Richard McCormack, Class of 2009 | Red Bee Media’s BBC Four Doco

RedBeeMedia_logoI’m a graduate of 2009 and I work as a creative for Red Bee Media. It makes content, promos and designs branding for a range of clients. However Red Bee is probably most well known in the industry as being the BBC’s creative agency. You know the swimming hippos on BBC1? Red Bee did that. However this post isn’t so much about me; rather it’s about my creative director, his co-producer and a ten year project. It turned into a documentary ‘100 seconds to beat the world: The David Rudisha Story’, which is a co-production with Hill Ten film. The doco will be on-air 22 July at 10pm on BBC Four. Here’s the trail.

A decade ago Jim and Ed set out to make a documentary about Brother Colm, an enigmatic Irish teacher who has also coached many of Kenya’s most celebrated athletics including Wilson Kipketer, Matthew Birir and Peter Rono. Jim and Ed wanted to discover why a man without any professional training or athletic experience had managed to consistently develop gold medal winning athletes. However on 9th August 2012 the subject of the documentary changed, when David Rudisha ran the fastest 800 metres in history and took gold at the London Olympics. Jim and Edward looked back at their rushes and realised they had a range of footage and stills of David as a shy teenager developing into an athlete. So the documentary was refocused on David.

I came on board over the last year or so when Jim asked me to film an interview with Lord Seb Coe for the documentary. One bleak Tuesday morning, I met Jim outside Coe’s offices in Victoria armed with a Canon 5D, a Canon XF305 and a bed sheet for a backdrop (which Jim had spent thirty minutes the night before ironing). Continue reading

Congrats Emily Mullender Class of 2013 at Red Bee Media / BBC TV

Emily-Mullender_2013GradI graduated in Media Production – specialising in Single Cam – from LSM last year. After 3 or so months of the hell that is job hunting and a couple of unsuccessful interviews, I finally landed an interview with Red Bee Media in London. The position advertised was Media Assistant but came with no job description so I didn’t actually find out what it was until I started! Red Bee is one of the largest playout and channel management businesses in the UK, providing services to a number of broadcasters including BBC, Channel 4, UKTV, BT Sport and Channel 5. They provide services such as playout, media management, creative services, access services (subtitling and audio description) and content discovery. It’s basically the broadcasting ‘behind the scenes’ side of television.

So I had quite an intense ‘competency test’ based interview in November and was called a few hours later with the offer of a job, to start the following week. Continue reading