Hi Everyone! My name’s Guy, and I’m one of the current Marketing Placements here at ProspectSoft. One of the biggest jobs I’ve been set so far on placement was creating ProspectSoft’s NUE Awards Application for 2018-19.The NUE Awards is an event ran by RateMyPlacement, which rewards students, employers and Universities by recognising their successes within undergraduate employability. The awards showcase the passion, innovation and dedication from across the industry in the UK. The category we’re competing in is “Best Small to Medium-Sized Undergraduate Employer 2018-19” – an award we have won an incredible 6 times previously!

Behind the scenes

The application consists of two parts; a written application, plus a supporting, creative piece of supplementary evidence – which, in our case, was a video! We began by coming up with a few ideas about what we could do differently this year that would catch the judge’s attention, then created a few mind maps to flesh out our ideas. Eventually, we came to the decision of shooting a real-life video (as opposed to animation style video which we’ve done before) that featured our very own placement students. We had a general idea of what the video was going to consist of, but this changed multiple times throughout the process as we wanted to ensure all placements felt comfortable with what they had to do. From this point, I began developing a script of everyone’s parts within the video, which revealed a structure to follow. After checking this over with my line manager, Jess Heald, the first day of filming quickly came around! A microphone had been bought, a fresh SD card was in the camera and a tripod had been dug out of the cupboard – let the filming commence!

Lights, camera, action!

The filming (all in all) ran pretty smoothly without too many mishaps! Granted, us placements certainly weren’t born natural actors, so learning our lines may have taken quite a while in some cases (not naming any names!). But the whole experience was great and watching everyone mess up their lines offered me a bit of entertainment! The filming took well over a week, and one of the most time-consuming days was when we ventured off to interview one of our customers at Connect Vending! This was a great experience, and in my opinion, it gave the video greater credit as it highlighted first-hand how a real customer values us placement students in their business. It was also a good chance to get out of the office and interact with one of our customers on-site which is something I’d not experienced before!

Adding the final touches…

With all the filming complete, I had a few days left before the deadline day! This was probably one of the most challenging parts of the process, as I learnt a new software programme (Adobe Premiere) completely from scratch and learnt how to create animation using Adobe After Effects. These two pieces of software are typically used by professional video editors, so admittedly I had to spend a fair bit of time watching YouTube tutorials and getting to grips with some popular techniques. Although a 10-minute video may not seem too long, the editing behind this was plentiful and ended up involving quite a bit of trial and error. However, once I’d passed the learning curve I was able to edit the video much quicker and churn out animations in no time. This enabled me to have the video complete a day or two before the deadline.

In what seemed like no time at all, it was the day of the deadline. I’d rendered the video (which took well over an hour!), so all that was left was to upload the video to YouTube and submit it to RateMyPlacement alongside our written application that Jessie, our other Marketing placement, worked hard on. The uploading process sounds simple enough, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing! We had created a new YouTube channel just for our Placement videos that day, and when it came to uploading the video, YouTube decided to not play ball and kept crashing! I’m sure you can imagine that tensions were beginning to run high as there were only a few hours for us to upload the video, and the uploading process on a relatively long video can take quite a while, despite the YouTube palaver! By this point I’m sure you’re on the edge of your seat…but you can relax! We managed to successfully upload the video from a different computer and thankfully this worked a treat; everything had been submitted well within the deadline time!

Next stop, the awards!

We’re delighted to announce that as a result of all our hard work, we’ve been shortlisted, and we’re eagerly awaiting the award night to see if we’ve managed to secure a 7^th win! I found the process very rewarding, despite being a little confusing at times! The only challenges I faced were in the learning process of the new software, but after some practice I was able to crack on with the editing smoothly and error-free.

The awards ceremony takes place on 1^st March 2019 and will be held in London. We’re up against the likes of Canon, Golfbreaks and MMT Digital - so fingers crossed we’ll have impressed the judges enough again this time round to take the crown home!