DIGITAL EVENTS and LIVE STREAMING SPECIALIST

DIGITAL EVENTS SPECIALIst

During the pandemic, it became clear that the events industry as it was known was going to have to adapt quickly in order to find a route through the crisis. As a live broadcast producer, I’ve been creating content to engage screen audiences for years. As the events industry moved online, a space emerged for experienced content makers to use their skills to take material hitherto used in a live event environment and not only put it online in a slick and televisual manner, but to take that content and enrich it to improve the audience experience from that of a passive observer to an engaged contributor. Since the autumn, I have produced more than twenty live streamed broadcasts for corporate clients, and supported the redevelopment of content for a number of mixed pre-recorded and live events taking place in a digital context. With the democratisation of screen media being one of the other cultural effects of the pandemic, increasingly clients and makers will own the means of the distribution channels for their content. I am really excited by this move, and see it as a huge opportunity for artists, producers, clients and creatives to collaborate free from the confines of the traditional broadcast and events media. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to support organisations to create relevant, disruptive and progressive content going forward.

DIGITAL PRODUCER OF ORIGINAL ARTISTIC WORK

At heart, I’m a creative. Alongside my production work, I’m developing a number of my own artistic projects, and I love supporting the work of colleague artists. I’ve been approached recently to get involved in an application to the Arts Council to curate the digital reimagining of a piece of theatre being developed by a theatre maker friend. Having spent a great deal of time thinking about how the online audience engages with art online, I’m excited to take part in some research and development around a specific piece and see where this goes.

WORKSHOPS, LECTURES, CREATIVE DIRECTION

I was engaged by Birmingham Conservatoire recently to support their ‘Soundlab’ project participants to imagine and create the concept for a music video for a piece of music they have spent the last term creating and rehearsing. This work involved the delivery of a set of online workshops to the contributors, initially teaching them about how music videos are made and created, then offering some prompts for participants to begin their own creative thinking about what the story of their music video could be. We focussed our responses around the creation of some characters at first. Then we used the stories generated from these characters to devise the story of our film, which I worked to develop into a storyboard for the video which I then presented back to the group. At this time of being separated from each other through the necessities of social distancing, we conduct all of our work online, and we developed a story that incorporated a look at what life is like for all of us right now into the story. I’m very excited to see what emerges as the final video. I’ve now also been contacted by another University to deliver a lecture on the subject of putting theatre on screen, so I’m busy collecting material for that now.