Media Parents

Monthly Archives: February 2012

5 minutes with… Jules Seymour, PD

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Jules Seymour, PD, Chris Brown, Editor, and Amy Walker, SP, are in the TALENT section of Media Parents. Matt Holden, EP, is in the NETWORK section of www.mediaparents.co.uk

I’m a very experienced Producer/Director and Series Producer. Over my career I’ve worked on numerous documentaries, factual and factual entertainment programmes. I’ve made a lot of ob-doc style programmes from “Trawlermen” to Police docu-soap style series. I’ve also worked with numerous presenters on a wide variety of factual and fact-ent style programmes. I have a lot of experience in the Edit having cut numerous hour and half hour programmes, and I’ve SP’d a returning series for ITV three times.

I am also an experienced self-shooter with numerous credits on a variety of programmes working with a variety of cameras. (Z1-DSR and others).  Being an experienced self-shooter was important for the World’s Greatest / Scariest series for Five that I recently made, and am returning to work on Series 2 of at Mentorn.

http://www.mediaparents.co.uk/freelancers/126/jules-seymour

I’m married and live in Shepherds Bush with our two daughters who are five and eight, so I was keen to work at Mentorn for geographical reasons, as well as liking their output. I would obviously prefer to take on work that cuts in London, but of course for the right project I would be prepared to commute.  Cutting this series in-house at Mentorn in Hammersmith meant a short cycle or an easy walk into work for me every day, which is a rare delight in TV as you know.

Being a PD on the Series meant we all had to work co-operatively together because of the limited time and budget at our disposal.  Much time and effort was spent in preparing for the shoot in the States, in providing shooting schedules and interview questions for the stories filmed all over America.   Fellow director Jim Shreim and AP Hannah Eastwood shot four stories that made it into the final cut, and over on this side of the Atlantic I shot three stories for other episodes as well as the core stories for my programme “Near Misses”.

Fortunately Jim Shreim and Hannah Eastwood are both wonderfully talented and diligent and managed to come back from the States with what we wanted and more !!!

As this was the first series there was an element of finding exactly what worked for us and Michelle Chappell, the commissioner, as we started to put the programmes together.  The subject of “Near Misses” was tricky in the sense that it was difficult to come up with over-arching themes, when they were by their nature random events.  It became clear as we started cutting it that we were dealing with personal testimony of near death experiences, and that the randomness actually worked within our general theme. …making for a very diverse but hopefully gripping programme.  Please watch this evening on Channel 5 at 8pm.

See www.mediaparents.co.uk for great networking, talent, jobs and information. To contact anyone on the Media Parents blog please go to the NETWORK part of the Media Parents site. To join us please go to www.mediaparents.co.uk

February 2, 2012 @ 8:12 am Posted in News Leave a comment