Random.

I was asked to produce a piece of work which said who I was, what was special about me, and gave my contact details... I assume we are going to be using it to make our business cards or something?! This is what I done....

Its only a quick photo at the minute but the idea is there and I can whack some nice type on there instead of the handwriting maybe...

Introducing... The HandyCap.

The other day we were asked to pick some words out of a dictionary and try to give them some new meanings. My favourite was:

 'Handycap' - a cap that that has everything you could possibly need attached to it somewhere or somehow, the user could wear it all the time and then when they need something they can just grab it.

Pretty handy huh?  I reckon it would probably look something like this if it went into production...

Apprentice Challenge.

Your Fired! Not really.

Bucks New Uni was set the challenge of hosting their own 'Apprentice' Style business challenge by some local business man who said 'we would never manage it' I wasn't really listening but he said some throw away comment about how it would never happen, someone at the Uni heard about it and decided to prove him wrong! This Apprentice Challenge would run along side enterprise week.

Now all of this is really meant for the business and marketing students, but a few of us creative students heard about it and thought we could probably give them a run for their money, so we threw together a team and branded ourselves 'cream of the crop.' Wicked.

First we had to go to the launch party where all 16 teams met and found out who their sponsors would be. An FA cup style draw took place and we ended up with The Crowne Plaza Hotel as our sponsor, which I was pretty happy with. We then spent some time with our mentor from The Crowne Plaza getting to know him and finding out how he could help us, aswell as sharing a few drinks and cannopes.

Stage 1.

For the first challenge each sponsor gave their team £50 to spend, the challenge was to buy and sell doughnuts and make as much profit as possible, we had about a week to plan and sort out a supplier and anything else we needed. We went away and thought about it individually, then came together to share our ideas the next day, then took them to our mentor. In the end our plan was to blag some free bunny costumes (which we did) and sell in the shopping centre in town, using the costumes to draw people to our stall. We also had 2 'rovers' who went out to various locations to sell during the day, including the police and fire stations, the hotel, local building sites and a school. Selling went well and just before we ran out of time we ran out of doughnuts, which was a bit of a result! When all the profit as counted we had made nearly £90 and sailed through to the next round!

Stage 2.

For the second challenge we were given another £200 plus the profit from stage 1. Each team had a market cart in town on a saturday, we could buy and sell whatever we wanted in order to make the most profit. We played around with a few ideas and looked in to maybe selling a 'bag carrying' service to help people take all their shopping back to their cars. In the end we went with another idea; we would use the money to buy a Nintendo Wii console and then charge passers by to have a go, with the chance of winning the console if they had the top score at the end of the day. We wanted to get a buzz around our stall in order to attract lots of people and create a bit of competition. Come the day of the challenge we found our market cart was not in the best of positions as it was kind of tucked away. This hindered us slightly and we resorted to the bunny costumes to attract some attention again, the day ran smoothly and we had a steady flow of people but no where near as busy as we had hoped. Come the end of the day we had covered the cost of the Wii console and made about £12 profit, which doesn't sound that good, but some teams didn't even break even. We handed over the console to the lucky winner who had only spent £4 on goes! So he was pretty chuffed. Unfortunately our £12 profit wasn't enough to put us through to the final round, we had a laugh and managed to make some profit though...so not all bad.

Strategies.

Here are our first thoughts for some advertising strategies, we were asked to come up with 10, these are a work in progress:

1. Ryvita - So light you might have to tie them down.

2. Kiwi Shoe Polish - It saves carrying a mirror. / Your shoes are a reflection of you.

3. Carling Extra Cold - Gloves not included.

4. Monster.com - Only zookeepers like working with monkeys.

5. Kellogs Corn Flakes - Voted no.1 by milk everywhere. / Milk's Favourite.

6. Nutri-Grain Bars - Have an extra 10 minutes in bed.

7. Night Nurse - One sheep, 2 sheep, ZZZZZZ

8. Hornby Trains - Your dad might even let you have a go.

9. Elastoplast - Bloody good.

10. Clearasil - Everyone will spot the difference. / For when your under the spotlight.

11. Daihatsu Cars - No one likes show offs anyway.

12. Exchange and Mart - Everything from Audi's to Zimmer frames.

Round 1! FIGHT!

We were asked to produce a piece of film, based on the idea of how body language can be used to control a situation, we didn't want to be too obvious and wanted to have a bit of fun. We thought about doing it one of two ways; either like the cult classic Street Fighter or like an old western, shoot 'em up style.  We decided to go with Street Fighter and wrote a quick script and sorted a location, Here's what we came up with:

It shows how powerful body language can be, and how someone can take control of a situation without having to say anything! We had a good laugh making it and I'm pretty happy with the outcome.