POST
AUDIO POST SKILLS
Industry endorsement for ScreenSkills courses
The ScreenSkills Select initiative is designed as a bridge between universities and colleges and the screen industries.
It provides a directory of courses in the UK that are addressing the main priorities for screen employers. Around 120 courses have been approved, after being independently assessed by a ScreenSkills industry team, which has rigorous criteria to check courses for industry-relevance and links to employers. With content and teachers always changing, they also provide annual feedback.
On top of this, ScreenSkills funds a series of employability training events, where industry professionals give information on getting in and on in the business. How to become a runner is at the top of the list.
ScreenSkills Select endorsed colleges get various benefits, including online industry insight sessions, Open Doors events and an Annual Congress, with a raft of industry speakers. A Select partnership manager works with course leaders to help students build personal industry connections. The accreditation can also introduce colleges to local industry working groups if they’re in Manchester, Bristol or Belfast, the West Midlands, Cardiff, Yorkshire and Scotland. Select’s industry advisory group includes Natascha Cadle co-founder of Envy Post.
One of the students who used Select to find the right course is Tom Holmes, who recently graduated from West Herts College with a Level 3 Diploma/Extended Diploma in Creative Media Production: Film and TV, equivalent to three A levels. He is now working as a Foley Assistant at post-production house Molinare. After doing a Media Studies GCSE, he went to the ScreenSkills Select website to find the right next step in education. “The course really focused on being vocational” he says, including work experience as a priority. And it was flexible, allowing him to work with RSA Films, and do two BFI Academy courses specialising in sound.
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sat with me last week and we started learning about how to strip dialogue for an M&E, and that’s straight to the point…This is what you need to get the job done.”
Sometimes students arrive with wonky practical knowledge. While Pro Tools, or Reaper are standard in the industry, they aren’t necessarily taught in colleges, despite the free versions. Sometimes they’re using Logic, because their background is music. Or the knowledge is superficial. “They often know how to use software but not how that software is put together. Why it works,” says Bray at Clear Cut. “So that manifests itself when something doesn’t work, or when they have to do something that is different or unusual.”
There’s agreement that students are often prepared creatively, or technically, but seldom both. Addis has been consulting with a couple of university courses, suggesting a sensible balance.
Getting such valuable industry input is increasingly the role of dedicated industry outreach staff employed by colleges. They will work with industry professionals to formulate content, recruit guest lecturers and set up work experience. “Industry liaison people are really important; I can’t emphasise that enough” says Cadle. “It comes down to an enormous amount of time, but it’s valuable for both students and industry to connect, to speak with each other.”
Molinare creative director Glen Gathard sees supporting colleges as a way of encouraging the industry to diversify its workforce, rather than relying on informal recruitment. “We’ve supported people like West Herts College in getting their ScreenSkills accreditation, and advising them on what skills the colleges need to give the students to give them the best possible chances when accessing companies like our own, so they can be learning things that are actually relevant.”
It’s a two-way street. “If you really genuinely care, then have a meeting and give them some pointers of what is useful to the industry,” says Gathard. Ashby at Brunel agrees: “It doesn’t have to be unis doing the outreach, companies can come to us.”
James Shannon is head of audio technology at Splice; he’s a Surrey University Tonmeister graduate and also lectures at the University of Gloucestershire. Shannon was pulled back into industry after full-time lecturing last year. “So many people that teach aren’t in the industry and it’s very hard to get that balance. So, how do you keep current as a lecturer?” he asks.
Shannon talks about how students might become interested in audio post from two directions: one, where they study a more general film production course, so they don’t have such a technical background; and two, from sound and music production courses which is more technical. “Most of
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