Playback: Beyond Directing, Alternative Routes in the Film Industry

Jacqueline Abrahams trained in fine art, specialising in performance and live art. She worked as a scenic painter for four years before moving into theatre design, then eventually film via teaching and youth work. She has designed feature films, short films, TV dramas, theatre, performance and live art working in the USA, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, Czech Republic, Ireland, Wales, Spain and South Africa.

She is responsible for crewing a team of inspired, creative and talented individuals. She is responsible for working to often very tight budgets and has designed productions that have large ambitious studio set-builds as well as location-based work. Her experience includes working with scripts, on improvised pieces and with artists in a less conventional context. She won a BAFTA in 2009 for best production design, nominated for a BAFTA in 2010, won the RTS Best Production Design award in 2010 and was nominated for a BIFA 2017 for production design.

Simon Clark is a freelance location drama sound recordist. He was hooked on the process of recording and reproducing sound from the age of 10 and at age 17 started his professional life in TV sound post-production. He then worked in documentaries for 15 years, travelling around the globe before making the world of location drama his professional home in the 1990s.    

As director of the Institute of Professional Sound he is a passionate advocate for structured training within the film and TV industry. Since 2015 he has been Head of Production Sound Recording at the National Film and TV School and writes regular articles on sound techniques and equipment for Resolution magazine.    

TV drama credits include eight series of Waking the Dead, The Government Inspector, Line of Duty, Skins, Mad Dogs, Burton & Taylor, An Adventure in Space and Time, The Go Between and The State. He was BAFTA nominated for The Promise and won the 2016 Sound Craft BAFTA for Wolf Hall, both directed by Peter Kosminsky. He has just completed work on King Lear for the BBC and Amazon, directed by Sir Richard Eyre with Sir Anthony Hopkins in the lead role.

Dan Ward is a filmmaker and writer, regularly contributing to Art Monthly reviewing film and video. He is co-founder of Black Shuck, a non-profit co-operative that works with artists and organisations to produce film, video, audio and digital projects. It is owned equally by all of its members, and was founded in response to the current lack of opportunities for young artists in London, the difficulty in earning wages to support radical practice, and a desire to democratise the tools for producing and exhibiting visual art. 

Most recently Black Shuck completed the post-production on films for the Random Acts programme. This type of work often encompasses colour grading and sound mastering, working to achieve results that, through discussion with the artist/filmmaker involved, extend ideas within the work.