Opportunities

With the second annual 4Talent Mobile Games Pitch due to kick off this morning, here’s a quick run-down of the 9 contenders, who we whittled down from several hundred entries.

For those not familiar, in a nutshell this is a pitching competition in partnership with EA Mobile, Nokia and the Golden Joystick Awards, as part of the London Games Festival.

We asked 4Talent readers to throw us ideas for innovative, experimental games for mobile phones - and based on judges’ scores for originality, innovation, commercial appeal and technical feasibility, and in no particular order, here are the finalists:

Miles Boylan (22, from Preston)
Miles’ idea Snapshot pinpoints a player’s location with GPS, and then sets area-specific photographic tasks that can then be uploaded and rated by other users online.

Tobias Rowe (22, from Colchester)
In Tobias’ idea Finders Keepers, you’re an elusive cat burglar who must steal antiques from local museums and other players’ vaults via Bluetooth, while defending your own using bespoke puzzles and mini-games.

Nicola Depuis (28, from London)
Nicola’s idea I-Queu allows players to compare their IQ against an international playing community by setting each other questions, and working together to jump the virtual queue.

Steven Fraser (from Edinburgh)
Steven’s idea Street Art sees graffiti turf wars springing up across the world, with players manipulating photos into works of art on their phones, rating them online and challenging each other to claim the streets one by one.

Trevor Conway (49, from Belfast)
Trevor’s concept Alter-Ego places the player in a parallel existence affected by genuine real-world events and breaking news stories, making choices from the perspectives of those involved.

Matt Watkins (37, from Nottingham)
Matt’s idea Running Rings is a game of physical exertion using GPS, in which players literally run circles around each other to score points, annex space and reach a new level of networked global domination.

Dominic Brancaleone (25, from Bournemouth)
Dominic’s idea Treasure Hunt allows players to hunt for genuine loot by responding to text, photo and video clues, and can be personalised to create your own trail.

Robin Clarke (28, from London)
Robin’s idea Way of the Dodo is an adventure/puzzle game designed to encourage thinking about the natural world, in which players guide the last known colony of helpless birds to safety whilst sharing real-world info about conservation.

Hamad Hussain (27, from London)
In Hamad’s idea The Contract, players choose to be either a government agent or a sleeper, are given a unique key code and must then locate, identify, recruit or entrap the opposition, obtaining their code by whatever means possible.

Good luck to all the finalists: we’ll announce the winner on the blog soon!

Just wanted to let you all know about a quite cool opportunity arising out of a potentially diasppointing situation. There was to have been a Q&A panel following the Electric Cinema’s screening of 28 Days Later tonight, but that’s sadly now not happening. Boo hiss.

However, the cool thing about this is what we’re doing instead, which has a wider reach and is not so time or place specific. We’ll be putting together 4Talent’s first collaborative interview, with questions from 4Talent users to Chris Gill, editor of 28 Days Later. It’s journalism democracy in action…

You can send your questions for Chris to catherine@4talentmagazine.com by 31st October - they can be about everything from editing, to working on 28 Days Later specifically, to digital film, to working with Danny Boyle, and whatever weird and wonderful queries you may have as filmmakers, editors, filmwatchers, journalists - who and whatever you are.

You can read all about Chris and his fantastic acheievements on DNA films website (scroll down) for Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, on which he also worked, or you can check him out on IMDB here - it’s a CV spanning 20 years that includes Brideshead Revisited, 28 Weeks Later and the forthcoming Ricky Gervais directed comedy glitterati-studded This Side Of The Truth. So send in those questions and be fully credited in a 4Talent interview…

It’s taken us 2 solid weeks, but we can now proudly announce the shortlists for the 4Talent Awards 2008 - 5 in each of the 20 categories.

We’ve quite simply been blown away by the quality across the board, and it’s been a real struggle getting down to that fortunate 100, who will be sent off to our illustrious judging panels over the next few weeks to select our final 20.

So here they are: massive congratulations if you’re amongst them, and please, don’t be disheartened if you’re not - stay across future opportunities with 4Talent and there’s always next year! Winners will be notified by 31 October.

