The guest speaker lined up for this week’s club meeting should be familiar to everyone at OVFM as it is our very own Professor Mike Shaw!

Before he picked up the camera and became the club’s resident special effects whizz, Mike spent many years working in advertising and was responsible for masterminding a number of campaigns for many top name companies and businesses of the time.

So what does this have to do with filmmaking? Both films and adverts, or indeed any creative process, begin the same way – with an idea. Certainly there are differences in that ads need to be short, to the point and within a specific remit of the company or product requirements (and we at OVFM are not adverse to making short films under a minute either) but there needs to be a starting point and it is that common thread which will be one feature of Mike’s presentation.

Mike will be talking us through some of the campaigns he was responsible for, explaining the various stages of creative process and sharing the end results with us, which saw Mike rub shoulders with some the showbiz elite of the era – not that Mike is a name dropper so don’t expect to hear the name Sammy Davis Jr. mentioned at any time during the course of the evening!

It might be a different tact from our usual film related guest speakers but I’m sure it won’t be any less interesting to us as creative types. And who knows – we may see an ad campaign already familiar to us unaware it was actually one of Mike’s.

Only one way to find out and that is to join us this coming Tuesday evening where you are Shaw to be in for a fascinating evening!

Ahem. I’ll get my coat….