Interviews, Coffee and Networking

I promised myself some time off when I got back from the Championsheeps and despite my temping agency trying desperately to get me to work odd weeks here and there I've stuck to my word and turned down the irrelevant job offers. Now before you start thinking this is a really stupid idea (I am still in two minds about agreeing with you) I should add that I have had a flurry of interviews and networking things to attend.

Last week I had an interview to work in the art department on a very exciting sounding feature film. That was  on the Tuesday and seeing as I am very new to working in the art department and have only worked on the Hollyoaks promo before as a set dresser I suddenly had to dash around Manchester trying to put together a portfolio the day before the interview with only two decent photos to add to it. Plus it was the first portfolio I've constructed since I did A Level Art so the man who was interviewing me probably was thinking "what a bloody joke"...I know I certainly was! So that was last Tuesday and I still haven't had an answer about that job despite a few texts and phone calls trying to chase up an answer. 

On Thursday there was a networking doo at one of the buildings in MediaCity. It's called the Greenhouse and it's where a nice assortment of small indie production companies and other small businesses live. On my way there I went via the Blue Peter Garden and was delighted to discover that someone has erected a little cage type dome thing that goes over the pond and there are real live fish happily swimming around in there now. Getting back to the reason I was there (well apart from all the cupcakes, ice cream and macaroons I was promised) the networking event was very well put together. They had the advantage of all their tenants being in their own offices so it was easy to navigate and target the companies that you actually wanted to introduce yourself to. I came away from it feeling that I made some very useful contacts.

Last Saturday there was a cider festival happening in the centre of Manchester. This had been in my diary for months as I have been moaning rather regularly about the lack of decent cider that's been missing from my life whilst going out and about since I moved here. I come from a little village in the depths of Gloucestershire and down there they feed it to us before we progress onto solids so cider is something that is very dear to my heart. Originally it was going to be just my flatmate and I attending but two days before this most wondrous and hallowed event I tweeted about it and then all of a sudden somehow it became a mini networking afternoon/evening for people who I've worked with in the industry and people who I'd like to work with in the future...the power of Twitter hey!

On Monday I had a big scary but mega exciting interview at the BBC for a job in the indie acquisitions team in the Children's department and for the first time ever at a BBC interview my brain didn't turn to mush and I was giving coherent answers to questions that in the past I have just fallen flat on my face with before I've even had a chance to get any words out of my mouth. Obviously my plan that I came up with in November actually worked, which was to move as close to MediaCity as possible so that I could change my perception of the BBC from the mystical fantasy palace where all my dreams and wishes would magically come true yet when invited to an interview would not feel I am worthy of working in such an awesome place - to - a nice company that I'd quite like to work for. I'm not sure if I have the job yet or not but the interviewers said as we were wrapping up that I gave a very strong interview (I was waiting for the but...) so I guess that's a result in itself. They promised to let me know by the end of the week so they have roughly a day and an hour and half to keep that promise. 

I had a coffee date on Tuesday with a little chum of mine who I work with on Dickinson's Real Deal and then yesterday morning I went for an interview at an indie company who specialise in commercials who are looking for freelance art department people, production assistants and runners (I took my newly made portfolio and flashed my two photos from the Hollyoaks promo at them) and then another coffee date in the afternoon with a relatively newly formed indie company that I've built up a nice little relationship up with on Twitter. It was a way of introducing ourselves to each other and putting a face to the tweets but we ended up have a good natter for about an hour! Next week I'm off to Sheffield to volunteer at the Children's Media Conference and then I get back on Friday and volunteer over the weekend down at the BBC for Give an Hour. 

So my plan to take some time off hasn't really been any less manic than if I had been working, and much more so than if I had agreed to sit on a reception with no way of furthering my career or stimulating my brain cells. 

Carry on Temping

I'm at a tricky stage in my freelancing career where I'm starting to get my name known by production companies in the North West and people are asking for my assistance on set and in the production office. Unfortunately the jobs aren't for long enough periods for me to pack in my temping-on-the-side just yet. The trouble is I get bored easily when I'm not working and also slightly panicky so if a temping agency phones me during a quiet period asking me to work I will instantly say yes.

At the moment I'm in a period where I'm temping for a couple of weeks to tide me over until I journey down near Luton for 10 days to run around Whipsnade Zoo with a bunch of overly excitable kids as part of an event put on by the guys from Aardman (read more about that here). Originally this temping contract was only going to be for a couple of days which is exactly what I wanted but then it got extended and extended some more and now I'm here for a whole 3 and a half weeks (and dashing around the country on Saturdays to work on Dickinson's Real Deal). I do this until the 30th May then I travel down south on the 31st, pick up a hire car and work for 10 days solidly missing all the Jubilee bank holidays as I go. It works out that I have just 5 days off in the period between 3rd May - 10th June whereas most people with normal jobs will have had a total of 15.

