It’s been nearly 2 weeks since I returned from Lagos, and I have been pretty busy. I’ve had 2 interviews – one for the RSPB and one for my MA Wildlife Filmmaking course – and while the preparation for them hasn’t been too difficult, it has been rather time consuming, involving watching a lot of wildlife documentaries to familiarise myself with some of the finer details of my favourite programmes. I’d totally forgotten how awesome some of the really early Attenborough stuff is – the first episode of Zoo Quest for a Dragon where a young David brings home Charlie the Orangutan is incredibly heart-warming, and if you haven’t seen it before I suggest you go watch it here.
Anyway, so the first interview was last Friday morning, and it was the more important one – the one for my Masters. It was a lot shorter than I expected being only about 25 minutes long (I thought it would be an hour at least), so I didn’t have enough time to talk about all of the things I wanted to, but it was interesting and I really enjoyed it. I was interviewed by 2 BBC employees, and they started by explaining that we didn’t have very long and that the interview would last about 20 minutes followed by a short writing task, so that set the pace. We briefly talked about what interested me about the industry, why I wanted to do the course etc (all the obvious questions), and then went on to the more challenging part which was more of a judge of my creativity and teamwork. They asked me about what I liked most about my favourite programmes, and then asked me about what other mediums I thought I could use to connect with an audience: I talked about sound (I realise now that was probably meant to be more of a question about multiple platforms, but you can’t win them all…), and how most people don’t really think about sound in wildlife documentaries but that its crucial in creating atmosphere (the foley sound in Hidden Kingdoms, for example, made it more likeable for younger viewers). That seemed to get a good response and they mentioned that they’d read in my application that I like to DJ, so I talked about different layers of sounds and how mixing music could be similar to producing the sound for a wildlife documentary – having the right blend of atmospheric sound with the sounds of the main characters of the sequence coming through. Then came my favourite part of the interview, where they created a production scenario to see what I would do…
“Imagine you’ve completed your masters, it’s 5 years down the line and you’re directing some filming in South Africa. You’re on a boat off the coast filming sharks, and there’s only 2 days left available to film. A storm is coming, and you aren’t getting on with the guy driving the boat. What do you do?”
I mean, that’s a pretty awesome question to have in an interview! Although I didn’t really have any idea what to say, as it’s not the sort of thing I’ve ever come across before. I said a few things about asking people’s advice and different options (is there another team somewhere that can get footage? Is it the sort of thing there might be stock footage of?), and then we moved on to looking at some of my photos and the written task, which was a short synopsis of a chapter in a book about a man hunting with his dog. It’s always difficult to gauge how well you do in an interview, especially when it’s so short, but I think it went OK and I guess we’ll see before the end of this week…
The second interview, which I had on Monday, was for a job selling membership to the RSPB. Again, it was actually pretty enjoyable – mostly just talking about wildlife and a few different scenarios testing how friendly and persistent I might be with people while out in the field. I had to give a short presentation about a project the RSPB are currently running, so I chose the “Birds Without Borders” campaign, which is all about protecting our migrant species internationally across their migration routes. It’s supported by Chris Packham who has been in Malta trying to raise awareness about the “Spring hunting” (read: indiscriminate shooting of anything with wings, including many of our protected migrant species), something which he is now being held by the Maltese police for filming. If you haven’t already been following his Youtube series, Malta – Massacre on Migration, you should definitely check it out.
Anyway, with the results of my RSPB interview back I’m excited to say I have a new job, which I start training for next Tuesday. In the mean time, I’ve set up my new Bushnell trail cam that my mother bought me for my birthday, which I’m hoping will give me a bit more of an insight into some of the nocturnal goings on in my garden. It’s mating season for the foxes at the moment, something which is hard to miss as the distinctly unromantic, scream-like cries they make cause our dogs to go mental; so I thought why not see if I can get some good photos or even footage? So far I’ve experimented with a couple of different places looking into neighbours’ gardens (the presence of our dogs means foxes don’t come into our gardens as much), and while I haven’t got anything mindblowing yet, I did get the below shot of a fox so at least I’m looking in the right place! This weekend I’m taking the trail cam down to Cornwall to put out and see what we can find around her farm, so check back in next week and I’ll put up any good photos we get!
Tom Richards 