Emergence and Guiding Lights
Gaëlle is in Paris just now finishing the sound on the two scenes from the Girl from the Estuary we shot as part of the Emergence workshop. It's been such a great experience and allowed us to cast and discover our fabulous MARNIE who blew us all away on the shoot. We also got to work with a really top notch fabulous crew including Michel Amathieu on camera and Anne Seibel on production design.
Another fabulous workshop I've had the privilege to be on this year - and which is sadly coming to an end - is the Guiding Lights scheme. All too fast, but it has been good! Past entries will show how it kicked off in Galway, and who the other participants were. But I haven't yet mentioned the key component of it all (and which continues until October) ... my amazing mentor Amanda Posey from Wildgaze! Best known perhaps for producing Fever Pitch, An Education, Brooklyn and most recently Their Finest with Gemma Arterton.
It's actually hard to work out who will make a good mentor. The Guiding Lights experts (Emily Kyriakides and Alex Thiele) share lists of industry people to consider, and help enormously to navigate the process. A good mentor needs to have the skills and experience that make them busy people, yet have the generosity to make time to share their knowledge and insights with you. It is so individual - it might not work out if you just don't hit it off in some way. So with all that in mind, I feel incredibly lucky to have found all that and more in Amanda. She is enormously busy, running a successful company and slate of projects and making time for her young family, yet also manages to carve out time to mentor me meaningfully too. This is invaluable. It was actually in conversations with her writer husband Nick Hornby that the desire to work with her was cemented. He was one of the GL experts answering questions for a week, and in so many of his answers he mentioned Amanda in such a way that it was clear what a great producer she is.
And so our final day was a pitch to a panel of: David Segal Hamilton (BFI) / Celine Coulson (Film4) / Jeremy Baxter (Riverstone Pictures) / Hilary Davis (Bankside) / Alex Stolz (Film Disruptors)
And then a party at the Picturehouse Central where they handed out the little booklets with all the Guiding Lights mentees.
Find out more
We're in production and development so things are always changing. Ohna will be keeping the news page and Twitter feed up to date. But if you want to know more please do get in touch!