I need to get me some of these mittens made by Jennifer Westwood

I'm not complaining and I wouldn't have it any other way. It's really nice to be busy but what started as temping for a few days to stop my brain from shutting down completely between freelancing jobs has snowballed out of control and I'm left feeling that perhaps I should start saying no to these pesky temping agencies that phone me up to work all the time. The major down side is that I've had three production companies phone me in the meantime asking if I can do ad hoc days of work with little to no notice (one phoned me up at 09:40 one morning asking if I could be in Liverpool by 11am!) and I've have had to turn them all down due to me not keeping myself available for such eventualities. If the work had been longer than a day I would obviously pack in my temping job in a flash but this particular agency has been very good to me in the past and the people I'm working with at the moment are all very lovely. I'm always the first person they ask for when they need a spare pair of hands so I don't want to piss them off by leaving them stranded because they will just go out and find another favourite temp and when I'm going through another dry work patch they won't be there to help me out with my rent and my bills and more importantly fuel my alcohol and cigarette addictions.

When I finish my manic working stint in a month's time I'm having a week off and bumming around London for a bit. Hopefully by the end of this spell I will have sorted myself out and shall rise to greet the dawning of a new era...in which my tv and temping work come together in a great and glorious future!*

* Obviously I would rather be in a position where I can ditch the temping altogether, I just really wanted to throw a Lion King reference in there.

My First Ever Invoice

On Friday I created my first ever invoice for actual paid work within the industry. I almost feel like an adult who trades her services for a monetary value or something ridiculous like that and it feels absolutely bloody a-maze-ing! After four years of earning very little in this industry I was beginning to think that being able to make a living from working in the biz was a complete and utter myth. Now I have a bit of paper (which is hopefully the first of many) to tell me that it can actually be done. I think I might even frame it and put it up on the wall.

As super temp of the century (these are other people's words, not mine) I have seen and churned out a fair few invoices in my time. It is a boring and monotonous job and not very fun at all, especially when you get to see how much companies charge for their services in comparison to how much they give you in return for being their slave girl. However, when you're creating invoices for yourself, it is a rather daunting but exhilarating task, especially if it's on the back of your first properly paid freelancing gig within the industry you actually want to work in. Anything could go wrong, you're calculations could be out so you double and triple check just to be on the safe side whilst all the time thinking "I can't believe I'm actually being paid a decent wage for this". Then there's the issue of how to plan your referencing system. Even in my long and wonderful years of admin based roles, most of the time I just have to make do with whatever referencing system is already in place but when you have to start one from scratch it's a whole different story. Then there's the layout to think about and the potential typos to avoid and the formal business lingo you have to adhere to and a million and one other things that you've never really worried too much about before when churning out invoices but when it becomes personal then it can take hours to do just the one.

So now my first ever invoice has been typed up and sent off and I feel a little throb of victory coursing through my veins at the whole process. All I need to do now is wait to be paid and then have a nice long chat to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs about how to deal with tax and National Insurance issues which I am not looking forward to. Things like that confuse the hell out of me and I'm just very glad that it just so happens that my first paid solo freelancing gig happened after April and not before. 

Spring Rebrand - Fiona Style!

A few weeks ago I was at a creative industries networking event in Manchester and met a lovely little lady called Christine Charnock who has done some very exciting graphic designing (go and browse her website at  http://www.christinecharnock.co.uk/). She was my drinking buddy for the evening and we exchanged business cards at the end of the evening as you do at these things. I was very impressed with the card she handed me, it was so smooth and pretty and it certainly put my crappy free Vistaprint cards to great shame.

At the same event I also met some rather...shall we say, interesting characters who had ideas for TV programmes and with my existing knowledge of the industry, were keen to keep in touch. It was then that I became very aware of the fact that when I ordered my business cards many moons ago, I thought it would be a good idea to include my home address on them. Now normally I wouldn't think twice about this but as it's really not necessary in this day and age to keep in touch by post I would rather not be handing out my home address to random people who I've only just met. Also I seem to have a natural ability to attract the nutters (birds of a feather and all that...) and seeing as I have only just recently managed to shake off all the crazies that I seem to have collected in Chester over the years I'm not really keen on the idea of brand new crazy people potentially showing up at my front door without warning. So it was then that I decided the time was right for me to upgrade my business cards and  not include my address on the new ones. 

The next day I was sitting behind a reception desk at my non industry related temping job and the only thing I was required to do all day was to sit there, smile and say "hello" to people as they walked past. The company also had a no internet policy so I started brain storming ideas for my business card design on a scrap of paper. I needed it to be something television related obviously but I also wanted it to be fun and completely different to everybody else's. By the end of the working day I had put down my crayons (and by crayons I mean an archaic version of Microsoft Paint) and I had completed phase one of my grand business card design and this is how it looked...

And thus Test Card Fiona was spawned into existence! If you hadn't guessed already phase two included a photo shoot of myself playing noughts and crosses with a freaky looking clown. Firstly I needed to take a trip to Abakhan and get my sewing kit out to create the clown. After fiddling about for ages trying to remember which bits to turn inside to stitch the damn thing up properly  (it's been a while since I've attempted to sew something together which didn't have clear step by step instructions at the end of a knitting pattern) I finally ended up with this truly terrifying thing....

