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. 

Happy National Willy Fog Day

You may or may not know this but today is National Willy Fog Day. This most celebrated day was first dreamed up in a Broom Cupboard by Andy Crane back in 1988 to coincide with the transmission of the last episode of Around The World With Willy Fog when it was first broadcast on Children's BBC.   For those of you who need your memory refreshed (or don't know what the hell I'm on about), Willy Fog was a distinguished gentleman cartoon lion who decided to go on a jaunt around the world with his butler and his butler's best friend, Tico, who was a cheeky Italian hamster or something, picking up a beautiful Indian cat princess called Romy on the way. The story was based on Jules Verne's novel: Around the World in 80 Days and in my opinion is much better than the original story.

Prior to the monumental day, children up and down the land were encouraged to write in with a stamped addressed envelope and request a song sheet with the lyrics of the theme tune so that when the day arrived everyone could all sing it in unison from the comfort of their own sitting rooms. Legend has it that in the lead up to the event, Television Centre was so inundated with sacks of mail that they needed to hire extra staff to keep up with the demand. To this day, Andy Crane still receives emails and tweets from people wishing him a happy National Willy Fog Day (they're not all from me I promise). So have a lovely Willy Fog filled day, if you don't have the complete box set to feast you eyes upon [then shame on you] have a look the clips below and feel free to sing along to your heart's content.


Back in the Broom Cupboard in 1988

This continuity link was broadcast last Christmas on the CBBC Channel and I may have got a tad excited about seeing Andy Crane back on CBBC

Charity Videos...The Mancunian Way

At the start of March I was working on a promo video for a local charity, Forever Manchester which was directed by Transmission Creative and produced by Visual Collective. The reasoning behind the video was to show that the charity uses a much more fun and original approach to fundraising rather than sending a load of chuggers* onto the streets to guilt trip passers by out of their money whilst they're on their lunch break.

It was an amazingly fun shoot to be involved in, we took over half of Piccadilly Gardens in the centre of Manchester and started our own flash mob by the fountains. Check out the video below and keep your eyes open for the little lad with the amazing Oscar the Grouch hat because he was a pretty awesome kid and he certainly had the best head wear I've ever seen!


*a chugger is an abbreviation of 'charity mugger', you know the people who follow you down the street trying to carry on the conversation after you've told them that you're not going to sign up to a monthly direct debit scheme in the middle of a public place without finding out more about the charity first. A chugger is not to be confused with one of Keith Chegwin's lesser known relatives.

To find out more about the charity and how you can get involved in fundraising with them, visit their website at http://www.forevermanchester.com/

PSHE Videos Never Looked This Good When I Was at School

At the beginning of the year I did a two week work experience placement at Red Production Company. I was helping out with a variety of different programmes that were in production at the time, mainly doing office based work but I also managed to get on set for a day. They were producing a series of short films for BBC Learning entitled Life Stories to highlight a variety of relationship and friendship issues which will be shown in schools as part of PSHE lessons and I was helping out as a floor runner.

My job on the day was to make sure all the children, chaperones and crew were happy and to ensure the cast were at the right place at the right time (make up/wardrobe/set etc). It was also my job to queue the children onto the set at the right time and generally help out with whatever needed doing. It was really great to be working on children's based content again and all the kids were absolutely fantastic and the crew were bloomin lovely. I was also highly impressed with the fact they had a catering van on location, which when you've been working on low budget indie films, you tend to get very excited about things like that and believe it to be the highest form of luxury. Not only did the catering van provide hot lunches and snacks throughout the day but when I arrived at 7am on the Saturday that we were filming, I was informed that breakfast was also included, a pick n mix hot breakfast butty with all the trimmings to be precise...heaven!

Anyway here is the finished video, it's a lovely little story about two school friends and it's a great feeling to watch it back and know that I played a part in creating it.



To watch the other videos in the Life Stories series visit the BBC Learning Zone website.

New Business Cards Please

I got home yesterday evening after working with the Dickinson's Real Deal crew (which is always a pleasure and so much fun) to find an exciting looking package waiting for me. I ripped it open and tipped out a little box containing my new business cards. The images are slightly darker than I would have liked them to be but on the whole I'm very impressed with the overall everythingness of the cards. Bring on the job offers!

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!

Life's a Treat With Shaun the Sheep

I've been told off in the past by friends and parents for doing voluntary work in the industry. However, as I have only recently moved to Manchester, giving a day or two of my time every now and again to a worthy cause can be good for my soul, it gets me out of the flat and gives me an opportunity to work with people in the industry.

As soon as I moved to Manchester at the start of November I was constantly badgering the BBC to help out with Children In Need until eventually I was pointed in the right direction and added to the list of volunteers. When the day came around, my designated job was chaperoning Pudsey Bear around MediaCity and also helping out with a teddy bear's picnic event put on for two sets of pre school kiddies. This however was over by 11am (and Pudsey had been whisked away by someone else) so I set about finding other things to do. The guys from Aardman Animations had some rather exciting games going on outside on the Plazza including Welly Wangling and  Championsheep competitions which involved running around an obstacle course rolling a sheep that was a metre and half in diameter and a coconut shy type welly throwing thing. It was all crazy fun and although they had designated people working on the games I helped out here and there  inbetween selling Children in Need merchandise. At the end of the day I helped them pack up all their gear and just happened to be there when the lady in charge passed round a piece of paper so we could write down our email addresses for any other future Aardman events and thought nothing more of it.

Fast forward four months and out of the blue, in amongst all the spam that Linkedin send me on a daily basis, I found an email in my inbox from the very same lady from Aardman who was looking for people to work on an event for a week over the summer down near Luton. My initial thought was "it's too far away" and then remembered that one of my best friends lives not so far away from there who hopefully wouldn't mind putting me up for a week and a bit. Then I read to the bottom of the email and saw how much they were willing to pay for me to stand in a field and have and awesome amount of fun (with extra money for travel expenses) and I thought that I needed to do it no matter if I have to live in a tent for the duration . Basically, with my really pathetic temping wage I would get the same amount for nine days work as I would sitting behind a reception desk for a month so it's a no brainer really. It has only taken me four years of working really low paid jobs whilst trying to fit it around slightly more secure mind numbing temping jobs and trying to scrape together enough pennies to pay rent and bills but this is my first paid job that I can comfortably afford to live off that will last longer than a day. I know it might not seem like much (after all it is only going to be for nine days) but I feel it's one huge giant leap in the right direction towards an actual career for me and it's a very exciting thought.