Semi-Permanent Auckland 2013

Wow, it's been a while since I posted anything. That probably gives a good indication of the busyness of school lately, with an Education Review Office visit at the start of term, and the ongoing action packed life that is the development of Passionfruit magazine!

One of our major excitements for the last week has been a trip to design industry conference Semi-Permanent Auckland to carry out some interviews, gather some inspiration, and, most importantly, to give students a chance to see some of the options for making a life in the arts. We ended up taking nine students for the two days, seven of them from Passionfruit Magazine and two others who were keen to join us. This was a really positive improvement on the three who came last year. This was aided by Semi-Permanent giving us two tickets to give away (and an extra free one - thanks heaps SP!), which has helped build the profile of the magazine through social media.

Here's a short video of some of what we got up to over the two days. The three people being interviewed are (in order of appearance): Askew One (Graffiti artist); Matt Boulder (Art Director of Digital Kitchen); and Kelly Thompson (Illustrator).

Semi-Permanent

Words of advice from Moffitt &Moffitt

It's been a week since the Auckland edition of Semi-Permanent, and if I take much longer to reflect on it the news will be stale!

About a month ago I attended an event at Wintec with ten of the Passionfruit Magazine crew, at which Simon Velvin, director of the Semi-Permanent creative conferences, spoke about his career to date. He also gave away a few tickets to the Auckland conference, two of which I won! This set in motion a trip up to Auckland, with five of us (two staff and three students) attending the conference.

Ron English in conversation with Radar (conference MC)

Semi-Permanent was two pretty intense days (made up of four 90min sessions, each with two different presentations), and by the end we were all pretty exhausted! Stand-out presentations included those from Ron English, Industrial Light Magic, Swifty, Special, and the rather dodgy lads from Stolen Girlfriends Club (I was glad the students I had with me were mature seniors and not Year 10's).

Next time we'll see what we can do to get along to some of the conference side events, for a chance to interact more directly with the various people who are part of Semi-Permanent. I have to admit that sometimes it felt like a lot of sitting and listening and watching (which isn't too bad when the people presenting are the visual effects art director for films like Rango), and a bit more hands on activity would have been great. Events like the three day intensive hand-made zine workshop with Swifty would have been fantastic to be part of.

UK-based designer Swifty showing work from the Yea Nah zine project run prior to Semi-Permanent Auckland 2012

The best part for me (from the Curriculum Integration Project side of things at least) was the chance for out students to be exposed to a whole range of potential futures for themselves in the 'creative industries'. I think it would be unrealistic to expect many of them to go on to have careers in magazine publishing, but I hope that being part of the project will at the very least open their eyes and minds up to a selection of futures that could become theirs. After all, that's a big part of what education is about isn't it?