Jobs, Careers & Volunteers Fair at Bucks on Thursday 27 November.

Welcome to the 2014 annual Bucks Jobs, Careers & Volunteers Fair! We’re looking forward to welcoming over 80 employers, charities and other organisations to the High Wycombe Campus to attend this year’s Jobs, Careers & Volunteers Fair in the Gateway Events Hall between 11am-3pm on Thursday 27 November. 

This year, many employer organisations are looking to meet students from all years to offer a mix of work experience, part-time, volunteering and graduate opportunities and also to engage with staff to discuss how they may engage their industries with our wide range of courses. Organisations in attendance this year include:

• Virgin Atlantic
• Majestic Wine
• Crazy Bear
• Enterprise Rent-A-Car
• Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust
• The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy

For a full list of exhibitors please visit http://bucks.ac.uk/learningandteaching/careers_and_employability/Careers_Fair_2014/Fair_Exhibitors.

For many of our students, working part-time while at university is something of a necessity. While we don't encourage our students to take on work that will compromise their ability to study, we do recognise that many will need to earn some extra cash to make ends meet. The careers fair can be a great place to find out about opportunities for part-time work while studying at Bucks, as well as a chance to look beyond the university into the Great Unknown beyond.

For more information please contact Louise Wicks, Student Temp & Volunteering Agency Manager, on extension 5103.

For more on the experience of studying at Bucks New University, come and visit us at one of our Open Days,  take a virtual tour of one of our animation studios, check out what our students think of our course, and see why we're ranked in the top 12 creative universities in the UK. Find out why we're giving free laptops to all our students, and why we give all our students free access to videos at Lynda.com. Also, see what financial assistance might be available to you. Learn which is better for animation, a PC or a Mac? Get hold of a copy of a map so you can find your way around campus, and learn about motion capture at Bucks.

Does Education Encourage Creativity - or Kill It?

Sir Ken Robinson. Photo: Wikipedia

Sir Ken Robinson is an educator who believes passionately in the importance of teaching creativity in our schools. In an interview on Radio 4 yesterday morning, he talked about why he thinks our system of education is broken and needs fixing. Robinson argues that creative thinking and creativity are a vitally important - and widely neglected - part of our education system. Dance, he says, should be as important as Maths, of equal value and time in the curriculum. If you missed him on the radio, you can watch his fascinating (and very entertaining) 2007 TED talk below.

Robinson argues that the stuff we learn today in school is geared to the needs of the 19th century economy, when universal education systems were first being built. This is a curriculum which is out of date, and ignores the needs of the 21st Century economy, where creativity and the ability to invent new ideas are the paramount skills needed.




Here at Bucks we believe that creativity can be taught. Studying 3D animation and the digital arts is not just about learning the right tools and which buttons to press. Yes, technical expertise is necessary, but creativity matters too. Good digital artists are just that - artists. Inventive, creative, funny and entertaining artists.

Every great project begins with an idea

London's visual effects houses charge far more than their counterparts in Asia. How can they afford to charge a premium? The answer lies in a unique blend of technical excellence and creative talent. The perfect digital artist knows the software inside out - and also knows what to do with it. Clients come to London because they get - and expect - something extra.

Technical excellence and creativity

Pleasing clients is what commercial artists do for a living. This means coming up with ideas, creative solutions, ways to make the client look good. Creativity and creative thinking is at the very heart of the process.

Learning animation isn't just about technical excellence - though this is also vital. It's about coming up with great ways to apply what you have learned. Creating great projects is what we aim to do here at Bucks. Our university was recently ranked among the top ten creative universities in the UK.  In addition, we are currently ranked number one in terms of facilities spend per student. This is probably because of the huge recent investment in the Gateway Building, a creative media hub which hosts the most modern facilities money can buy.

Gateway Building

We have motion capture, TV cameras, Green Screen rooms, Computer rooms, a dance hall, performance facilities, recording rooms and sound mixing suites. All of it is state of the art, and the opportunities for collaboration between departments are huge. Creativity and creative thinking are at the very heart of what we do.

---Alex

For more about the experience of studying at Bucks New University, come and visit us at one of our Open Days,  take a virtual tour of one of our animation studios, check out what our students think of our course, and see why we're ranked in the top 12 creative universities in the UK. Find out why we're giving free laptops to all our students, and why we give all our students free access to videos at Lynda.com. Also, see what financial assistance might be available to you. Learn which is better for animation, a PC or a Mac? Get hold of a copy of a map so you can find your way around campus, and learn about motion capture at Bucks. And find out about how our online video tutorials work

Friday 4th April is Motion Capture Day at Bucks

On Friday 4th April we'll be testing out our shiny new Motion Capture system at Bucks. The Events Hall in the Gateway building will play host to our latest, biggest and most expensive digital toy, extremely useful not just for animators hoping to capture excellent physical performances but also for students studying sports and motion analysis. On Friday we are welcoming students with some experience of motion capture (and even those with none) to come along and help us get the system to work.

