Unfortunately, the time came to pack up and leave Liverpool. I loved my time spent in this city but the trip must go on and Manchester was waiting for us. After some hotel breakfast we got back onto the bus and made our way to Media City in Manchester.
First, we talked to Annabelle from Salford University. She gave us a tour of the university and told us about the opportunities that students get because they study so close to Media City and BBC studios. I thought it was very interesting that a lot of the tools that they use look similar to things that I’ve seen at Point Park (on a bigger scale of course). I think that Point Park and Salford have a lot of similarities and it made me wonder why there aren’t more connections between the universities as far as study abroad opportunities.
We then had two lectures from Annabelle and James, who works at BBC on a children’s show called Blue Peter. Annabelle talked to us about the future of VR. It was a very interesting discussion and there were a lot of films using VR that were used for much different reasons than video games or entertainment. I don’t usually think about VR because I don’t see it much in my everyday life so it was nice to focus on and think about something I don’t consider as part of my media consumption at this point in my life.
James talked to us about his journey from his first job in media to the position that he has today. It was helpful to hear that someone with a job that a lot of media students would aspire to have started out in the field having absolutely no clue where he was going to end up. I think that a lot of people going to school right now are panicking because it seems like you need to have everything figured out all of the time. But it’s very nice to know that that isn’t always the case. We also got to see some clips from Blue Peter and it looked like a very interesting show. I would love to watch more of that show. The message of the show, that you can do anything if you just give it a try, is so important for young children to see because having new experiences is so important. I love children and I love seeing what’s going on in children’s programming and so it was nice to see such an awesome show being produced for children.
After we heard from Annabelle and James, we had some free time to get lunch. My friends and I got some noodles from Wagamama. The food was good but attempting to pay separately for our food was such a hassle it was physically draining. At least the food was good!
Fortunately, we had a very fun and interesting tour ahead of us to get that fiasco off our minds. We got to tour the BBC studios with two amazing tour guides. We saw radio and TV studios, as well as some other rooms that are utilized by employees. I loved seeing the radio studio and hearing about how they run the shows because I have two shows on WPPJ and it’s fun to see the differences between how our shows run and how professional and widely listened to shows run. I also loved the fake show that our students did at the end of the tour; everyone was so funny and our tour guides made the tour a great experience for us.
Our time in Media City came to an end and we got back on the bus to head to our hotel for the night. After checking in we met in the lobby for a quick walk to our group dinner. We ate at a pub and the food was delicious– especially the cake and ice cream that we had for dessert. After dinner I worked on my blogs in the hotel lobby before coming back to our room to prepare for our flight to Edinburgh in the morning.