A warm welcome to our 2007 placements

We've another three fantastic placements under way this year.


Firstly, Central Saint Martin's graduate Laura Jean Healey will be working alongside DoP Seamus MacGarvey on various commercial assingments. Seamus's last film was Atonement, starring James McAvoy and Kiera Knightley; Laura has been watching Seamus at work on the grading.


Over in Plymouth, Digital media artist Birgit Binder is building an interactive web project under the guidance of HMC Interactive Director, Adam Montandon. We hope Birgit will be able to give a work-in-progress preview of this website at a Technical Change seminar at The Lighthouse in Glasgow on 21 June.


Meanwhile back in London, aspiring editor Anna Dick has been selected to work with Emma E Hickox as she edits The Time of Our Lives, another feature starring Kiera Knightley. Daily filming has only just begun so this is a great opportunity for Anna to gain experience right from the start of a project.


We expect Laura, Birgit and Anna to set up their own blogs in due course - watch this space for details!

Ladies Who Brunch

Just back from the Everywoman Networking Brunch where there was lots of talk of mentoring and I got to speak to quite a few people about Technical Change, and the importance of visible women in leading roles.

The panellists, including solicitor and judge Karen Aldred, Financial Mail on Sunday Editor, Lisa Buckingham, IBM's Jacqueline Davey, GE's Isabel Fernandez and Citibank's Carolanne Minashi were all immensely dynamic women with a kindergarten-full of children between them and more titles after their names than you could shake a stick at.

It's probably best not to attribute quotes directly but one really good idea was "pyramid mentoring" whereby mentees go on to mentor women in positions below them and these in return mentor their subordinates (I hate to use hierachical terms but for the sake of brevity they work here - you get the picture).

Another good suggestion, re trying to encourage girls to consider less well-trodden career paths at school, was to relay the benefits of these "unusual" careers (eg, information technology, financial services) not just to the pupils but also to the parents and careers advisors - as it's these last two who can be the real barriers to change.

Plus ça change?

Just came across this report online: Why Are There So Few Women in Games? It was published a couple of years ago, but suspect things have changed little since then.

For a positive look at what women are actually doing to change the games industry, here's a more recent thread on games for women by women.

If women designed games, would they be any different?

Just heard Emma Westecott and Aleks Krotoski talking about women and games design on the BBC's Listen Again service. They were on Woman's Hour a couple of weeks back but needless to say in between feeding the baby and packing up to go away for the weekend I only caught snippets.

Emma suggested women could add a more human dimension to games, creatively. Woman's Hour presenter Miriam O'Reilly said the games industry was making efforts to increase the percentage of women developers. Would be interesting to hear more from anyone who knows about this.

We had no women developers apply to Technical Change and I was worried we'd been looking in the wrong places but Toby Barnes from Pixel-lab was telling me he's worked on university courses for games developers and there's a dearth of women applicants - so TC is not alone.

The Women in Games conference is doing something to address the issue. And apparently Electronic Arts is very supportive - here's the blurb about them hosting this year's US WIG.