Blog conference day!

Last week we had the game art blog conference day and it was fantastic. It was a great opportunity to gain new tips and advice for the blog and learns some critical skills.

In the first session I participated in a discussion which included third and second year game art students, talking about issues they have had to deal with on the course and offering solutions to current problems. One topic that came up was time management which the third years noted was a crucial skill since projects in the next years will need a lot better management; for example the group projects we get next year.

Next session we delved into solutions to working through things that we don't want to work on. We talked in groups about each other's hurdles when it comes to the blog writing and discussed possible solutions to them. One activity we did was a continuous writing exercise where we just wrote continuously for 3 minutes about the course, this kind of exercise I need to do more often as I frequently get stuck while writing and I take forever to finish a blog post, hopefully doing this kind of exercise will help fix that.

In the third session we were with Avril focusing on adding references to our writing and getting to grips with picking out information from text. First we selected a printed journal about video games and examined it for 5 minutes trying to figure out a short summary for the text; I used the technique to read just the introduction and conclusion with a bit of scanning for key phrases to emphasise the point.

After, we jumped into our blogs with out task being to add a harvard style reference to one of older blog posts. I used a site called ReferenceMe to quickly generate some of the information from the link and then researched the rest to add a reference to my history of video games part 1 post.

In our last session we had a presentation about keeping schedules and time management as well as reasons we don't finish work. This presentation was aimed towards us figuring out what stops us from working and what causes distractions as well as working out when we work best so a personal time table can be made. The information here will prove very crucial helping me finish my uncompleted work over easter, and when I go back next term as I strive to organise myself better.

It then came to the end of the day summary. Chris and Mitch talked through their session about art direction in which Mitch created a two hour digital painting based of a written piece of art direction by a student, they suggested to the rest of us to try the same process going from written directions to painting and linking it to a blog post so I'll try and give that a go during the holidays at some point.

All in all, an insightful day with plenty to take on board and loads of notes to read. I am hoping this blog conference will act as a springboard to write in my blog more often and add posts of more value, I really want this blog to be high quality so I aim to get quite a lot of posts in during the holidays.

See you next time-

James