For anyone new to Bucks, the Events Hall is the big hall in the Gateway building on your left as you ascend the elevated staircase near the reception desk. It's where we have our open days, and where various sports activities also take place.

The Events Hall

Students who have used motion capture systems before are especially welcome. On friday we will be figuring out and properly documenting a dependable pipeline that can then be rolled out to anyone who wants to use the system. Friday will be a day for thinking, testing, collaborating and generally working out how we can use our system to best advantage.

The Gateway building, which houses the Events Hall, is marked number 10 on the map above.

Anyone student who thinks they might be able to help us out will be very welcome to come and lend a hand. You might even get to wear the MoCap suit and pretend you are Andy Serkis in The Lord of The Rings.

The session on Friday 4th April will run from 9am until 4pm.  9am to 11am will constitute set-up, and we will have to start packing down by 3pm.


(Editor's note: For more information about the Motion Capture system we have here at Bucks, read this post. And don't forget to check out our student's memorable trip to visit Centroid at Pinewood Studios in 2012.)

The Daily Telegraph ranks Bucks in top 14 Creative Universities

Art and Industry - what Bucks is all about

Recently the online magazine Huffington Post ranked Bucks in the top 12 Creative Universities in the UK. Now the Telegraph has weighed in, including us in a list of the 14 most creative universities in the UK.  So why are we in this list? The answer lies in the massive £40million investment made a few years ago in our shiny new Gateway media building - an investment that is now beginning to pay off handsomely.

According to The Telegraph, the list was compiled by the consumer group Which?, who asked more than 16,000 students in the UK tell them if music, theatre, dance, choirs and the visual arts played a large part in university life.

The results came from two separate surveys. One was conducted this past summer and one was done in 2012. There is no order to the rankings. We're not number 14 - we are among the 14.

Gateway Building - opened in 2010

 

I have never taught at a University that had better facilities for making media than we have here at Bucks. Our animation students collaborate with sound designers, dancers, actors, musicians, live action film-makers and - ready to go live in early 2014 - a new motion capture facility. We're even trying to figure out ways of collaborating the fashion students. I don't know quite how yet - but we'll figure it out.

All great film-makers are collaborators, and almost every successful media project that any of us work on will be a collaboration of one kind or another. Look at any great director or film-maker and you will find a hugely talented team standing behind them.

There are many ways that or students collaborate. One of them is the Bucks Media Collaborations page at Facebook, which brings different departments together to collaborate on their projects.

To take a look for yourself at what we offer at Bucks, drop in to one of our open days. In fact, we have one tomorrow, from 5.30pm to 9pm. More details here.

----Alex

(Editor's note: for more on collaborations between departments, check out this piece on the super-useful Bucks Media Collaborations page. To take a virtual tour of some of our excellent facilities, read this article.  And to see how serious we are about making sure our students are technically proficient, find out about why we're giving away free laptops to our new students.)

Bucks ranked in top 12 among "Creative Universities" in the UK by Huffington Post

Gateway media hub - opened in 2010

One of the best things about teaching at Bucks New University is the huge range of media disciplines that are gathered around our High Wycombe campus. In recent years Bucks has been re-inventing itself as a major creative hub, following the huge £40million investment in the Gateway media building that houses a wide variety of creative arts. That investment is now beginning to pay off, and recently the Huffington Post recognised this by ranking us number 12 among creative universities in the UK.

This is very welcome news for everyone at Bucks. In traditional university terms, Bucks does not score high on the lists. We don't do much research, and we lack the prestige of the ancient universities. However, despite our name, our institution goes back in one form or another to the late 19th century. Founded in 1893 as the School of Science and Art, the original motto was "arte et industria", which doesn't need much translating, even if you skipped Latin at school.

Over a century on, that's still what we do. Animation and Visual Effects is a perfect example - a blend of art and industry, or, rather, art and computer science - which is much the same thing.

How it used to be at Bucks. And, in a way, still is.

I have taught animation at many schools and universities around the world. But I have never taught at a University that had better facilities for making media than we have here at Bucks. Film, TV, acting and performance, Green Screen, Live Events, Sound Design - we have talented students in every department. Check out the Bucks Media Collaborations page at Facebook, which brings these departments together to collaborate on great projects.

For anyone doing creative media at Bucks, things are getting better all the time. So it is great news that the world is starting to notice.

----Alex

(Editor's note: for more on collaborations between departments, check out this piece on the Bucks Media Collaborations page. To take a virtual tour of some of our excellent facilities, read this article.  And to see how serious we are about making sure our students are technically proficient, find out about why we're giving away free laptops to our new students.)