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. 

Championsheeps Live at Whipsnade Zoo

Over half term I journeyed down to Whipsnade Zoo (it's near Luton) to work on a crazy but oh so awesome family event put on by a bunch of lovely people at SGA Productions in association with Aardman for Shaun the Sheep's Championsheeps. Trying to describe this event is quite a challenge but I shall try my very best. There were 6 different games that were adaptations to games that you would find at your average village fate/school sports day. We had a Naughty Pig Sack Race where the sacks had piggy bodies painted onto them and the contestants had to wear pig masks whilst people standing at the sides were encouraged to throw "fluffy poo" at them. We also had a coconut shy type welly wangling competition where people had to try to knock the farmer's heads off the scarecrows (pictured below).

There was also an egg and spoon race where you had a lot of chickens sat on baskets and you had to find chicks and eggs underneath the hens and distribute them into various coops and other baskets. We also had "sheep hopper" games and and cabbage throwing games and giant sheep rolling games and plasticine modelling and aerobics classes where we had to dance around like loons to S Club 7 for 15 minutes every hour. We were there for 10 days in total, including the weekends and Jubilee bank holidays. It rained lots and there were gale force winds and the giant inflatable sheep nearly blew away and we had to clear up animal dug from the roaming animals who had been trying out our race track during the night. On the other hand I essentially got paid to have a lot of fun. I love working with kiddies and there were certainly loads of them about.

I decided to hire a car for the duration of the job because I thought better of trying to navigate public transport during weekends/bank holidays. This I discovered was a very good idea. For those of you who don't know me personally, I haven't driven a car for four years due to mainly not having enough money to fund a car of my own. I'm not going to lie to you, before I picked up my little Peugeot 107 I was petrified. I was concerned about forgetting which pedals do what and navigating roundabouts and overtaking on duel carriageways during rush hour. When the man at the car hire place at Luton airport handed over the keys I walked out to the car thinking "why on earth did he just do that????" and I spent a good 10 minutes checking the mirrors were all pointing in the right place before setting off. It turns out however that the cliché "it's just like riding a bike" is actually true...albeit a rather large bike with four wheels, a roof and a motor.  By the end of the contract I was seriously tempted to drive back to Manchester in it.

So that's what I have been up to since the last time I posted. It has been a mad whirlwind of a ride and I would do it all again in a heartbeat! 

Hollyoaks Enchanted Forest Promo

At the start of this month I somehow managed to get myself working on the latest Hollyoaks promo and not just as a runner but as a set dresser, you know like a proper person's role where you get more exciting tasks to do than fetching tea for people who are too lazy/busy to do it themselves. I'm not quite sure how it all came about to be honest, I think a bit of shamelessly plugging myself on Twitter and Linkedin helped but to cut a long story short I was head hunted by a lovely lady called Emma Carroll who owns her own prop house in Manchester. She got in contact with me and asked if I wanted to be a set dresser on a Hollyoaks promo and obviously I said yes.

We were filming in a wood in Formby (just north of Liverpool) and it was the craziest and most exciting two days of my life. I have never worked on such a large production. As we pulled up at Unit Base on the first morning, there was a rather large car park packed full with vans and lorries and then at the location base we took up a whole field with other vehicles. There was a carousel and catering vans and huge marquees to eat in and coffee vans that made real coffee and golf buggies with trailers to lug all our gear on to set. The call sheet went on for nine pages and it was just a never ending list of names and contact numbers. This is how I always imagined what working in Hollywood must be like, not a one minute trailer for Hollyoaks!

If you haven't seen it yet watch it now and then I shall carry on with my tale...


So I was a key player in dressing the first scene with the tents and the bluebells, the smashed up living room scene, the lit up tent scene and I spent a good three hours or more in a field planting all of those poppies, buttercups and wild parsnips on my own. I had people walking their dogs commenting on the fact that they got very confused as they had never noticed poppies in that field before, that is until they spotted me hiding behind a clump of grass forcing them into the ground. I thought that if I could fool the locals into thinking they were real then surely that can only be a good thing...some of them even suggested I should leave them in after we had finished because the field looked much prettier than it did before.

There were about eight people in the art department alone and I loved working with every single one of them. We made a nice little happy family and they were all highly professional with so much vision yet so down to earth and they accepted me straight away and just let me get on with the things I was doing. The food from the catering van was possibly some of the nicest meals I've ever eaten and although we were on set for over 17 hours on the day we were shooting (we also had a day to prep the sets and a day to take it all down again) we always had enough food in our bellies to keep us going.

I can't begin to put into words just how much of an amazing experience the whole thing was. Not just being on the set of something as huge and visually stunning as this but to actually be dressing the sets for it as well was something that was just one big pipe dream for me up until very recently. The day after we wrapped I think I was awake for a total of six hours. I woke up at around 2pm to find that I physically couldn't move as all the muscles in my body had seized up, I went into the living room to say hello to my flatmate, had some breakfast, had a long hot soak in the bath and then fell asleep on my bed again with my towel still wrapped around me. It was a gorgeous day and I managed to miss all of it! Personally I'm not into running or going to the gym (you really don't need to be if you work in this industry) but I can only compare it to how it must feel to finish a marathon. You're physically and mentally exhausted, your body feels like it will never work again but you really can't beat that rush of pride and achievement.

For more news on this promo and to see a behind the scenes video (that features more of my poppy field and other exciting things) go to the Hollyoaks Blog. I also fully intend to put up some photos either this evening or sometime tomorrow so be sure to check back soon!

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. 

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/