…Or, my 2 weeks on a rollercoaster
When I was in primary school, one of my favourite movies was ‘Matilda’. In it, the villain of the film, the evil headmaster Ms. Trunchbull, installs posters in her school which read: ‘If you are having fun, you are not learning’.
As a child I thought this was pure evil. As a teacher I was equally appalled. ”The kids must have fun! It’s how they learn best!”
However, these past two weeks has made me really question my perspective on this. Pain is part of learning too. As I worked on my learning goals, I experienced moments that felt painful at the time, but upon reflection, I found them to have been helpful, since they are part of the learning process. I have also experienced lots of positive moments too. All in all, its felt like a rollercoaster with lots of ups and downs 🙂
LOW POINT: frustrations with Photoshop
This part is related to my learning goal #2: Execute, maintain and evaluate a campaign for grums. I had to create a short, sharp video to showcase 3 new products as part of the new hand soap pack grams is launching.
My attempt at photoshopping the grums
logo onto the wall mount
The problem was they did not actually have 1 of the 3 parts: the wall mount. Nor did they have photos of it with the logo printed on it. Therefore I had to take the existing photo of the wall mount and try to photoshop the logo onto it. This was an incredibly challenging task, and one that I felt I did not actually manage to accomplish as well as I would have liked.
My experience with the ‘warp’ and ‘perspective’ tools is quite limited. So it was very hard to get the angle to look realistic. While doing this task, I was with Rasmus and Simon, neither of whom have any experience with these tools. Therefore I felt very lost and frustrated, to the point of wanting to give up. However, I knew that wasn’t an option so I managed to create a photo which would at least work in the video as shown below:
LOW POINT: negative reactions towards unfamiliar work environments/tasks
Another lower point was when I spent a large amount of time inputting the mockups I had made in XD (see selected content page) into the official Kickstarter site in order to launch it. It turned out to be a bit repetitive and boring at times, since the actual creative work had mostly been done, and it was just a matter of downloading and reuploading things in the right formats.
It is with tasks like these that I feel like I am not ‘doing enough’, or achieving anything at all. But I think think this is due to the fast paced environment I am used to working in. For 10 years I worked in Primary Schools in Spain. You had tp constantly change the tasks and keep energy levels high in the classroom. Otherwise the students would lose interest and you would feel like you haven’t achieved anyting with them.
The slowed down pace, and less cognitively challenging kind of work (which is what I have been doing a lot of this week) is something I have to learn to adjust to, and furthermore, be a little bit grateful for. I suspect that in this field, not everyday is going to be high energy, or full og creative tasks. And I should welcome the change of pace!
HIGH POINT: improving my product photography skills
In my last blog post I wrote about how I had begun to address learning goal #4: ”I want to learn how to photograph products in a way that best captures the visual aesthetic of grums”. In my last session I did not manage to take any photos that I was happy with. This time however, I am pleased to say that I took quite a few photos that I believe capture the grums spirit and furthermore, are of a quality that could be used on grum’s social media like Instagram.
HIGH POINT: getting really good at copywriting
For these first few weeks, I have been tasked with creating content for grums’ social media, namely its Instagram and Facebook accounts. At first I thought writing captions for the posts would be easy, and that the hard part would be the actual photos, however it turns out its the other way round! Thinking of cool ideas for photos, or repurposing content that grums already has, isn’t too difficult, but the captions require a lot of thought. I have been doing this a lot and I feel I have gotten much better at it! Below is a recent example of post along with the caption from grums’ Instagram account:
