Tuesday 26 November 2013

Next Generation

Last week I spent a couple of days in Salford for the Next Generation event which was the student part of the Salford Media Festival. Over the 2 days I went to 6 sessions that we each aimed at giving students an insight into the media industry and giving us a helping hand into it.

How to break into TV...and stay there with Scott Martin (CBBC)
This session was led by Scott Martin, a producer for CBBC, and gave us loads of tips for breaking into the industry, from the usual careers advice to other places we can look to for getting the jobs we want and how to go about getting them.

Managing Productions in TV with Natalie Bolton and Judith Coker
Natalie and Judith are both Production Managers for the BBC and spoke to us about their role, what it entails and what route they took to get there as well as talking about what it's like to work in the industry in general.

How to write a winning CV for the Creative Industries
CV writing workshops are nothing to us as students but often they can be quite generic. This workshop was aimed at what employers in the creative industries are looking for when they see a CV so it was really helpful to us as it was designed to give us tips that would be relevant to the sector many of us are looking to go into.

Let Me Entertain You
Entertainment is a core genre for many channels, we all want to be entertained by TV, no matter how much we moan about - talent shows are getting samey, it's the same thing all the time, we want something new. Well, what is next? This session looked at what makes a good entertainment show and what sort of a future they have. Who knows, maybe the next big thing for entertainment shows will come from a student who attended that session.

Ben Fox - Showrunner
Showrunner is a relatively new term to the UK media industry and one that's come over from America - basically, you're the one in charge. Ben Fox is one of those Showrunners and shared with us what he does in his job as well as telling us some of the stories from what he's done, including showing us some clips from Emmy award winning Gettysburg.

Creating a World in a TV Studio
A lot of what you see on TV isn't really real, from the sets and the props used in them to the stunts. Duncan Howell is a Production Designer and has worked on programmes such as Shameless, In the Night Garden and The Royal. He talked about how he went about creating the sets for programmes - borrowing people's homes and redecorating them, building sets inside a studio of part of a room or even building a whole set outside of a terrace of houses like those used in Shameless or Coronation Street.

As well as attending the event, my time in Salford also included me introducing a friend to Wagamama for the first time, having the chance to catch-up with a couple of friends in Manchester that I haven't seen for a while and going exploring properly for the first time to finish my Christmas shopping before going to an art exhibition that a friend was exhibiting at - lager and potatoes, that was an experience in itself (you had to have been there).

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