Dan Goodwin's project log - Courses

I attended a Creative VJing course at Oxford Film and Video Makers. The course was a great way to get an introduction to the kit, software and techniques involved with live video mixing. The course was tutored by Ed Cookson from multimedia collective The Sancho Plan. Over two days the attendees worked on putting together a 3 minute live piece which we performed at the end of the course.

The course was informative, fun, pretty hectic and highly recommended.

I attended a stills portraiture course with the folks at The Oxford School of Photography. It's something I'd wanted to be able to do more of, particularly to take shots of bands etc.

The course was very good with advice on how to make your subject feel at ease when directing and posing them, lots of information on how to use light (indoors, outdoors and in a studio) and plenty of practice through assignments and group discussion.

The course was geared towards both film and digital and there was a good mix of attendees using each. I'm still shooting on good ol' fashioned film myself.

Whilst struggling with the GIMP to do my photo manipulation stuff, I'd been looking for a course to learn Photoshop (one which isn't really expensive as most of them are) for ages. I finally found one at City Lit. So that meant that I had to trek from Oxford to London every week, but the course was conveniently on Saturday mornings and only cost about 140 GBP for 7 weeks tuition.

It was fantastic. I was the only techy there - all the other students were arty types so it was great to see Photoshop being used in really creative and exciting ways. I finally learnt how to do all the things I'd wanted to do with pictures (and not just being able to stick my mates' faces onto other people's bodies).