It was good for BAIMPs to represent Bournemouth’s debut at the show and we return with the good news of Chris Herring and Tom Schrimshaw having won Best New Blood awards for their projects Ruled by Secrecy and Douteki respectively.

Although again tarnished by being called out as ‘The Arts Institute at Bournemouth’ at the award ceremony, at least this time it was more laughable in being half expected and now a long-running joke since Computer Arts’ mistake in their Graduate Showcase.

As for other awards, Talkboards finished as a Finalist in the Rhizome Artist Commission 2007-2008 (the very deserved winners here) and a Semi-Finalist in the Adobe Achievement Awards – so while I won’t be flying out to San Francisco, I have got a nice shiny certificate

Seems now with everyone now slowing beginning to disperse, our three years have gone stupidly quickly. It really doesn’t seem that long ago that we were working through the night on our Flash Animation projects in the first year.

From: One of the Geek Team All-Night sessions – 19th April, 2005.

Not that I’m even going to begin to get soppy or anything but I think our coursemates and tutors have been truly decent and we’ve only benefited from being so close friends and always on hand to cooperate and help each other out – or lend hardware. A huge huge thank you to Craig, Matt, Chris, Joe & Chris for screens and computers loaned for the exhibitions.

To: The Final Studio 3 All-Nighter – 15th May, 2007.

It’s a shame to hear our other years don’t get on nearly half as well as we do – let lone do these ^^ kinds of things – so much so that it’s possible that rivalry and unhealthy competitiveness may have significantly negative effects on projects or prospective shows.

I think iheartplay was a huge success, with most people getting interviews, internships or even jobs already secured as a result. A whole load of card-swapping and networking went on, very promising for individuals and in promoting Bournemouth University and the proud IMPs that we are.

While there were only four of us demonstrating at New Blood, we plastered the iheartplay promo materials – visually and literally – all over our pitch. We also rinsed the remaining iheartplay catalogues, showing the work of everyone involved and did our best discussing everyone else’s projects as relevant to visitors’ interests.

The huge majority of the other stands mainly exhibited graphics, illustration or print media. So although there were a lot of visitors to the exhibition as a whole, we found (as most did in Brick Lane) that an instant panic and chronic fear of computers and touching mice came over to anyone in the vicinity and they rather take our brochures to browse links and read the copy in their own time and space rather than risk showing their lack of computer skills or whatever. Either way, for all these people it was actually irrelevant who was physically there, as much as any projects that caught their eye inside the books.

I’ve only been able to find two reviews of the iheartplay exhibition so far. Daniel Harris’ of SubSub, though brief, described the show as ‘well coordinated, felt coherent .. and in placed damn interesting’. The only other from a disappointed BAIMP student who unfortunately didn’t think to note the opening times and missed the show completely (found here).

If anyone discovers any more dotted around the web be sure to send me a message or link on del.ici.ous.

Finally, sincerely the very best of luck to everyone on the July 11th. Personally I feel if two hours of Image Studies for a year has set us up for top marks all round then we deserve them just for sitting through ‘em

I’ve been asked to put together some viral games in Flash that we can host and bombard forums with to create a little extra buzz and get a bit more exposure.

Anyway, I’ve adapted some very simple classic arcade games, basically just substituting sprites with iheartplay logos and with a bit of restyling hopefully they’ll do the trick.

Some very buggy demos are online as follows:

Space Invaders:

http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/~mhibbins/iheartplay/invaders.html

Pac-Man:

http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/~mhibbins/iheartplay/pacman.html

Asteroids:

http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/~mhibbins/iheartplay/asteroids.html

A few more tweaks and they’ll go live on the iheartplay site, but feel free to have a go now and get yourself on the scoreboard – the more the better!

It seems everyone is putting together new online portfolios in preparation for the show, considering mine still claims my current project is design for small screens I think it’s time I sort one out too.

Tunnelling is almost done – *so* close to having it fully ready to roll, kind of a necessity Meanwhile I’m trying to get hold of some machines to run it locally at the show, that’ll hopefully be smoother too, as well as guaranteeing I can actually show something.

Congrats to those who got into the Computer Arts Graduate Showcase, good to see some Bournemouth Uni representation – well, Bournemouth, at least.

Also: New Header Alert! It’s actually Talkboards related now. The previous showed Alan Reed’s ‘City Poem’, which was part of the Public Pages project.

Hope the Easter post didn’t ruin everything.