EVALUATION

Level 4 Creative Enterprise Evaluation

The Level 4 Creative Enterprise course is made up of a variety of elements. The course has both a practical and theoretical side. The practical side of the course involves working as a team with the group, but also developing your own skills while creating a short film in quite a short timeframe. We also had to do skills development as part of the theoretical and practical part of the course, in order to further develop skills that can be used for each of our individual creative careers. The practical side of the course also helps to develop communication skills and enables students to take part in different work experience or volunteering with businesses that link to their own. On the other hand, the theory side of the course was a lot more independent. It mainly focused on how each student can develop their own creative enterprise. As part of the theory side of the course, we had to research different creative businesses and laws, etc, that would relate to the business we were trying to make. Throughout the course each student would show some degree of professionalism when creating their own business and developing business-like qualities.  As well as work experience and voluntary opportunities, there were a numerous amount of interesting talks held by guest speakers who each had their own, or played an important role, within a creative business. Many of the talk also included a workshop which allows students to experiment and develop key skills which would later be used for their business or the practical side of the course.

When starting the course I began planning the starting point and end point of my creative business, as well as beginning to research the copious amounts of laws and regulations that come with running your own business. My chosen creative business was to be a freelance musician/concert violinist. As my business revolved around music, I helped develop the scores for the short film as part of the practical side of the course, which also helped me develop composition skills which would be needed for my career. When starting the course, I set out to develop my musicality, as well as learn about how to create and manage a business. To do this I further researched the music business and what jobs were involved in being a freelance musician. However, I also used websites such as gov.uk to acquire knowledge of Regulations and legislation that would need to be thought about and incorporated into the making of my business. I believe that this was achieved as I now know a lot more about how businesses are created, developed and prolonged. In order to keep track of what work and research had been completed, I would regularly update my “creative enterprise blog” and keep documents of all work.

For my creative venture, I researched a variety of legal and regulatory guidance that would need to be followed, in order for my business to be successful. For instance, I researched; Copyright, The Data Protection Act 2018, Licenses (Public Performance) and Location Releases. I believe that Copyright is needed for my business as this would be used to keep ownership of my music and make sure that people would need to ask for permission to use it, instead of stealing it and claiming it as their own. The Data Protection Act of 2018 would be used to manage both my own data and the data of my audience carefully. A license may be needed to perform publicly and permission would be need from anyone who could be caught on camera when filming.

As part of the course as a whole we had to follow a lot of legal and regulatory guidance. For example, filming both inside and outside of the college meant that we had to follow Health & Safety regulations. Health & Safety is something that would need to be observed with any business and most definitely observed by all students and staff at the college.  We also learned about SWOT and PESTEL which is used when managing a business and how we can add it to our own business plans. As a class, we also researched; Cultural Policy, Location Releases, Trademarks, Filming in Public, GDPR, Intellectual Property, Child Labour Laws,  Public liability Insurance, The Competition Act 1998 and The Enterprise Act 2002. Learning each of these laws and regulations gave me a much better understanding of what it is like to own a business and helped me to come up with my own business plan.

In conclusion, by studying the Level 4 Creative Enterprise course, I believe I have learned and developed a large variety of skills that can be used in the future. My next steps will be going to University to study Music Performance and Teaching. Once this is finished I would like to look into playing professionally within an orchestra or teaching music. I am also looking at working on my days off from University to teach young children the violin. I believe that all skills learned on this course will help me with working as a musician in the future and would also help me when teaching as it has given me a much better understanding of how to run a stable and successful business. At the beginning of the course, I knew very little about how to run a business and only really had skills to use in music. However, as the course is coming to an end, I believe I have a much broader understanding of running a business and my skills in music have also improved. As part of the course, I also followed feedback from creative professionals, as well as feedback given from tutors (who are technically, also creative professionals), as well as self-assessing my own work. This allowed me to spot the flaws in my business plan and improve them, which is a skill that I believe will be needed in the future as it allows me to reflect and evaluate parts of my business and helps to give a much better understanding of how to improve on business flaws.