602 - Placement at Blup

 So my placement started early March.



I never actually saw myself working down south any time soon because of the price and lifestyle, but actually feels within my grasps after chatting starter salaries with Dines.
It was nothing but a buzz I got from commuting from Hatfield everyday and then the hustle and bustle of the underground was icing on the cake - all the various stimuli and wacky people feeding my creativity each morning. Felt ready and professional as hell.

- 10-5 start every day
- can stay longer if you want, but not a necessity 

I sat in on the Monday morning briefing which involved reflecting on the previous week and the work in-progress, whilst looking forward to the new week - setting goals and updating deadlines so they can feed all this back to the clients. It was all a very relaxed and quite casual environment in the studio, where everyone was honest, but at the same time, still very professional and efficient.
It was a nice tight-knit but chilled dynamic, where work can freely bounce between designers and ideas are constantly bounced around off one and other to ensure they are hitting all criteria. Everyone is quite vocal, so quite often they will openly discuss what they are doing out-loud so people can critique as they go, but they also have set times of the day were they can sit with Alex (Dines' right-hand man) and properly reflect and pitch their final ideas and test the strength of the concept and justification before pitching it to clients. Alex does design, but he's more of a content-writer / tester. All work goes through him before-hand.

I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know each member of the creative team and they all helped in different ways. Alongside top dogs, Dines and Alex, there is Sara - OG motion designer who has been with them since day one; Reiss who is in Monday - Wednesday, then 3 interns / freelancers all fighting to stay on at the end - so it is very competitive. It gives you drive to be the best in the studio! 

I especially got on with Reiss - part-time social media consultant / content-maker / youtuber - who helped me out a lot with design direction and brainstorming intensely at studio-level - being a recent grad, he understood where I was coming from and was able to shed some light on the transition after uni for me and gave some advice on how to make it go as smoothly as you can! We talked a lot about how to reach those deeper markets through social media campaigns and content - all very relevant and insightful to me off the basis of the projects I am pushing - VS & AV8!

Everything made me feel very professional and out of my comfort zone! But I liked it as I felt like I was fitting right in to studio life! They dropped me in the deep end to give me this feeling of working on a client-led brief, learning how to respond accordingly dependent on the client and their background and content style.

I worked on a brief with one of their particular clients - Me2, where I was creating some moving content for their socials.
- basically had to take statistics from their online research and produce it in an engaging and educational way to attract clients through the social media pages

 

- From this, I  learnt how to communicate with the clients via email and via phone throughout the design process in a professional and confident way - taking inspiration from Dines' attitude and approach - trying to show that I know what I'm talking about!
- I loved how I could get feedback from those in the studio at every stage - from initial ideas, to storyboarding, to actually producing the content and seeing it in-situ - all under wraps due to the non-disclosure agreement. As everyone specialises in motion, it was nice to get a mixture of creative / professional opinions all from motion designers, but with slightly different backgrounds/focuses within motion. This really opened my style and approach up more which is good!

Another thing I worked on whilst there was the Blup Glitched Alphabet! 
- They get each intern to add to their Blup alphabet - their insta is full of moving / remixed / glitched letterforms in the studios famously renowned style! 

I decided to put my own slant on it and dedicate mine to Dines as a thankyou.

- I drew him from various pics off his insta
- even animated him with a mic from a video interview on youtube with him 
- and also ripped some audio from the interview of him saying 'basically we make things look sick' !! (See next posts for development)