Right now, the UK is leading the world in media and the arts with a new wave of game-changers seemingly cropping up every single year. However, turning any sort of creative venture into a business can be an overwhelming task. Back in September last year, we brought you news of the latest round of courses being run by the people at Create Jobs, a London-based programme offering training and guidance for young creatives to help them make a career out of what they love doing.
Operating since 2011, the Create Jobs offers young people the opportunity to find employment within the creative industry via an intensive 4-6-week online course, giving an insight into the field of their choice with input and guidance from production houses like Stink Films (Jay-Z, Ray BLK, Game Of Thrones) and Stink Studios (Spotify, TikTok, Adidas), design agencies like Hero, Visly and Publicis Sapient, and more. In the past, the efforts of the Create Jobs team have helped 80% of its former students into careers and further training. Many of those former students have since gone on to achieve incredible things and make names for themselves in their respective industries.
The latest batch of courses ran through the final months of 2020, nurturing talent in the worlds of content production, digital product design, photography and podcasting, delivered through Creativity Works. Now all 99 young people have completed the programme, they are ready to present their work to the world. The brief, set by Reebok, for each person (or team in the case of the product design category) was to consider what they wanted their legacy to be and to explore where that idea took them.
Below, we’ve highlighted three of our favourite projects from each discipline and, most importantly, the minds behind them as they examine their legacies and how that ties into their cultural backgrounds, their faiths, the way they express themselves, and how they relate to the world around them.
Photography
Content Production
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Elli Siora - Curious Courage
Elli Siora: “The Creativity Works course showed me that there was space in the industry for authentic voices and perspectives, and making my film was the beginning of me finding mine.”
Legacies, Elli Siora argues in her short film, come from the stories that are passed down through generations. In her case, they are her grandmother’s stories of escaping war and forging a new life in a new country. They’re also the clothes that she makes for herself, a skill she passed down to Elli and in doing so forged a bond across the generations.
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Leah Lewis - Words To Power
For Leah Lewis, legacy is something intangible, passed down and added to by each successive generation of a family. It’s a constantly evolving story that grows as it absorbs and builds on all the ideas and beliefs of each family member. It is the faith, philosophy, dreams and stories that filter down through the years. Bringing the surging flow of ideas to life, Lewis uses abstract imagery and overlapping voices to create a torrent of swirling, overlapping ideas that stop just short of overwhelming.
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Tavie Tiffany Agama - First-Gen Legacies, Children Of The Diaspora
Agama’s piece, First-Gen Legacies, Children Of The Diaspora, follows three first generation immigrants — one from Somalia, one from Nigeria and one from Ghana — and tracks their stories, from their parents’ arrival in Britain to their lives right now. Along the way, each subject considers the cultural elements they’ve inherited from their parents — food, humour, language, stories — and encourages them to consider how those various things have influenced and shaped their lives today. They’ve each come a long way from their parents’ home countries, and one subject even describes how out of place she felt when she visited Somalia. Still, while their respective heritages have since become intertwined with their Britishness, the influence of their families’ home countries will stay with them forever.
Click here to see all the work from the content production course in a virtual exhibition space.
Podcasting
Tobi King Bakare - Kindred: The Melting Pot
Taking a somewhat lighthearted approach to the concept of legacy, Tobi King Bakare (whom you might recognise as Nicholas in I May Destroy You) and his Kindred: The Melting Pot podcast discusses how people with several identities struggle to fit in. As an Irish-born Nigerian living in London, he explains that he doesn’t feel like he completely fits in anywhere. To illustrate his point, he uses a handful of clips of American actors trying and failing to adopt English accents for their roles. As Brits it’s easy for us to hear the flaws and have a good laugh at them. He then speaks Yoruba, which to our untrained, non-Nigerian ears sounds flawless. However, he goes on to explain that to a Nigerian, he sounds just as inauthentic as Josh Harnett attempting to sound like he’s from Yorkshire.
Nina Bowers - The Flow: An Afrofuturist Adventure Podcast
Nina Bowers “Opportunities for growth and inspiration in 2020 were few and far between, in the middle of a national lockdown, Create Jobs opened up a whole universe of possibility, introduced me to phenomenal people, and helped me access new facets of my creativity.”
The Flow: An Afrofuturist Adventure Podcast tells the story of Zora, a young woman who seeks escapism after going through what she calls a “life-altering crisis”. In her panic, she remembers a story of P-funk pioneers George Clinton and Bootsy Collins of Parliament/Funkadelic going on a fishing trip into the Bermuda Triangle. After getting her hands on a boat, she heads out into the ocean and into psychedelic territory. Set against the backdrop of Clinton and Collins’ Afrofuturism, The Flow uses escapism as a therapeutic way of unpacking and countering trauma that applies not just to her own personal issues, but to us all in the midst of the global pandemic.
Nordie Childs - Legends Of Lockdown
Cast your mind back through the mists of time to those early days of lockdown. It was novel, it was a bit weird, and the true scale of it hadn’t quite set in yet. However, it was beginning to yield its first stars. One such star was Billy McLean who created a viral voice message claiming the government was working on a giant lasagne the size of Wembley Stadium that would be cut up and distributed to people’s homes via drones. On the face of it, it was just a funny meme to lighten an increasingly dark time, but as Childs discovers it also had a lot to teach us about the rampant misinformation that has spread like wildfire. Presented as a tongue-in-cheek news report, Childs gets to the heart of where it all came from.
Click here to see all the work from the podcasting course in a virtual exhibition space.
Product Design
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Cecily Castro, Team A (Allstar Assassins): “I am grateful for all the experiences this program has given me and it has inspired me to continue working hard to soon gain other opportunities in the creative industry.”
The Product Design element of the Create Jobs course was delivered by startup community YSYS who split students into five groups and posed the question of legacy in the context of smart phone apps. How would attendees leave their legacy in the world of tech? For Team A, who created the Bespeak app (above), that meant reshaping the world of social media into something that was as much about documenting and researching as it was communicating. Other teams applied similarly progressive approaches to fitness apps, project management, and education. Although they all took the original concept in entirely different directions, the ideas of collaboration and leaving the world better off than how you found it could be found in them all.
Click here to find out more about Create Jobs and their courses.
