Skillset Blog

Last night saw me at the graduation party for the new stars of post production in the South West of England. “First Post” is a scheme Skillset and the industry created to give new employees in post production the competence and confidence to ensure that they (and their companies) will be a success. It is delivered in a mixture of structured class-room training with on-the-job practical development in the workplace. Since its birth in London it has gone on from strength to strength - with versions in Manchester, Bristol (where I was last night) and Wales - truly building the future leaders of post production. This version was delivered by a partnership of South West Screen and 01Zero-One, with trainers from the industry.

Post Production is an industry in flux, and the young people I met last night seemed to show it. Traditional post production was well represented, but so were other area - Tigress Productions with a young staff member looking after their own Avid’s and Final Cut Pro’s, and an animator from Aardman. Both of these “production” companies wanted to invest their own staff with the skills and knowledge that they would usually pay for in a facilities house. The blurring of the lines between production and post has already happened, we know that, but now the services that were being bought by production are being delivered quite happily in house, thank you very much.

The conversations were about course content and what could be improved, but I couldn’t help feeling we have created a very today course for today’s needs. Now, we need to forget the demarcations of “post”, “tv”, “animation” etc, and start instilling the concept that where ever you sit in the industry, you are part of a value-added chain: the ‘creatives’ come up with the concept, the ‘production staff’ make it a (in some cases, virtual) reality, and perhaps the role of our future “First Post” stars is to maximise the opportunities for generating revenue from that content - as Adobe now say, “from screen to screen” - getting the content from tv to phone, from cinema to game, from blog to e-zine. But what is also lacking in the industry is the entreprenurial management and leadership skills to spot these new opportunities and exploit them.

So, any answers? How do we grow the future talent - making sure they understand their place in the process, how to monetise their services, and be ambitious to spot new opportunities. It feels a long way away from patching in a machine, or logging some footage.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Animation, Facilities, Skillset. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but we reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.