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?
No comments:
Post a Comment