Bjorn Van Velzen

The NOS is a public broadcast corporation that has the task of providing the Dutch people media in the field of news, sports and events. I'm part of the sports section where I work on content for our social media channels.

The content we make is published on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and our own website NOS.nl. In the social media team, we focus mostly on Instagram and YouTube but sometimes we post the same items on the other platforms. We share sliders, video’s, quote’s, statistics and match results based on the latest sports news or special events.

Animated explainer videos

We create these videos to explain a type of sport or a certain event.

Sliders

Sliders are news articles made in a social media-friendly way. We translate articles into brief stories supported by graphic design. The sliders are not always based on written articles. Sometimes we create our own items because some subjects are only popular for the social media target audience. Like the new player ratings in the videogame FIFA.

NOS Sport Archive

The corona pandemic has its impact on sports as well. Lots of sports events had to be delayed or even cancelled. Normally we depend on these events, so we had to create new content to keep our social media channels alive. One of the concepts we chose to go for was the NOS Sport Archive. We used amazing old footage to show historic sports moments.

During my game artist education at Mediacollege Amsterdam, I had to work two periods of 6 months as an intern. But because I went on my first internship 6 months earlier than the rest of the students, I did three periods instead of two. The internship at Gamebasics was my third and final one.

I was part of the design team where I worked mostly on game assets and graphic design for marketing purposes. I had a great time meeting all the employees and I have learned a lot from the people I worked with. It was amazing to work on a game that is known all over the world by millions of people!

Graphic design

I had never worked on graphic design for social media before this internship and it was a great way to learn it. We made in-game live event announcements and social media posts.

Game assets

I made game assets like buyable items for character customization, icons and UI designs. It was a long time ago I worked with 3D software but one of the designers helped me get through it. The 3D assets are made in 3ds Max, which I had never used before. It was a little bit challenging but the feedback was very nice.

During my game artist education at Mediacollege Amsterdam, I had to work two periods of 6 months as an intern. But because I went on my first internship 6 months earlier than the rest of the students, I did three periods instead of two. The internships at Gamepoint were my first and second.

Internship period 1

In the first period, I have been working in a team with two other interns. A developer, a designer and an artist (me). Our main objective was to make and develop new game concepts. After pitching our ideas, we started to produce one of them. The games were casual (multiplayer) mobile games. Genres like: match 3, bubble shooter, puzzle and gamble games. We made five games in this period, so it was like five weeks per game. I worked mostly on UI but next to that, I was responsible for UX, animation, sounds and general game assets like backgrounds, particles (unity particle system), cards/boards for the card/board games and some 3D models.

Internship period 2

In the second period, the interns I was working with left and I joined the casino/platform team of Gamepoint. There we worked on casino game prototypes and the release of Gamepoint Casino. My responsibilities were UI/UX, game art, graphic design, sounds, animation, research and implementation in Unity. I worked on four prototypes and Gamepoint Casino got released!