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Tuesday, 5 February 2002 |
A Couple A’ Gems.
The work I was so engaged in for the last few days, and that caused me to miss making some posts to this weblog, included putting together an application portfolio for the Perth version of the AWARD School.
I’m trying everything I can in order to get back in to the paid work force. At the same time I’m aware that some of the best and brightest minds in the world in the advertising, design and web publishing industries are also unemployed, including people who have published the reference books on their subject and who are heroes to thousands.
It’s great that there are several people now who asked me to come and see them and who are looking for a position for me, but I can’t just sit here doing nothing, relatively speaking.
So when I came across the AWARD School and discovered it has a branch in Perth, that the fees are cheaper here, and that applications were to close yesterday, I worked away on a submission to be accepted for it.
The requirement was the following:
- Give one good reason why you should be accepted into AWARD School. (Be creative and keep it simple, i.e. on one page.)
- Choose two great print ads and explain in under 50 words why you believe each is great. (Include a copy of the ads.)
- Do two print ads. One in support of and one against Australia letting in refugees.
- Do two print ads. One in support of and one against legalising the drug ecstasy.
Cross my fingers that I’ll be accepted, although there are some potential problems in that the course runs from March to July inclusive and I seriously hope that I get a job before then, and that will most likely eat up all my time as my jobs in the past have done. But I’ll be pleased to do the course anyway. Never too late to learn anything.
Meanwhile, I guess the judging is going on, and I thought it might be a good idea to get some further value out of the pieces I did, and republish them here. They’re going to need a bit of cleaning up, but there are two I can publish here right now, using the Radio 8 Gems function.
Assignment 1: My one good reason. Assignment 3: The text part of my submission for Australia letting in refugees. Fully art-directed version to come later.
I can understand why the AWARD School organisers have chosen the approach that they did—do two ads for and two ads against two given topics—but the real process of making ads is not exactly like that.
4:10:26 PM 
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The Couriers Both Just Arrived.
Yippee! Two couriers just arrived, with the first batch of books to review for this year.
The books are:
- Adobe After Effects 5 Visual QuickPro Guide
- Dreamweaver 4 Fireworks 4 Studio
- Final Cut Pro 2 Visual QuickPro Guide
- Flash deConstruction, by Juxt Interactive
- Macromedia Flash: Art, Design + Function
- Macromedia Flash Animation & Cartooning
Thank you, McGraw-Hill and Pearson Education! No sign yet of that big stack of Friends of ED books published since September of last year, but here is hoping they will appear soon.
One of the books that just arrived: Macromedia Flash: Art, Design + Function. Reviews coming to this site soon.
1:21:12 PM
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Today’s Listening Pleasure.
I need to chill out and cool off today, so although cooling off is going to be a problem given the heat here, I am working through a stack of ambient CDs, played LOUD.
Today’s CDs: Bands including The Orb and Orbital.
12:55:57 PM
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The Genteel Burghers Admit The Truth.
On the front page of today’s edition of The West Australian newspaper: 14 Months after Dullsville.
Perth has always been 60 suburbs in search of a city. I lived in the inner city longer than I did anywhere else here, and it was Dullsville then and it is even more so now.
Back then the only people who did not live on the gold-paved streets of the suburbs were immigrants, ethnics, the poor, artists and students. The rents were cheap and the houses could in fact be excellent. I had the old Bunnings mansion in East Perth for $75.00 a week for quite a while, and it was a terrific place—huge walk-in dressing rooms, servant’s quarters, more bedrooms than I could count, a long backyard as big as a suburban quarter-acre block.
The old Bunnings heiress eventually sold out to property developers even though she swore she ever would, and the long slow mutation of the deep inner city
into the home of accountancy firms and multilevel white box apartment buildings had begun.
Now, only the rich or the foreign can afford to live in the parts of Perth, East Perth and West Perth that our ethnic and art tribes used to inhabit. But, bizarrely, there are even fewer facilities that make for decent living there now than there were when the area was only for the impoverished to live in.
No supermarkets, nothing in the CBD that remains open after 5PM, the cinemas in decay with the biggest—the multiplex where movies premiere—now located in the far northern suburb of Innaloo. Even McDonalds shuts up early. Those who dwell in the upscale tower blocks keep flashy cars in their garages to zap out to the outer urban hypermarkets for their vittles.
The ethnic restaurant enclave of Northbridge has become a lot bigger but is completely dead during the day and only awakens to life in the evenings. And there are street gangs all over it, if you care to look. I was there yesterday to see Australian director Scott Hick’s Hearts in Atlantis, after delivering a set of articles to a firm in West Perth, and I will be there again soon to see In The Bedroom at a quirky little cinema that hardly anyone else attends.
Funny that it is only in the last two years that the genteel burghers of Perth have stirred themselves to recognise what the city has been for decades. I wonder if they will actually do anything about it? Or is it just more talk. The people of Perth deserve better.
The West Australian: Today’s front page.
11:30:45 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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