Film & TV Talk (Sem 2 Wk 4)

After lunch time there was a talk in the lecture theatre about how to get involved in the Film and TV industry in the West Midlands.

The organisation was Create Central running a Skills Accelerator session on – Navigating Film and TV production. From left to right

1 – Perjeet Aujla an Executive Producer in unscripted for Children’s tv, studied for History and English with Masters in film and tv.

2 – Jane Ray RTS consulting in local government , mentions transferable skills from her business devt. into TV

3 – Sam Gillie from Filming in England. She links crew to production jobs working for a screen agency

4-Martin Simms – leader of production central, started as runner on daytime tv, location manager

Martin

All come in via different routes into the industry

Production central is a services agency, bringing everyone to a location, crew facilities and support etc.

Increasing activity in filming in WM to get more people involved

Shows how many programmes are created in and around the Midlands who might be based at Digbeth Loc Studios but reach out to other locations in the region.

Sam

Sam as crew manager, national screen agency, covering whole of England.

Work with feature films and high end tv productions

National Crewing Service, National Crew Directory

Free to sign up

Filminginengland.co.uk/crew-directory

Some skills gaps which are easier ways into the industry

Jane

Works for Royal Television Society

Insta @rtsmidscentre

Careers fair in octobers

Perjeet

Perjeet Aujla is an Executive producer, means that she checks that the channel is happy with the results of the production

Heavily freelanced industry

Self marketing

Be broad with experience and not job title

Lead with skills not credits

Jobs are more likely to be found in your network

Skills are important from many other jobs, it’s not important if you’ve worked only in tv etc.

www.createcentraluk.com/talenthub

Tailor CVs and Cover Letters to fit the job being applied for.

Reflection

The presentation was a reminder of the good things to come out of the West Midlands or Central area in terms of Film and TV. There were several short videos showing famous films and TV programmes that have been filmed or produced in the region, from Bond to Peaky Blinders.

Whilst I am not directly interested in getting into the FIlm & TV industry, it might come in handy as an opportunity to investigate. Ian Gavan and Pete Muller both do photography for programme idents on Netflix/iPlayer etc. so it might be a possible route.

My son is a musical theatre/drama graduate and I thought that some of this presentation was relevant to him, the crew directory might prove to be a good opportunity for him to make some links into the industry too. I was impressed by the presentation skills of the visitors too and found that it was very inspirational also.

It was a worthwhile use of 80 minutes before I went back downstairs to write up my notes on the review, this presentations and my project.