ARD6504 – Creative Futures 3 Ffresh

It was announced in February last year that Ffresh 2013 Film Festival would be hosted by Glyndŵr University.  Then at Creative Futures 2012 in March, I had the opportunity to attend a session by Berwyn Rolands who had established Ffresh, the Student Moving Image Festival of Wales, the Wales Screen Commission, and the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales (in partnership with the National Library of Wales) whilst he was Chief Executive of Sgrîn Cymru Wales.  With this background of information, I was looking forward to Ffresh coming to Glyndwr University, although I hadn’t submitted any films into the festival I was still interested to see what I could learn but also the contacts and networking I could achieve whilst at this festival.

With my involvement in the Collective, it soon became apparent that my time at Ffresh would be different to how I envisioned.  The Collective had been approached by Mike Corcoran (The Guild, Glyndwr University) to have a stand in the main foyer for the three days of Ffresh.  With the added fact that I was representing the University at a Photography Workshop in Llandudno on the Thursday, it seemed my time in sessions at Ffresh would be extremely limited.  After speaking to my lecturers, they confirmed that what they wanted was for each student to reflect upon their time at Ffresh, to establish contacts and develop potential working relationships, to improve your knowledge of the industry and to improve your networking skills.  Being on the Collective stand would certainly meet these criteria in a way I hadn’t expected.

At the Collective meeting, prior to Ffresh I was allocated the challenge of creating the film showreel, as one of my interests in the Collective is filming, I wanted to portray the filming especially in a favourable light at the Fresh stand.  Although others at our meeting were happy to use the Wifi connection on campus to run our “You Tube” films (www.youtube.com/feed/UCN7pt2-xqtiV8o7Ec5wGNXQ).  I wanted the showreel to look more professional.  So with this in mind and with the help of Paul Lowndes and some of the other members of the Collective we reviewed the previous films to see which showcased the Collective’s work best.  We chose the best and I then undertook the editing, a simple job of putting the selected films back to back, ensuring the sound was unified and then placing our logo and contact email constantly across the bottom of the screen throughout the showreel.

Through the course of that first day, I met a lot of people and initially was out of my comfort zone, by having to talk to people I had never met, and potentially sell the work the Collective undertakes, to answer questions asked, but as the day progressed I found myself enjoying the experience.  I found I enjoyed talking about film and photography, but more importantly getting to know people and hear their views and opinions.  It was one of these conversations of getting to know the visitor, and joining the “Film Club Presents…” that actually resulted in me being approached for a filming job shortly afterwards.