Aki's Placement Blog

Things have deteriorated again in my personal life, to the extent that my work is affected. On the 14th and 16th I am in communication with Claire and Peter, who offer sympathy and support. As an organisation, Skimstone also offers personal support which I look to take up. Work-wise though, things are on hold essentially until New Year.  Looking back again on what I have already done though, progress is going well on the factual research I am doing on social media, though we are now looking at doing an animated songbook with the help of the in-house animator at Skimstone, instead of using issuu. I am now in the Comms Team, and while it is a bit difficult as I still haven't met a couple of the others involved, and Cristina is only working about one day a week at the moment, it gives me more chance to run with my ideas and cover more ground. I would like to see stronger engagement with the stories feature on Instagram, and am reassured that we will do this in the run up to the next p...

 December 8. Further planning on Who Holds The Torch. With the deadline coming up so tight before Holocaust Memorial Day, we have planned a timetable that increases steadily in business up to the event, whilst still allowing plenty of time for individual completion of projects. We have decided to do another radio show series, this time of three programmes about half an hour long. A key focus has been getting as broad a range of voices involved as possible, to allow for a global reach. With my limited experience in radio too, I feel that I can contribute meaningfully as I discuss radio technology potential with the musical and director team. Nii Kwartey Owoo is the radio manager, so he will be tech-ing the whole thing, but I try to provide some perspective for the broadcast too. My schedule is becoming very busy now, which I communicate to Peter and Claire.

 December 2. Zoom. ECHO artists. To further develop creative ideas we embarked on a creative inspiration exercise. This maybe would have worked better in person, as opposed to over zoom, but was still helpful in expanding the horizon of possibilities for pieces. Claire led an introspective mental sojourn down different memories relating to the Who Holds The Torch and Light in the Darkness themes. I found myself thinking of my mother, but the useful part of the exercise was that we were encouraged not to narrow things down to identifying one sole light, but instead focussing on the 'light' qualities of those people in our lives who hold the torch. Then, still with our eyes closed, we continued to do collective recalls of the words and feelings that were coming to us, all at random. This was actually very effective in building a patchwork of inspiration for creative practice, and helped to try and find the universal qualities that everyone can relate to in a very individual way -...

December 1. Zoom. Management team. Today was a very significant day, where my work has begun proper. I was introduced to everyone again, as an English Lit student with particular skills in marketing (especially Instagram), and how I'm looking forward to getting involved across the board, with the aim of gaining insights should I start my own company too. This time I made sure I kept the focus on the business and industry insights I wanted to gain, with my musical and theatrical experience supplementing that and coming second, so that I could really engage on the business level that I wanted. Recently I have been pitching quite a lot, and it is reminiscent of the sessions with Sascha! His tips are coming in handy here; particularly in engaging a virtual audience. I got to meet everyone in their business capacities today (where previously I have mostly met them informally or artistically). It was much clearer today that Claire Webster Saaremets (creative director and boss) was runnin...