In the morning we piled into the bus and I mean piled, we had to crawl over suitcases, and made our way to Media City. Dr. Annabelle Waller greeted us and toured us around Salford University. Salford feels like a media conservatory because they have some of the finest equipment I’ve seen at a school. Outside all of the windows are media companies that students could one day end up, because everything is so close I imagine the students make a lot of connections. I hope they like Salford because if being there would quickly make you plant your roots.
Annabelle talked to us about VR, a common discussion point on this trip, before James Probert came to talk to us. James is a show-runner for a popular kid’s show with the BBC called Blue Peter. His story was really inspiring because he never thought he’d be were he is, he just continued to work and follow opportunities. It made me feel better about the fact that some of the things that I want to do are not related to an advertising degree. Advertising seems like it will be a great career but all the starting positions seem like something I would want to move on from pretty quickly so it’s good to know that as long as I am proving myself in my work I can get to that place I want to go.
After James gave his talk we had a little break before heading to BBC. BBC’s tour was a lot more like a traditional tourist tour than a discussion. It was still really cool because they showed us some of their AR tools that tied in nicely to the rest of our Media City talk. It was wild to me to see how much of the sets that they us are actually just blank pieces. I haven’t done any work in broadcast so there was a lot of stuff I didn’t know about because it is behind the scenes.
After a full day of tours and lectures we went to the Manchester Holiday Inn. Suffice to say we didn’t see much of Manchester.