Our Event gets a review

Our recent event, Your Media Your Future, was featured on the Weston college website. Click here to read the review.

Cormac MacMahon

Here is a video I created of Cormac MacMahon, News editor at Heart Bristol, where I did some of my Work Experience talking about how he got into the media industry.

Media Event Blog 6 - Evaluation

The day had arrived! I turned up at Weston College at 8.30am to set up the cameras I was going to use to film the event. The first problem happened almost straight away as my spare battery was flat, despite it being recently charged! I convinced the tech support to let me borrow the battery charger and the problem was solved!

I helped Kim set up the banners in the performance space and in the gallery then I started filming the preparation and build up to the event. I thought the banners were perhaps a little small but I thought they served their purpose well. Actually, in hindsight, it was quite an achievement to get these banners on time as we had only ordered them from the printers at the latter part of the week before and had to get them sent by courier to get them to us on time!

I wanted to get as many shots of the students as possible at all stages of the event - From signing in, looking at the posters and videos on display and making their way into the performance space for the main event. I also got shots of the team signing in our 'clients' and welcoming the guest speakers.

Below is a short sequence of events at the beginning of the day:

I felt a great sense of achievement as I watched the students watching the films and taking notes reading the posters, they were getting something from this event and we felt our event was doing it's job, inspiring people to think seriously about an education and career in the broadcast media. They had a great incentive to learn as much as possible with the questionnaire and prize money, but I think they genuinely wanted to learn and I felt we had succeeded in our aims.

I thought the whole event went extremely smoothly, we did have a couple of problems with the videos on show in the reception as the video files wouldn't play for some reason on one of the computers. But this was only a minor hiccup and we managed to get to the bottom of it pretty quickly. I'm glad to say that this slight problem was one of only a few and we didn't really experience many more.

As the main event started it became pretty obvious we had overlooked something important pretty quickly, the lighting. I felt that if we had used the blinds at the back of the hall, instead of putting the projector screen in front of a big window and set up a few lights, it would have looked a lot more professional. I'm not sure displaying anything on the projector like the website as the speakers were talking was a good idea either, all you could see were pictures and text on their faces!

My favorite speaker of the event was Cormac MacMahon the News editor at Heart FM in Bristol. It was great to see speakers like Valerie Burke, who worked on Challenge Anneka, Jason Holmes the genius behind Extreme Fishing with Robson Green and Laura Abrahams who has worked on Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity, get me out of here amongst others, but Radio is my passion and was really interested in what Cormac had to say about his career route and his day to day duties in radio journalism.

All in all it was a great event, and I really did learn a lot about event organisation. From the red tape hell and countless emails just so we could switch on a TV in reception to being successful in applying for funding I found the work really challenging and interesting. Our team was good too, we have all worked together now on many different projects over the past 2 years and I felt this events success was down to knowing each others strengths, our ideas and creativity and working really well together.

Media Event - Blog 5 - Budgeting.

So the event was nearing, so much to do and so little time! We had at last agreed on the budget and had sent our funding applications to Weston College and the North Somerset council. Here is a picture of the budget we had planned on the board and some of my comments on the budget:

We had received quotes from some local printers for the fliers and posters but we found out near deadline day that the college would only deal with a printing firm in the North! Sam excelled in contacting them and arranging at short notice the deal for the banners and we were delighted to hear they could get them to us in time. We could also get the posters that were kindly designed for us by the graphic design students printed at the college so our printing budget was slashed. It was also really good to be able offer the graphic students £100 for their work.


Westons Generic designs had to be applied to our promotional literature:


Our Job role posters, designed by the graphic design department at the college:



We were also pleased to hear that our prizes, WHsmiths vouchers, that we going to be given away at the event for the quizinaries, were donated to us by Sadie Skelling from Student Services at Weston College. Another thing we could cut from the budget!

I had negotiated a deal that was agreed by the whole group to put together the website for £100. I feel that this price is very competitive, a website for an event like this would cost in the region of £400 for design, hosting, and domain name purchase by any other company. Unfortunately, this is not a service that will be cut from the budget. ;o)

We had agreed that, for the refreshments provided at the event, we should get a quote from the Weston College's 'Loxtons' canteen. They were able to arrange a selection of snacks, hot drinks and a meal for the event organisers and contributors for approximately £40. We agreed on this quote and Loxtons was booked.

The actors, all drama students at Weston College that Adam had lined up to perform job scenario sketches inbetween our guest speakers had to pull out at the last minute due to their tutor refusing to release them from a class. This was a big disappointment, not only for us, but surely for the actors that they were being denied their first professional/paid work. I find it a bit strange that a drama tutor would deny his students an opportunity to add their first job to their CV.

And of course, the most important thing - The speakers. We had 3 independant TV Directors and one radio journalist confirmed for the day!

Laura Abrahams - Big Brother/I'm a Celebrity

Cormac MacMahon - Heart Bristol

Jason Holmes - Extreme Fishing

Valerie Burke-Ward - Challenge Anneka

Designing Website for the media event - Media Event Blog 4

I volunteered to design and upload the official website for our event 'Your Media, Your Future'. I have had a history of web design and website maintenance so I was keen to do this for the group.
Websites I have created before are the now defunct alternativedevon.co.uk, a local music site where bands could upload their demo mp3s to us and http://www.themightybook.co.uk/ a site for the book review radio show I produce.

I wanted to make the site very basic and wanted just to give visitors an idea of what would happen and what to expect, a map telling them how to get to the college and a small amount of information on the guest speakers. I felt that the layout and look of the site had to be basic but had to be attractive as well.


I chose a website blogging tool called 'Wordpress' to design the site. I also have previously used this to set up the Mightybook site before. I uploaded wordpress to my own webspace and started inputting all the details on the event. I received all the speakers comments they had sent us, sourced photographs of them and uploaded all that information to their individual pages.

I downloaded of an image of a map pointing out where the college was and got the address information from the Weston college website and presented it on the main page.

Once all the information had been inputted I found a wordpress theme I liked and installed that. The wordpress themes are the layout of the website and thousands of themes are available for free on the Internet.

I had uploaded the site to my webspace (http://www.ukbands.co.uk/media/) I decided to buy a domain name for the site to make the address more memorable. The domain I bought was http://www.yourmediayourfuture.co.uk/ this cost just under £11 from http://www.easily.co.uk/.

I did come across one problem with the website however, on some Apple Macs, on clicking some of the links on the website would cause a virus/spyware error! I checked the site, did a virus check and made sure the site hadn't been hacked and all results came back clean! Stupid Macs!

Here are some screenshots of the site, but you can still visit the site and see it for yourself at http://www.yourmediayourfuture.co.uk/

Main Page:

Cormacs Page: