning of next week (12th May). You'll need to produce a single sheet/equivalent email with the following info:

1. Updated Project Info
2. Progress update
3. Agreed next tasks

I've included some more details and an example in this pdf file. Please email your progress sheet to me on sharl@mac.com

Posting Work to Flickr

We're still waiting for more of you to post your group work for the Voice Mobile project to Flickr. Remember, if you don't give us the work, we can't show it to the client, and you won't have the chance of winning any of the £1000 (UK) that's being offered!

To recap: All you have to do is

1. Sign up to Flickr at http://www.flickr.com.
2. Post images of your work to your Flickr account
3. Join the Vis Com International Flickr group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/viscominternational
4. Add your images to the group photo pool.

That's it! You can add notes or comments if you like, or just leave the work to speak for itself. Take a look at the work by Emily that I linked to in the previous post to see how she's done it. Bal Nandra will be back in the UK later this week and he'll be compiling work for the client, so make sure he's got some great stuff to show!

HK Live Brief

"V" in lives_photo1, originally uploaded by Emily Chau.

Emily Chau is the first to post some of her group's work for the Voice Mobile project, identifying "V signs" in nature and the designed environment. Thanks to Emily, and we'll post more as you add them to the Vis Com International Flickr group.

Document and share your work

We're encouraging students to post their work to the Flickr Group for Visual Communications International