Building my final projects has two parts… there is undertaking the actual project and then there is presenting the project as content on ibuiltmyown.education.
For instance, with my Not Your Average Life Coach project…
- I had to coach people over an extended period
- I also had to write up my life coaching experiences for presentation on this site.
Both parts of the process are very draining and time-consuming.
Wherever I can, I am cutting corners by utilising life experiences I never intended for use as final projects (becoming a life coach is a perfect case in point).
I am also re-using content I have previously created.
Either unused content from other parts of ibuiltmyown.education or content I have created for my other platforms.
Utilising life experiences I never intended for inclusion in my MTA Portfolio and recycling old content about those life experiences for use on this site is an approach I have adopted for building my Creative Technologies Sandbox project.
The components (mini-projects) of my Creative Technologies Sandbox
My Creative Technologies Sandbox is the final project for my concentration in Multimedia Studies and Creative Technologies.
Mulitmedia and Creative Tech is the most direct continuation of the theory and practice of my first BA (Hons) degree in Film and Media Studies with Creative Writing.
During my first degree, I got very creative and experimental with content creation, desktop publishing and digital filmmaking.
I created my first blog sites, graphic design elements and further developed my short form filmmaking.
The seeds for ibuiltmyown.education were also laid during the final year of my BA (Hons) when I researched building an unrealized website for my practical dissertation that would used WordPress on an independent hosting service.
Once I had graduated and while I was still figuring out what I wanted to do following university, I continued to experiment with multimedia and creative tech.
Then, even when I had started to build my MTA Portfolio, I progressed my creative technology skills further in several projects alongside my studies.
These creative tech projects were…
- The Miracle of Crowdfunding mockumentary
- The Breaking Cinema Podcast
- 365 FRAMES 2015: A video a day for a whole year
- My Cameo Microfilms
- The Cinema Complex documentary
- Ways 2 Interface – Blog and research project (which was a continuation of the multimedia research I initiated in my BA (Hons) theoretical dissertation)
All these projects were started independent of my MTA Portfolio and were never intended to be included.
I didn’t even end up finishing most of them because I gradually abandoned them as my attention shifted more towards building my MTA Portfolio and creating ibuiltmyown.education.
When I was starting to mind map potential workable final projects for my concentrations, I kept struggling to think up one cohesive and overarching capstone project for my Multimedia and Creative Tech concentration.
I was hesitant to use one or any of my non-MTA creative tech projects as my Multimedia and Creative Tech final project because most were abandoned and unfinished.
Plus, on their own, none of the non-MTA creative tech projects represented applications that encompassed the full study focus of my Multimedia and Creative Tech concentration.
But they had all been influenced by what I had been studying for my MTA.
It also became increasingly clear to me that my explorations with multimedia and creative tech would always be open-ended and ongoing, as my post BA (Hons) explorations had shown me.
Even around the time of writing this blog post, I have been dabbling with a few online Artificial Intelligence creative applications (and it’s entirely possible there will soon be an AI component in my Creative Tech Sandbox).
Considering the amount of time and creative effort I had put into my non-MTA creative tech projects, I decided that I did want to acknowledge them as being full-fledged MTA creative pursuits and components of my Creative Technologies Sandbox.
Retroactively, I have brought all these other creative tech projects together with my coding and web design work to form my Creative Technologies Sandbox project.
My Creative Technologies Sandbox is less of a cohesive final project and more of a compendium of my continuing explorations with multimedia and creative tech.
But that’s acknowledged in the name of the final project, it’s a sandbox for playing in.
Something to do with recycling old blog posts
Another major advantage of incorporating these other creative tech projects as components is that I have already done write-ups about each of them.
While I was undertaking my BA (Hons), I created my first blog site: Something to do with Film.
It’s a blog I’ve kept quietly running for 12 years now and I’ve used it to chronicle all my theoretical and practical explorations with film and filmmaking.
Something to do with Film collects and chronicles all my academic and non-academic film-related creative technology work… which includes my other creative tech projects.
I’ve already written summative posts of my other creative tech projects on Something to do with Film, so I am recycling those blog posts to create the new respective component pages on ibuiltmyown.education.
Unfortunately, it’s not just a case of copying and pasting the blog posts over as I need to reformat each post to fit within the page elements and layout design I have settled on for all the project component pages.
I also have the advantage of hindsight now and I am finding that I am rewriting the original posts; as well as adding more to them to make them more effective at portraying the totality of each of the other creative tech projects.
The only other creative tech project I don’t (yet) have summative post for on Something to do with Film is for my blog and research project Ways 2 Interface (which focuses on my academic and non-academic multimedia-related creative technology explorations).
But Ways 2 Interface is a blog site in its own right and, I suspect, when I get to it, there will be content on the site that I can recycle for its component page on ibuiltmyown.education.
Overall, recycling old content and prior creativity is a massive time saver!
It’s also hugely gratifying to be able to take all those other underutilised/un-finished creative tech projects and say, “Actually, yes, they do matter!”