As part of this week's Discover! Creative Careers Week, ScreenSkills' Head of Careers, Margaret Burgin, shares her diary of the activities taking place across the country to highlight the range of roles available in the creative industries.
This has been quite a week. ScreenSkills has contributed to Discover Creative Careers week by working with screen companies to provide visits and workshops for over 300 students.
On Monday students from St Helen’s College in Merseyside visited ITV’s Granada Reports newsroom at MediaCityUK in Salford. Their teacher Natasha Kearsley told us they “had a fantastic time”.
Still in Manchester, Maise Maguire, the Executive Producer of The Voice, visited Manchester College to talk to a group of performing arts students and tell them how the show is made.
On Tuesday, there was an awful lot going on and I got to visit that famous soap street in Weatherfield – Coronation Street. Two schools, Hathershaw College from Oldham and Lord Derby Academy from Liverpool, did a storyline workshop on the underworld set. Their task was to come up with new story ideas for the show. They were helped by the Corrie story team and had a surprise visit from two of the cast Elle Mulvaney (who plays Amy Barlow) and Tanisha Gorey (who plays Asha Alahan).
Also on Tuesday, much further south, students from Thomas Tallis school in Greenwich and Prendergast Ladywell School in Lewisham visited Molinare, a postproduction house in London. Teacher George Field from Thomas Tallis said: “It was such a fantastic opportunity. The students are still talking about it.”
On Wednesday and Thursday, students at Reddish Vale School in Stockport and Stratford School Academy in Newham, welcomed ITV into their schools for a “Create the next big hit” workshop where they worked on new programme ideas and pitched them to ITV staff.
On Friday I was back with the soaps on the other side of the Pennines, and a storyline workshop at Emmerdale with ITV Yorkshire and students from New College in Bradford, the Holy Family Catholic School from Keighley and St Mary’s Menston from Ilkley. The storylines pitched by groups of students included some great ideas including family trauma, a pretend murder, and a topical tale about dangerous dogs. At lunchtime they toured the set, and then each group wrote a short script. What the students didn’t know is that three of the cast, Joe-Warren Plant who plays Jacob, Roxy Shahidi who plays his mother Leyla, and Isabel Hollins, who plays Victoria, were going to come to do a read-through of their scripts. The three cast members did a Q&A and stayed long enough to pose for selfies.
And then it was in the car and 180 miles south to Elstree where on Saturday morning, I got the chance to visit my third soap of the week, this time at the BBC where it was It was a day off for the Eastenders cast. Although Albert Square was empty, and it was raining yet again, students from The Chauncy School and Parmiter’s School enjoyed a tour of the set and a talk about BBC opportunities. The group from Parmiter’s were accompanied by teacher Jo Zanetti who said: “it was an amazing morning, and the students were buzzing from the experience!”
As if that wasn’t enough, Adam from the Ubisoft games studio in Gosforth visited Academy 360 and Sunderland College to talk about careers in Games in the North East.
I really enjoyed the week; it was so rewarding to see so many young people excited by the chance to look behind the scenes and see the variety of different roles who work together to produce great content for screen.