Short Documentary
Pinny Grylls, 29, London
David O’Hara, 25, Scunthorpe
Poppie Skold, 26, London
Maria Andrade, 26, London
Laura Martin-Robinson, 28, London

Long Documentary
Fred Burns, 24, Sussex
Katja Roberts, 29 & Magnus Dennison, Newcastle
Tom Evans, 28, Oxford
Lorne Kramer, 25, Bristol
Stuart Kershaw, 28, Liverpool

Dramatic Writing
Ali Muriel, 28, London
Cosmo Wallace, 29, Glasgow
Carla Grauls, 29, London
Tim Price, 28, London
Stella Papamichael, 30, London

Dramatic Performance
Sarah Kempton, 22, London
Elizabeth Rainbow, 28, London
Emma Rigby, 19, Liverpool
Sagar Radia, 22, Middlesex
Helen Clapp, 25, London

Directing
Tom Marshall, 22, Middlesbrough
Adam Randall, 28, London
Dominic Leclerc, 29, Bradford
Robert Glassford, 29 & Timo Langer, West Lothian
Rob Sorrenti, 28, London

Comedy Writing
Felicity Carpenter, 27, London
Chris Grady, 29, Glasgow
Rose Heiney, 24, London
Christopher Wallace, 29, & Philip Hodgson,Tyne & Wear
Daniel Flay, 24 & Alastair Craig, Huntingdon

Comedy Performance
Anna Whelan, 23 & David Tynan, Wigan / Sheffield
Greg McHugh, 28, Glasgow
Vikki Stone, 25, London
Napoleon Ryan, 30, Kent
Eddie Kadi, 25, London

Presenting
Carly Lindon-Forrester, 23, Liverpool
Laura Marks, 22, Glasgow
Amelia Gildea, 23, Wiltshire
Ben Chancellor, 30, London
James Sherwood, 25, Kent

On-Air Radio
Alex Baker, 25, Birmingham
Adam Edworthy, 22, Coventry
Alex James Atkinson, 27, Manchester
Veena Virahsammy, 21, Barking
Steve Folland, 29, Hertfordshire

Off-Air Radio
Andy Ward, 23, Sussex
Simon Buschenfeld, 30, Bristol
Philip Dyer, 29, London
Matt Horne, 26 & Colin Greaves, Gateshead
Ann Scantlebury, 23, London

Music
Toby Trueman, 26 - The Icarus, Edinburgh
Oliver Harrison, 21 - Fossil Club, Bristol
Camille Davila, 29, Cambridgeshire
Louis Standard, 19 - Pinstripe, Avon
Iain Woods, 22, Brighton

Production Music
Ella Spira, 20, London
Blair Mowat, 22, Edinburgh
Chris Hanson, 26, London
Richard Mead, 29, Maidstone
Richard Bradley, 28, Sheffield

Music Video
Ian Smith, 26, Oxford
James Cook, 22, Durham
James Knott & James Curran, 26, Derby
Steven Quinn, 27, Belfast
James Willis, 23, Humberside

Innovation
Becki Burrows, 27, London
Jack Lenox, 21, Surrey
Kay Vasey, 29 & Jonny Emmanuel, London
Mike Young, 23, Hertfordshire
Phil Mundy, 27, Huddersfield

Multi-platform
Chi-chi Ekweozor, 29, Manchester
Dan Hon, 29, London
Steve Ellis, 26, Birmingham
Mike Cunsolo, 28, Sheffield
Claire-Frances Lennon, 25, Glasgow

Animation
Ian Wharton, 23 & Edward Shires, Preston
Mark Nute, 29, Gateshead
Jessica Cope, 24, North Yorkshire
Karen Penman, 28 & Liam Brazier, Essex
Cassiano Prado, 30, London

Journalism
Rob Sharp, 28, London
Hassan Ghani, 23, Slough
Natalie Whelan, 22, London
Lauren Carter, 23, Hertfordshire
Lee Coan, 29, Hertfordshire

Photography
Lucinda Chua, 23, Nottingham
Ellie Harvey, 22, London
Hal Sear, 24, Watford
Eleanor Hardwick, 15, Reading
Loubie-Lou photography, 30, Leicester

Multi-talented
Rob Madin, 22, Chesterfield
Oliver Lansley, 27, Surrey
James Roberts, 23, London
Allyn Lawson, 22, Warwickshire
Jamie Stone, 23, Edinburgh

Wildcard
Chris O’Shea, 27, London
Johanna Basford, 25, Dundee
David Procter, 25, London
Amy Winters, 24 & Kseniya Zagorodnyuk, London
Tanya Richam-Odoi, 27, Leeds

Following on from our finalist announcement for Radio HaHa, here are some short biogs of the chosen 9. Many thanks to all those who took the time to submit their moments of comic genius.

