Ollie Tristram

Hey everyone.

On Friday 22nd February I spent the day at a Multimedia company based on the outskirts of Nottingham (with St. Anns) to see what work they got up to and to gain an understanding of how a company of their size works.

After being in contact with them for a week or two before visiting, I was originally going to attend an on-location shoot for one of their client's DVDs. However due to the nature of the business, the client had some issues to sort out for themselves, so that day (Friday 15th February) did not go ahead.

So a week later, I was invited to spend a day with them. Now, to be honest, I was expecting a big flashy office block with D3 Design in big letters along the side and then to be greeted by a receptionist. Was I wrong! Instead, the company was run from an upstairs room of an ordinary house in which the Creative Director and his partner lived, with their son and two chocolate Labradors.

Adey and Jo were their names and after having spent the day with them they were nice people. Me and Adey in particular had a lot of similar interests, especially that we both dislike coding! It was weird because originally I asked whether to come dressed in a shirt and tie, but after being greeted by Jo in jeans and a t-shirt and then Adey in his dressing gown I can see why I didn't need to.

To cut to the chase, their work room was phenomenal! I walked into this average-sized room to see a desk near the back with two 30" Mac screens on it. I then saw hooked up to them was a graphics tablet, mixing desk, drum machine and full-size electronic drum-kit. Not to mention the machine that was powering everything. I asked him the specs of his Mac G5 and if I remember rightly it was a Quad 3.0GHz processor, 8GB RAM, 4 hard drives equalling 1.5TB and dual top of the range nVidia graphics cards. I might have got those figures mixed up a bit, but it cost £2500. I was quite shocked that a normal house could have such amazing equipment in it.

Anyway, throughout the day I was shown all the different software they used which was pretty much anything you can think of. As a company that produces video, animation, music, graphics, flash, websites, etc for clients - Adey was the one that did all of that, he was so multi-talented. As we went through all the programs I thought I'd take advantage of my time there and ask a few questions about how to do things that would help me on my course, such as music mixing techniques and flash advice.

At the end of the day I was welcomed back anytime and I will still be hopefully going on the next video shoot they have. I enjoyed myself and time went by fast which is a good sign of course. Now after having established myself with them I can hopefully pop round or contact them by e-mail if I have any queries about software, because they seemed willing to help me, and again, they were nice people.

Check out their website at http://www.d3-design.com