Hello there. It’s Saturday night on the 27th of February and I’m sitting in writing a blog for college. 10 super duper cool points for moi. 
This thursday we had another guest speaker in to talk to us from the digital media world about what they do, did and plan to do. His name was a series of letters that when put together became Ian Cudmore. At first I was impressed by his voice by the way it seemed to echo mysteriously but then later realised the mic was on up the front. This shattered the illusion.
Ian is a self employed wanderer of the digital media industry who has dabbled in quite a few corners like flash, short film making and editing. He has now narrowed his skills primarily into editing which is what he says he does when someone asks him “what do you do?”. I was surprised and interested to find out he actually got his undergraduate degree from NCAD as a product designer (correct me if thats not quite it) and then got into digital media afterwards through a masters in Trinity College Dublin. I guess it shows once you have a creative flare and a passion for something that there isn’t that much of a transition between such fields.
Once freed from college Ian was looking for projects to get stuck into and was fortunate to get in touch with a Scottish musician (through Myspace) named James Yorkston and was asked to go over to him to create a promo video(an epk) for his album . Ian shot elements of him playing, composing, speaking and then edited it into a short video to be sent along with the album to the record label. He told us how it was more for the opportunity and experience that he did this. I thought it was very cool. Something I hope to do when I’m done here is to get into the music sector to film gigs, interview musicians, make music documentaries or whatever. Ians done a fair bit of this stuff so I was loving checking out his final products. Ian’s also done a lot of filming with Lisa Hannigan including an epk for ‘Sea Sew’ which is her latest album. I threw Ian’s name into YouTube this evening and had a look through some of the videos he edited for Lisa and her band. Theywere playing down in Dingle in a great little pub called Dick Macs (where I’ve had a few nice pints before) and they are a fantastic collection. Check it out.
Overall I really enjoyed the talk he gave as did everyone else. His approach was very casual and he genuinely seemed keen to be talking to us. He’s not finished college too long really so to hear someone quite new to the industry really enjoying himself and to see him experimenting with new ideas and challenges got me quite excited for when I’m out there, getting work and meeting interesting people. Hopefully we get some more speakers as interesting and genuine as Ian. He’s also a Kurt Vonnegut fan He showed us Vonnegut’s explanation of drama –> Brilliant.
