Personal Branding Presentation

During the session last week, we discussed personal branding and looked into the process of presenting oneself professionally. This involved thinking about qualities, qualifications and work experience which may be desirable to prospective clients and/or employers. Our task for this week was to create a presentation to sell ourselves and our work.

I have attached the slides from my presentation as image files below along with some thoughts as to the content in each slide.

This is my personal statement. I found it key to convey here the diversity of my work, my love for the work I do, and my reliability with regard to meeting external deadlines and working to the briefs of others here.

This video can be watched by clicking here.

I included this piece to demonstrate my ability to create convincing foley audio, as well as my ability to animate traditionally using digital software; in this instance, Flash.

This video can be watched by clicking here.

This piece demonstrated my ability to provide music and voice-over for an animation, my ability to work with fully traditional techniques composited digitally. It also provides an insight into the kind of client work I have produced.

This piece is currently unavailable to view online as it has not been released by the client yet.

This animation again shows my ability to use traditional techniques in a digital environment, yet in a completely different style. This piece was also a commission produced for a client.

This video can be watched by clicking here.

This piece shows my ability to work with traditional techniques in a 3D environment.

This video can be watched by clicking here.

This is an example of my digital 3D work; again reiterating the diversity of software packages and styles I am able to work with. During the presentation, I mentioned that although I am capable of producing 3D animations, it is certainly not a strong suit of mine and that I am much more comfortable working with traditional techniques and primarily in 2D. As such, during the feedback I received from my presentation it was suggested that I should consider not including 3D work in my showreel.

This video can be watched by clicking here.

Finally, this is a commissioned piece which involved collaboration with two other animators. The piece is evidence of my ability to work well both in a team and with clients, it also shows my ability to work with mixed media animation.

This table represents my skills in various software packages. It was suggested during the feedback for my presentation that when I come to compile my creative CV, this would make a good addition.

This is the first time I have presented myself and my work in such a context (i.e. essentially trying to sell oneself). I found it quite difficult to talk about myself during slides which only featured text, as I found myself struggling to elaborate on my points. In presenting my work, however I found it very easy to present confidently with a good balance between presenting in a friendly and somewhat formal manner. 

Having my work on screen to remind me how I feel about the work I do, how I go about creating my work, and where I see my work going in the future really helped me to sell myself. I will bear this in mind during future presentations and similar exercises. Additionally I feel that it may have been beneficial to include links to my social media pages and website within the presentation, as this would have enabled viewers to access the pages on their own, whereas in my presentation I only really showed the highlights from such pages.

Creating a Website

During our first session today we looked what we would be doing over the course of the Distribution Methods and Practices module. Generally, the aim of the module will be to establish a 'personal brand' and to make ourselves as attractive as possible professionally to clients and/or employers. One of the ways in which we will be doing this during the module is to establish a solid online presence and identity, partly through setting up a website on which we will host our work, present ourselves as animators and enable clients and employers to get in touch.

Creating a website to host my work is something I've been very interested since before joining the animation course and I was very keen to start looking into hosting plans and domain-names as soon as we finished todays session. 

I ended up joining 'portfolio box', as service which provides users with a range of customisable templates on which to base their website. The service is also specifically designed for hosting graphic content including video and imagery, making it very easy to update as and when projects are completed.

I had initially wanted the domain name 'www.DanHodgson.com/.co.uk', unfortunately these were unavailable. As such, I opted for 'www.theclockworkdog.com'. 'The Clockwork Dog' is an alias I have used as a username in the past when shocasing my animation, illustration and musical work online in the past. In addition to setting up a website, I also set up a Vimeo plus account. While I already have an account on YouTube onto which I upload more or less all my work, I will be reserving the Vimeo account as a more professional space, on to which I will only be uploading my best/most relevant work along with footage I intend to embed on my website.

Here is the link to my website so far: http://www.theclockworkdog.com/
Currently it is fairly underdeveloped and requires a lot more doing to it before I would consider sharing the page with potential clients/employers, however I have begun to upload examples of my animation and illustration work to the site and everything seems to be going smoothly.