top of page
PASSION
PROJECTS
Last year, I was asked to speak along with key members of my company as a panellist at the 2023 UK Creative Festival in Dreamland, Margate. The 2-day festival is a work experience and networking event hosted yearly by the Creative Circle Awards and is designed to give school leavers, recent graduates and young creatives access to the essential resources and opportunities they need to break into the industry and land their first jobs. Our company's panel talk was called 'Inform + Inspire: Unlocking The Industry For The Next Generation', which we all created together to break down all the key roles in the industry that young creatives might not be aware of and teach them how to work in them. We also each took turns explaining what our roles were and shared tips and expertise on how to stand out in the application process. Lastly, we ended our talk with an in-depth Q&A where we answered questions from the audience. My answers can be viewed at the following timecodes: 1.18, 6.49, 19.36, 26.17, 34.14 and 45.11.
Last July, I was asked to speak along with key members of my company as part of a panel at the 2023 UK Creative Festival in Dreamland, Margate. The 2 day festival is a work experience and networking event hosted yearly by the Creative Circle Awards and is designed give school leavers, recent graduates and young creatives access to the essential resources and opportunities they need to break into the industry and land their first jobs. Our company's panel talk was called 'Inform + Inspire: Unlocking The Industry For The Next Generation' which we all created together to break down all the key roles in the industry that young creatives might not be aware of and teach how to work in them. We also each took turns explaining what our roles were and shared tips and expertise about how to stand out in the application process. Lastly, we ended our talk with an in depth Q&A where we answered questions from the audience. My answers can be viewed at the following timecodes: 1.18, 6.49, 19.36, 26.17, 34.14 and 45.11 .
In 2022, I was fortunate enough to be one of the founding members of the employee resource group, the 'Black Employee Network' known as B.E.N., at VCCP. We created it because we wanted a safe space for Black and Ethnic Minority employees to connect with each other and receive mentoring, advice and resources from other Black employees within the company who they might not otherwise meet. For Black History Month that year, we asked our company for permission to create and run all the events as they were usually hosted by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team, but we wanted to use the month to offer businesses and talents in our own personal communities the opportunity to network with our company and equally, educate our company on the various histories and nationalities within Black Culture. We divided the month into four key pillars of celebration: Food, Fashion, Film and Music, and created weekly newsletters on each theme that were shared company-wide, discussing topics such as Black British TV shows that you might have never heard of, 10 Black British Designers to watch out for and the origins of Black Haircare. For physical events, we also hosted:
- A buffet lunch for the whole company with local African and Caribbean vendors.
-A vogue/ballroom fashion show with award-winning vogue dancers to celebrate the intersection of Caribbean Carnival Fashion and Queerness
-An office-wide music takeover where we played various Black Music Artists for part of each day in the office.
-Finally, we hosted a Film panel with a selection of notable Black British Filmmakers, Entrepreneurs and Writers such as Percelle Ascott and Tafara Makopa to discuss how they find working in the Creative Industry and what challenges they face to get their voices and work recognised.
The end result was an overwhelming success with back-to-back packed events, hundreds of commendations from our fellow employees and senior heads of departments, and an official recognition of positive impact from VCCP's Vice Chairman, Julian Douglas!
While working at VCCP, I was also given the incredible opportunity to be part of the production team entering the 2022 Straight 8 Shoot Out Film Competition. Straight 8 is a yearly film competition founded by independent Film Director Ed Sayers and involves 20 production companies from around the world who compete to make the best 'one take no edit' short film that must be shot exclusively with a Super 8 film camera. As part of the project I submitted two script ideas for the film, and managed to be voted runner up, so I then decided to volunteer to work on the shoot instead as the 1st assistant cameraman. The project took 6-8 weeks of extensive planning outside of work hours, regular production meetings and learning how to creatively problem solve our production issues, as the budget was extremely limited so we were reliant on our own personal connections and skills. Thankfully, our team managed to hand-make all of props together, score some free composed music for the soundtrack and enlist some wonderful upcoming talent to star in our 8 hour one day shoot. The end result was a 2 and half minute masterpiece titled 'Date Dreaming', which is a short romantic comedy and about the trials and tribulations of modern dating. Best of all, we managed to beat out 17 other companies and win the Bronze award for third place at the renowned Cannes Lions Festival!
bottom of page