Culture City TV (an update)

As the end of this academic year draws near and I've reflected on my university work I feel I also want to reflect on the last five months focusing on something that has changed from a hobby to what seems to be an amazing career path.

Of course I'm talking about Culture City Television (CCTV), If you don't already know its a company that me and a few uni friends started on the 1st of January 2013. The idea of Culture City Television sort of came out of what I was doing at college, just merging my love of music and film together through recording college bands, being in a few bands myself and always being that annoying lad at the front of a gig with a massive camera! When I started uni this year I realised it might be a good time to make a proper go of it and include some of  like minded passionate people that are in my class (Rion and Peter),

As for future plans, we've got a lot of them, we've just started working with a paper based listing magazine in Liverpool called 'LOW DOWN', this magazine gives out 10,000 free copies a month and features every artist you can think of, we hopefully will be working with them to incorporate our content in the magazine through what I think is a great piece of technology called layar. We're planning on putting on a big gig in the future, and maybe making it annual, seasonal or even monthly, these gigs would consist of the best bands we've had on and would filmed perfectly through a live stream to the internet allowing us to sell out the venue plus sell online tickets. 

Since our first video was uploaded on 01/01/13 we've filmed over 30 musicians/bands, a theatre company, Peter Guy and Clarry Mowforth from The GIT Awards, Ian Tilton, Photographer to the stars and numerous gigs. We've also incorporated Film reviews on our site and expanding on what started as a small youtube channel. 

I've also had the pleasure to be invited on the Billy Butler show, attended numerous networking events, been invited to some of my favourite bands album launch parties and I'm also over the moon to be attending the LMA's (Liverpool Music Award) nominations party very soon!

Already we've been in contact with some great film companies, one being "Bright moon Media" and I'm really enjoying being involved in the latest film project the City That Rocked The World.

Billy Butler

As part of my CCTV venture I was lucky enough to be asked go on the Billy Butler show on one Saturday moring to talk about what where doing.  I've recently found out his average audience is 320,000 people ! It was a fantastic experience and great publicity ! Below is a link to the interview.

CCTV Website

After working on Dreamweaver and numerous different blogs we decided to create out own CCTV website to showcase our content, I hope you like it!

www.culturecitytv.co.uk

Reva Photoshoot

One of the great things about Culture City Television is the fact it can and has opened up so many doors for me and the rest of the gang, recently we did a photo shoot for one of my favourite bands EP's REVA

Website

When I was first told about the task to create a website on Dreamweaver I found it quite daunting considering I’ve never created anything similar before. At first I struggled and tried a few different styles but eventually decided to look for some inspiration. As my main passion is filmmaking and the fact that hopefully after university I will be working in film industry I wanted to look on other filmmaker sites. I found a few interesting sites but found them all quite basic, the web pages acted more like a blank canvas t­o showcase the websites content. I found this style was used particularly well on the ‘Hurricane Films’ website and I began to base my design on that one. ­­­

Once I had my initial layout sorted I began to enjoy the process more, although I found Dreamweaver quite challenging at first after I submitted my website I became a bit more adventurous with the software and decided to re-do my site.

This a link to my live site - http://www.student.ljmu.ac.uk/lssjcamp/mysite/index.html

Below are some screen shots of my newly updated site that is yet to go live.

Chester Zoo

This is the final edit of my final film for production practice in my first year! 

Google Maps

For my google maps project I decided to do the tour bus that I chose for my personal profile project, This map shows, through videos and images the passengers journey while on a the "Liverpool City Explorer Tour Bus". The Lines are used to show the route of the bus!

View The Tour Bus ! in a larger map

The Automatic

Another part of the Creativity and Concept Development module involved our class visiting The Automatic, a creative learning space. Our first brief we were given in The Automatic was to solve a problem of a company needing the newest innovative snowplough. To do this we were given Lego and put into teams. Before I started university I found these methods pointless and childish but the more I experimented with them my opinion completely changed. With the Lego we had to design a new and interesting snowplough. It was a great experience for our team’s idea to win. After this we were then given two further tasks to make a machine for the snow but strictly not a snow plough and to create a machine for any kind of weather. I found the third brief a lot harder as I’ve always found it easier to come up with an idea once I’ve got a starting point. However, I find it ridiculously hard to come up with an idea from scratch. 

Personal Profile

For the  Production Practice module we were given the brief of a 'Personal Profile to make a  short film on an interesting person. At first we really wanted to do the Liverpool musician Pete Wylie but do to his personal problems we decided to film a tour bus guide and to our surprise we were really happy with the end product. After  having this as a back up plan it worked really well!

After Effects

Today I tried to get my head around the software after effects, I'm getting used to it and put together a small piece. 

 

What Is Art?

As part of my Creativity and Concept Development module, we had to pitch an idea for a short documentary of a part of Liverpool. In my team we decided to go for the angle of "What Is Art?" we chose this after visiting the walker art gallery earlier this year we all had different opinions on what art in fact is. At first our group had three people in, myself, Nick and Meghan but after the second week of the project Nick sadly dropped out.

Our idea was to explore the idea's of what is art? due to the fact in our team all three of us had very different and contrasting opinions, this gave us a lot of different idea's to explore and helped us form some sort of debate on the subject. 

For our pitch we did a short film shown below