Vision Creative Conference is an annual event that brings together pioneers from the creative industries and showcases their innovative thinking. With a range of speakers from Google employees to founders of Iced Coffee brands, a few Wildlife Filmmaking students excitedly headed down to the Arnolfini to see what it was all about.
Joining some of the Documentaries and Features students, we went to make a promotional video that demonstrated the “creative freedom” theme of the conference, and we intended to absorb as much creativity as we could from the speakers. Kicking off the conference was Alex Hunter, formerly of the Virgin Group, who told his audience how companies should use social media to create personal relationships with customers: wise words for a digital age.
But it wasn’t all about marketing. Jon Fidler is the founder of 3D printing design company Modla, and he explained his vision for using 3D printing to connect children with nature – it costs around £3 for the materials to 3D print the casing for a camera trap, a tiny investment for a young person to learn a valuable lesson about how technology can be used as a conservation tool.
Perhaps the most interesting talk for a Wildlife Filmmaking student however, was a talk from Jonathon Wise, co-founder of Comms Lab, an organisation that works with communications agencies to articulate their positive role in society. His talk raised the point that anyone who produces content for broadcast has a responsibility for the effect their content has on society, and that advertising agencies should be held accountable for promoting mass consumerism in an age when the planet’s resources are dwindling. He envisaged a society where content producers were motivated first and foremost by the positive changes they could make to the way people think, and that – for me at least – was the real vision of the conference.
Tom Richards 