When people think of interior design or architecture drawings, usually floor plans come to everyone’s mind first. However, a designer will quickly understand that a section drawing, that is a vertical slice through a building, space, object, etc., is the one that allows you to understand and test the experience of a design more effectively. […]
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I was delighted to attend a Google hangout recently and meet our Rest of World group of students at OCA. Students attended from Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Zambia, USA, Hungary and most impressive of all – Japan (Calling in from Japan impressed me the most, simply because it was 4am there at the time of […]
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In the last blog post we looked at how strict processes can be used in composition, taking examples mostly from minimalist composers. In this post we’ll be looking at a more open-ended type of process: probabilistic decision making. In the process music we looked at last time, each rule had a single possible interpretation, exactly […]
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I critique as I read so you get my thoughts as I go. (Big smiley emoji). Excitement welled in my chest. I’d spent years writing my novel, and I was so proud of it. I’d found a critique group, posted my first chapter, and here it was: my very first critique. I could see it […]
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I’m a tutor on OCA’s Interior Design courses. I was sent images of a model made by one of my students. It represented a pavilion design and was well made and interesting to look at. Trouble is, I had no idea how big it was supposed to be. The dictionary definition of scale is “The […]
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I am sure as a distance learner, you’ll likely be used to incorporating different technologies into your learning experience – I was certainly Zooming ‘before it was cool’ thanks to OCA meetings and I can’t help but notice how many learning tools we seem to be early adopters of. We’re also lucky to have […]
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Those of you who follow our OCA Creative Writing social media – in particular, the @ocawriters Twitter account – may have spotted a few celebratory posts earlier in the year. When we learned the course had achieved 100% student satisfaction in the 2020 NSS survey, we were all absolutely thrilled. ‘NSS’ stands for National Student […]
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When practicing writing visual descriptions, the scriptwriter works towards applying the few technical rules that are required by scriptwriting standards: scene heading with indication of time and space use of active verbs in the present tense brief paragraphs no camera directions describe only what can be seen and heard Their application aims at shaping the […]
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Sometimes during study we can hit a stumbling block which we can’t immediately solve by ourselves. When this happens, please don’t suffer in silence or let your studies fall by the wayside. Instead, reach out to your fellow students or your tutor if you’ve hit a brick wall and don’t know how to overcome it. […]
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At the beginning of October 2020, Helen Rosemier organised a Momentum Session with the theme Contamination/Curation, which was led by tutor, Bryan Eccleshall. Open to OCA students from all disciplines, the idea was to split all participants into groups of five with the brief of creating a curatorial proposal for an exhibition comprising works submitted […]
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