How I combined my creative interests through cross-course collaboration

This article was written by Sustainable Festival Management BA(Hons) student Sam.

If you’re anything like me, there’s probably more than one way you like to create and you may have lots of diverse interests. 

When I was applying to university, it took me a while to decide which direction I wanted to focus on. It was between art, music, film-making or the Sustainable Festival Management course and I eventually settled on festivals, as I figured that’s a subject where all of these things come together! 

This turned out to be a pretty good assessment, as I quickly realised that being in Falmouth meant I had access to so many creative people and all kinds of facilities, from woodworking workshops to television cameras and recording studios - the list goes on. 

In the first year of my course, I found myself organising music events at the Fish Factory, a local art space in Penryn. Like many of Falmouth’s venues, Fish Factory welcomes a wide range of weird and wonderful student-led creative projects. With my events, I ended up having some Creative Music Technology and Popular Music students perform and some friends on the Television & Film Production course decided to film a mini-documentary about the process as part of their module. 

As any enthusiastic creative person might find, it wasn’t long before I got to know some of the wider networks in Falmouth and Penryn. This September, I collaborated with the Fine Art department to host a party at the Cornish Bank, an exciting venue in the center of town. I worked with some third-year students, who designed and installed audio/visual projection pieces in the venue whilst me and my friends performed the music. 

Meeting people from many different courses is exciting and working on interdisciplinary projects often reveals approaches you may have not considered before. There are so many ways to do this - the societies and Students' Union are a great example. Last year, I helped look after the beehives on campus with ‘BeeSoc’, alongside Falmouth and Exeter students studying a whole range of subjects. The SU societies are shared between Falmouth University and University of Exeter, which means we get the best of both worlds. There are currently over 150 student groups that you can join anytime and plenty of sports clubs. 

Cross-course collaboration is often built into the modules we study. Within my department - Cornwall Business School - many of my modules are shared or collaborative, meaning I get to work on projects with students from the Creative Events Management and Sustainable Tourism Management degrees, as well as sharing some lectures with students on Business courses. During 1st year, this involved collaboratively organizing an event in AMATA (Academy of Music and Theatre Arts) - my group’s event was a photography exhibition and the others worked on gigs and dance workshops. 

Part of my Sustainable Festival Management degree also involves attending workshop days at the Eden Project, where we get to work on real-life projects alongside the team there. These days are great opportunities to meet and learn from the people that run things there and collaborate in a more professional setting. We’re currently working on a project for next year, which involves hosting a day festival in the Biomes with live music, interactive art pieces and workshops. We’ve been getting lots of support from Eden staff throughout the process and absorbing some of their expertise.