Creative Minds - Isabelle Eoka's Profile

My Products

Wow! Looking back through the year where do I start.

I have worked on many projects designing and producing a range of diverse products. From creating a garment, designing a website to painting a picture using watercolours. Also I have written a few articles.

We collaborated with Weymouth College to create a canvas, which had to include both colleges in one painting. On my canvas, the diversity of Newham College is portrayed by the different coloured hands, while the stones in the background show the fact that Weymouth is known for Portland stone.

The assignments that I enjoyed the most were the production of our 'Street Fashion' article and the photography task in which I produced a version of a classic Andy Warhol picture.

I like these activities best because it allowed me to take ownership of my work and be creative. For example when I worked on the 'Street Fashion" project, I had to define what I thought 'street fashion' was. For me, my idea of street fashion was ‘lots of colours with no boundaries’ compared to high fashion where there are boundaries. Have you ever seen a model walk down the catwalk wearing red and pinkish jeans, a yellow top and green shoes? This was what I was looking for when we were given a camera to hit the streets of London to explore this issue.

After taking my pictures, I wrote a feature about street fashion and added my images and text to a white, green and blue Nike Air Force 1 shoe background.

Using one of my flower photographs I interpreted one of Andy Warhol's pop art pictures. The one of Marilyn Monroe, where he's duplicates the same picture but added a different effect to each of them. I did this by manipulating the original image of the flower three times in Photoshop. This image is presented on the slide show animation at the top of my page.

My Focus

Eoka, Isabelle Eoka.

I am a multicultural and multilingual speaking young woman that has recently moved to London from Sweden.

I am of Congolese heritage but was born and raised in Sweden. I have also lived in Paris, France, for a short while.

I have always had an interest in media but there was very few lessons taught in my secondary school.

When I moved to London, I started to look for a local college that provided media courses and heard about the new Creative and Media diploma and that is why I am on this programme at Newham College.

This course has provided me with an introduction to the media industry and given me the opportunity to work with other students, teachers and industry trainers who have the same ambitions and interests that I have.

I have also had the opportunity to work with a professional photographer and gain valuable work experience working for the Press Association and Evening Standard.

Being on this course has ridiculously increased my interest in writing and I am actually writing a book now!

My Ambitions

I would really love to get my foot through the industry door. Whilst knocking I would like to continue brushing up and improving my new found media skills in order to pursue my main ambitions: to become a columnist, an author, a journalist and a reporter.

My Presentation

For our exhibition we had to present the work that we've done. I chose to exhibit my Weymouth board and some of my photography work.

We had several exhibition meetings as a group. In these meetings we had to decide matters such as, the venue, date and time, duration, layout and catering and safety issues. Our plan was to keep to tight deadlines. So, during the meetings everyone kept individual notes to be able to follow on from where we left off. It was really good because everyone had their say and everyone contributed as well. In our final meetings we discussed ways of promoting our exhibition and how we were going to get our feedback.

The people that attended our exhibition were staff, students, managers and even some teachers. The day went well.

My Reflections:

Over the past year I have gained knowledge about the media industry and I have added these skills to my skills set. Skills such as interviewing techniques, website development and photo optimisation. My photography work has allowed me to be more creative and spontaneous.

These new found skills have made me confident, motivated and more able to approach others.