UCLAN Provides Top Media Experience

Dec, 4 2015

~UCLAN continues to innovate and thrive as a cultural and sophisticated institution now and well into 2016. With new and diverse courses available for students there is no better time to enrol and develop your specified skills as a young person or mature adult.

With television programmes highlighting issues today’s youth endure, it makes perfect sense for media students to collaborate on successful T.V. dramas.

Popular soap operas Emmerdale and Coronation Street will introduce their cast and crew to the media students at UCLAN and work alongside them throughout the course of a week in a bid to enhance and develop their media skills. The students will use their creativity to brainstorm ideas, storyline the first episode, script, rehearse, shoot and show it, all in five days.

This is the first time a project like this has been undertaken and has the full authority of the students. ITV will assist and guide but the hard work is done primarily by the students.

Dr Andrew Ireland, executive dean of UCLan’s College of Culture and the Creative Industries, said:

“This is a really exciting and ground-breaking opportunity for UCLan students to get really strong, high-profile hands-on media industry experience.

“To become the first and only university to work with ITV on such a fantastic project is amazing and I know our students are really looking forward to the challenge. Challenge and opportunity – that’s what higher education is all about.”

The outreach programme that enables this unique field of work to take place is delivered by Northern Lights. It works to create formal relationships and works with colleges and universities across the North of England.

The lead of the project, ITV’s creative director, John Winston, gives further insight into what the course will provide and the practical value of learning by experience,

“At ITV in the north we really believe in helping a whole new generation of potential programme makers understand what we do and hopefully make them want to join our industry. “So what better way than throwing them all in at the deep end?”.

Whether they sink or swim depends on their time, hard work and commitment to this most  positive and engaging project.

Filming begins next February, 2016.