Daniel Jamieson
Daniel is a 17-year-old film student from Edinburgh. His submission, AJ and Finnegan, is a spoof American cop show following partners AJ, a young hot-shot rookie, and Finnegan, a gritty old-hand maverick as they fight back threats to national security while constantly arguing about it. It was created in his college’s recording studio, and Daniel directs, storylines, edits and adds sounds to each episode, while allowing actors to improvise some real comedy gold.

Jenni Armstrong
Jenni is a stand-up comedian who writes sitcoms for radio and television, and makes comedy shorts. She uses a DIY aesthetic to enhance the surreal comedy of her work, and has filmed a mini-series called Jenni Shows and Tells which can be viewed on YouTube. In May, Jenni did a comedy review in the style of this show for 4Laughs. Jenni’s submissions for Radio HaHa include Lebacuppacoffee, a mock promo for a Lebanese coffee shop, and the surreal skit The Adventures of Gok Wan.

Lauren O’Reilly
Lauren is a 22-year-old postgraduate student in scriptwriting and drama school graduate who aims to write scripts for radio. Her idea for Radio HaHa, The Race, is an inner space-style comedy skit following sperm as they compete to fertilise an egg following a drunken encounter. Lauren’s inspiration for the piece struck following a night out where Lauren found herself watching a group of drunken men dance terribly and asked herself, “You were the one that reached the egg first?”

Madeleine Brettingham
Madeleine is a radio and television comedy writer whose work has featured on several Radio 4 programmes, including Recorded for Training Purposes, Fordham and Lipson and The News Quiz. She’s interested in comedy that provides a new take on the world, and her submission, Goth Town, poses questions such as ‘What’s it like having to exude satanic majesty while you’re buying bogroll from CostCutter, or visiting your nan?’ Goth Town follows the story of a misfit brother and sister who live in a grimy townhouse near Morrisons, and their struggle to stand out in a grey world.

Richard Cray
Richard is a former radio commercial producer who, in his words, “Left the industry to get a proper job.” He’s been a regular on the London comedy circuit, produces podcasts for Comedy 365 and is co-producing a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. Richard’s submission is a compilation of spoof radio ads and promos: The Dogs Must Be Carried, Top 50, and Liar News.

Nicola Depuis
After studying Radio & Theatre Production, Nicola worked as a journalist for seven years, during which time she hosted a weekly radio show. A finalist in the Galway Film Fleadh pitching competition this year, her first screenplay was recently optioned and she’s currently working on a studio assignment. Tubescent is a radio sitcom that gives a comic insight into the lives, worries and conversations of teenage friends aimlessly riding the public transport systems of their city.

Richard Kelly
Richard is a former teacher who is now focusing on a writing career. His sit-com, The Good Defenders, is a comical take on the traditional superhero story following a team of B-list heroes that protect Earth from rogue celebrities, with some hilarious consequences.

Andy Ward
A recent Keele University graduate, Andy Ward presented, produced and wrote several popular university radio shows while studying there and has recently been trying his hand at stand-up comedy. His submission, Spooky Times, is a surreal ghost story that follows a man who encounters particularly bad problems whilst attempting to prepare a barbecue, juxtaposing the presentation style and atmosphere of a serious ghost story with a comic writing style.

Stephen Yorke & Ben Harris
Stephen and Ben are a duo who write TV radio and press ads at separate advertising agencies in London. The pair recently decided to collaborate on their own comedy pieces. and came up with the idea of creating podcasts to bring their comedy to the world. Their programme, Funpot, is recorded at home on their computer and comprises 5-minute slots of the pair ‘trying to make each other laugh’ by creating comic situations and playing off one another.

As you may have noticed, over the last few months we’ve been calling for up-and-coming comics to fling their funny bits in our direction for a unique competition with E4 Radio, called Radio HaHa. The response was incredible: we had literally thousands of audio clips and scripts snippets piling into our inbox.

It took us a little while, but we have our 9 finalists. They’ll be wending their wily ways to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival next week for a day of intensive workshops, followed by a nerve-racking pitch to a panel of E4 Radio commissioners, who have pledged to match at least one of them with an independent production company to take the idea to broadcast.