Finding a blackboard proved most difficult as no stationary or office supply shop seem to stock them. Of course I could have ordered one online but wasn't really willing to pay a lot of money for it and didn't really want to wait a week for it to show up. Luckily for me, my flatmate is an Apply fanboy and recently purchased an iPad so in order to keep him happy (he likes trying to justify his purchase by telling me how useful it is) I decided to put his new toy to a genuine and almost practical use for the day. I found a very nice looking blackboard app to download and then it was all steam ahead for the photo shoot.

Now there's a very good reason why I like to work behind the camera and that's so I don't have to have a mass of cameras in my face. I'm not a very photogenic person and all the family photo albums are filled with me either trying to hide from the person taking the photo or pulling the most ridiculous faces because I can't actually arrange my face in a normal fashion when there is a camera pointing at me. As such, it took me from the time Neighbours finished at lunchtime to half way through Pointless (about three and a half hours all told) before I managed to get a semi decent shot of myself.

Rumour has it that the girl who features on Test Card F was actually using her left hand in the photo and it was flipped around afterwards. I'm not quite sure why this happened, possibly because suppressed left handed school children up and down the country would complain that if the girl in the Test Card was allowed to use her left hand then they should be as well. Whatever the reason I was quite glad to discover this news as I am exclusively left handed, as in I don't use my right hand ever (except for holding shopping bags), so flipping the photo in post was always going to happen but it was nice to know that at least I was being authentic to the original  as much as I possibly could.

This is the finished article, my exciting new business cards are being printed off and should be arriving sometime next week. I can't wait to start handing them out to people, the back is also pretty exciting but I will wait until I receive them before unveiling them properly. Until then, sleep well, don't have nightmares and if you are afraid of clowns, hope to god that you don't bump into me and ask for my contact details!

Scan Girl's Proudest Moment

Love Life starts tonight, Thursday 15th March, 9pm on ITV1

For almost two years of my life I was temping for a company where my entire day consisted of scanning an endless amount of paperwork and saving it onto the company's network drive. It was a rather pitiful existance at the time and the only variety in my day was hanging out in the smoking hut, eating lunch and a whole hour of bliss where I sat on reception and flirted outrageously with contractors. I soon developed the nick name of Scan Girl, the lamest super hero the world has ever seen but one who will smoothly and efficiently rid your office of excess crap. I was the fastest scanner in the west, so much so that I developed a most ingenious way of pulling out staples really fast by spreading a huge pile of paperwork out like a fan and then wizzing over it with the staple muncher. It was so effective that I gave myself repetitive strain injury as a result which was highly ammusing to the rest of the team but then they all got quite jealous when I ended up with a beautiful technicoloured electronic stapler and ergonomic staple remover after making a stand for my rights.
I worked there for a year then they got rid of all their temps including me and then they begged me to come back to them nine months later because nobody else was prepared to do the scanning in my absence. I then stayed on there for another eight months until the next round of redundancies happened. After that I decided to stop wasting my life away in Chester and move to Salford to be more proactive with infiltrating the television industry. I admit that another big reason for me moving was so that this company (lovely as all the people in my department were) couldn't come crawling back to me for a third time. I had nightmares of being in that role for years and years and then one day realising that I had scanned my soul away.
I moved to Salford in November so that I could better my chances at making a successful career for myself in the television industry. Outside of London, Greater Manchester is the place to be. With the BBC moving a load of departments up here this has attracted other broadcasting companies into the city and strengthened the ones that were already based here. Besides which, the people are friendlier, renting a flat is a lot cheaper and you  can actually use your mobile phone on all public transportation systems.

At the start of the year I was offered a couple of weeks work experience with Red Production Company. They are a very highly renowned independent production company and make some amazing television dramas. During my time there, I was asked if I could scan a copy of all the actor agreements (along with some other bits and pieces) for a drama called Love Life which was in its last stages of post production at the time. I found it quite ironic that I had moved to pastures new only to be faced with the thing I was running away from. However just to put it into some sort of perspective, this scanning took half a day rather than 20 months.

I soon discovered that Love Life had some very exciting cast members, Alexander Armstrong and Rob James-Collier (aka Thomas, "the bastard" footman from Downton Abbey) to name but a few. I discovered that scanning in moderation and in the right environment can be quite pleasant and exciting...also it helps if you are as easily amused as I am. I went home that night, switched on Pointless and got quite excited knowing that I had been working for a drama that contained an actor that was there on the telly right in front of my eyes.

Love Life starts tonight, Thursday 15th March at 9pm on ITV1 and I promise you that it will be amazing. It's a three part drama and you can always record Glee and watch that later. I know my part in it wasn't even really a part at all but I will still be watching and getting highly excited thinking to myself that I contributed at least four hours of my life to the programme but hey, this is the industry that I love and even the menial tasks that under any other conditions I would consider gouging my eyes out as a better alternative can give me the greatest satisfaction. As Mary Poppins famously once said, in every job that must be done there is an element of fun...luckily for me I find the fun in practically everything I do within this industry because it's all awesome.