The Development Department in Lockdown

Hi everyone,

In my last blog post I interviewed some of the NI TV Industry’s top women about how the television sector is operating under lockdown, and now, thankfully I have some of my own experience to contribute!

I spent June working part time at Nice One Productions, as part of a team generating ideas for NI Screen and BBC Three’s brief for the Northern Ireland Youth Content Development Scheme in Factual Entertainment. I was working with my friend Conor Finn, who I've known for a long time through RTS Futures, and Hannah McMillan and Daniel Connolly, who were new to me. It was a really fun young team that I had a great time working with.

With most of my TV career being in development pre-lockdown, being part of a development team whilst working remotely was a really unusual experience.

In the ✨before times✨ you’d have crew brainstorming sessions where you’d bounce off each other and write every crazy idea into a chaotic spider diagram on a whiteboard, you’d also have brainstorm sessions outside the office, the idea being that the change of venue would inspire us.

These initial brainstorming sessions in lockdown were the biggest change, not being able to step away out of ‘the office’ (in my case my bedroom in my mum and dad’s house) and go out and about in the world to look for inspiration. 

We still had brainstorming sessions and bounced off one another very effectively, it just was very unlike what I was used to as we were all working remotely, and presented a whole new array of challenges (Zoom audio glitches? Bane of my existence for 4 weeks)

It didn't help that this was a part-time gig that I worked my other part time job around, so not only was I dealing with the new experience of Zoom meetings, but I ended up having to take one in my car in a supermarket car park on my lunch break!

We were also lucky enough for our producer (and MD of Nice One), Chris Jones to have organised a meeting with BBC Three Youth Executive Maeve McLoughlin (who kindly featured in my previous blog) where we could pitch some our ideas and follow her advice on which ones to develop further. It was great to get her invaluable insight and also served as an excellent opportunity for us researchers, as Maeve is a very influential person in the NI industry. This meeting with Maeve was essential in our process of filtering out which of our ideas would be our frontrunners that we would go on to submit to BBC Three and NI Screen.

The rest of the process was relatively the same as pre-corona, we did research, contacted potential talent and worked through several drafts of treatments which Chris, gave us notes and feedback on.

Overall, working remotely in lockdown was quite a surreal experience, but a unique one that I’m grateful to have had (and throw on my CV), I’m absolutely buzzing to be back in the industry again after my year out at Uni (after being CONVINCED University was the worst career move I could have made), I also need to be able to join in at the Emmy’s in 20 years when everyone’s telling their Zoom-glitch anecdotes 👩🏻‍💻🏆😉