The story of FMX 2012.

Story & Photos: Sabrina Seidl and Alexandra Ostasheva
As you might have read already in an earlier post, Alexandra Ostasheva, Sabrina Seidl and Carita Forsgren had to pleasure to participate the 17th Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Transmedia (FMX) in Stuttgart, Germany, a few weeks ago. The trip was fantastic, the conference mind blowing, the city beautiful and the company, how should it be different, very amusing!
The entire conference attendance has been organized within a projects of us two Media students. Due to our strong interest in VFX and CGI we wanted to participate to this conference, but how to afford it?

After coming up with an interesting project plan and several discussions with teachers, we got the ‘go’ for the conference. Our idea was to produce a showreel for the Media studies, showing the best works done by students within their studies, organize the entire conference presence for TAMK Media and then of course represent our studies there.
proud with our TAMK flag
 The project started somewhere in early march and came to an end in mid june. Over the entire period, we were extremely busy with all the tasks like planning the steps, creating the storyboard, collecting the student works (that was real hard work!!), filming the footage, having loads of meetings with different representatives from TAMK, writing tons of emails, learning more about how to animate the video and realize it, planning the conference presence etc. The projects caused quite a lot of sleepless nights, because the time of the event came rapidly closer, and of course the work outside of the FMX project, like other projects on which we were working simultaneously, different courses and work) we had to do as well.
However, we were done with everything about 4 days before the start of the event. The showreel was done, the promotion material collected and the presentation took shape.
At FMX, we had the best looking booth as we have been told, thanks to all the colorful promotional material TAMK has to offer, hence it attracted quite a lot of visitors.
promotion material
building up the booth

The students reacted very positively about our broad offer of study areas, our close cooperation with companies, the project based studies and the interest grew even more when they heard about that you don’t have to pay anything for studying in Finland.
The companies and business professionals were highly impressed about our showreel, our studies and the achieved skills and promised to contact us in future for upcoming job openings.

And what was the most important of this event? We widened our horizon in the field, could follow some insider knowledge from movies like MIB3, Madagascar, Hugo, The Avengers,... we met highly interesting people but we also realized how much we still have to learn to be able to play in their league. Nevertheless, we did enjoy the conference by all means and couldn’t stop marveling at the speakers and knowledge presented. 
One of the lectures held at the cinema
Thanks to TAMK for supporting our project idea and making it come true for us to participate at the conference. Though it has been a huge amount of work to make everything happen, it was worth every single minute of work! Besides that, TAMK profits from our project as well, because we got a lot of students interested in our programme, we came back home with lots of suggestions for improvements of our studies, companies got attentive to TAMK Media in FINLAND and the Media programme has now its own showreel that can be presented any time by everyone to demonstrate what we do.
Alexandra & Sabrina on stage
“TAMK - design your future” - as we named our presentation at the FMX conference.