Northern Lights

It’s the penultimate day of Northern Lights, and my last day here at Fudge. Overall it’s been a fun, rewarding experience and an eye-opener as it’s given me an insight into different areas of the creative industry, as well as challenging any preconceptions I had.

I’ve found working with my digital team enjoyable and we’ve produced some great work, in the form of our pitch to Fudge that went down really well. The brief was set by them for Under Armour, a sportswear/equipment company who are massive in the U.S. We had to come up with a campaign that promoted their Performance Mouthwear products.

I was actually quite shocked with the reception to it. Ben & Phil who we worked with, are the guys at Fudge who go out to pitch and create campaigns for real, big clients in their own work.

I approached the brief with a zombie theme in mind, which gave us a lot of creative scope to play around with ideas. Despite my initial reservations about it possibly being off-brief, it actually worked well as Fudge said it goes well with UA’s existing branding and “macho” image.

I would recommend the course to anyone, and to approach it with an open mind!

This course was a great experience for me, as I came from a very broad course at university , I was able to gain insight into the different media sector- TV, radio, games and digital . It helped me to understand how the industry work especially with the digital sector, and guided my career path in the right direction.

The last 4 weeks with Fudge was also great, which puts me in contact directly with the digital industry. As a team I got the chance to work on a real brief to come up ideas for a digital campaign. This helped developed my pitching and presenting skills and we received great feedbacks!

By Pei Sze Wong

The course started with a bang on November 2nd with a module run by the BBC at their northern most outpost at Manchester. With the media industry still in a team meeting about where to go next, the BBC are in fifth gear developing Project Canvas alongside their ambitious new plans to move to Media City. Their move North isn’t just a change of building, it’s a move into the future marked by plenty of investment in Research and Development.

So where does this leave us? The people on the course designed to bridge the gap between University graduates and a media industry still stooped in chaos. The speed at which things are changing has been marked and we’ve been encouraged to think about content working across many platforms rather than the traditional process of thinking up an idea, pitching it to TV execs, then getting made. It’s an exciting time, and it feels like we should be inventing new platforms rather than pitching our ideas to the old one.

Even if we went straight into ‘the industry’, we could still be left behind as the world of digital accelerates to light speed – so it’s well worth us taking some time out to answer the question, “What the hell is going on?” Once we’ve got a good understanding of that we’ll be ready for employment by forward thinking content creators and agencies. That’s the plan anyway.

If you’ve no experience of web2.0, what it means, or how it has changed things, take a look at the video below. When you watch it bear in mind it’s nearly three-years-old – an age in the digital world since Web 3.0 is well and truly on the way.

Feel up to date? Well you’ve got three years of development to catch up on. Take a look at ReadWriteWeb, reddit, techcrunch, mashable, and Seth Godin. Here’s another cool video which might just get you close to the mode of thinking you need to be in. You can thank us later.