So here they are:

Daniel Jamieson for his shrewd spoof of US police drama
Jenni Armstrong for her delightfully surreal Gok Wan adventures
Lauren O’Reilly for her sticky sperm sketch The Race
Nicola Depuis for teen-public-transport-com Tubescent
Madeleine Brettingham for Goth Town’s dark humour
Richard Kelly for his off-the-wall take on the superhero genre
Stephen Yorke for some witty on-air banter
Andy Ward for his dryly hilarious Spooky Times
Richard Cray for taking off local radio cliches with tongue firmly in cheek

You can also read more detailed biogs of all of the above.

More to come from the finalists: watch this space. We’ll be following the ideas through the development process in the next issue of 4Talent magazine, and they’ll even be featuring in a special episode of The Fix podcast, which launched with the first episode yesterday.

We’ve taken our sweet time, but we can now proudly announce our top-level judges for this year’s 4Talent Awards - our showcase of the UK’s hottest young creative talent.

Our latest scoop is legendary trance DJ Paul Oakenfold, co-creator of that notoriously infectious Big Brother theme, for the Production Music category.

Victoria Pile, creator of Green Wing and Smack the Pony, is on hand to judge your Comedy Writing skills.

Charlie Pattinson, who exec-produces multi-award-winning hit series Skins and Shameless at Company Pictures, will be casting his eye over the hotly-contested Dramatic Performance category.

Double Bafta-winning This is England producer Mark Herbert at Warp Films will rate the Directing entries, while T4’s exec producer Richard Cook at Eyeworks is hungry for new Presenting talent.

Exciting animators: get your painstakingly-crafted work on the desk of Helen Brunsdon at Aardman. And for innovative cross-platform producers: who better to see if you have what it takes than digital marketing guru James Kirkham at Holler, the agency behind the groundbreaking Skins campaign.

Not to mention senior Channel 4 commissioners across the board: Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film4, Radio, T4, Music, New Media, 4Creative and Current Affairs.

For those in the know, these include Shane Allen, Caroline Leddy, Sarah Mulvey, Kate Vogel, Liza Marshall, Peter Carlton, Sam Steele, Debbie David, Cath Lovesey, Neil McCallum, Matt Locke, Adam Gee, Alice Tonge and Dorothy Byrne. Oh yes: we’ve been busy.

So if you’re under 30 and hungry to get your finest work under the noses of some of the best in the business, you have until 5pm on 29th August 2008.

Update: 9 finalists revealed

We’ve just launched our fantastic new competition with E4 Radio: Radio HaHa. Submit short audio clips or comic scribblings: the best 9 will go through intensive workshops at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, then pitch to get their idea developed into a fully-fledged radio show on the new station when it launches.

But what’s E4 Radio actually about? No doubt any radio producers among you will be drooling with anticipation at the thought of a new door being chiselled in the rock-face of British radio, so we asked the team to pitch it to us in 300 words. So from the horse’s mouth:

“E4 Radio will be a new kind of station. One that’s up for a bit of fun and mischief and for doing things differently. Like the TV channel and its website, E4 Radio will provide mainstream entertainment targeted at 16-34s. The schedule will focus on the E4 staples of great music, comedy and entertainment and will pride itself on being the first to bring its audience new stuff and new talent from these worlds.

We’re going to give the audience more access to the airwaves than ever before, providing new levels of interactivity and an active role in shaping the sound of the station, from music to the news agenda. We’re making a radio station for an audience that likes to listen to radio content when they want to, on-demand as well as live, and we’ll be commissioning different programmes tailored to these listening modes.

In terms of comedy, our door is open to every kind of comedy there is - we want our schedule to be flexible enough to accommodate to accommodate bite-sized short programmes, more traditional built blocks, and we hope to pioneer new comedy formats that don’t even exist yet. We think there’s tonnes of scope to innovate with format and we want to trial lots of things. As with all our output we want to create programming from a much more diverse set of voices, stimulate new areas of independent production and create new cross platform collaborations.”

We have a date lined up with the enigmatic Holy Moly as part of our new radio series… and are looking for opinionated bloggers, tabloid journos with a thirst for gossip, or anyone with the style and attitude to get the conversation flowing with one of the media’s most elusive figures.

More info on the Head to Head page.