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

This post forms part of a series. Read the first installment.

Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes

Now let’s say that you’re actually really boring. There’s a market for what you do but to be honest the mechanisms of how you do it aren’t really of interest to anyone. Or let’s say you just don’t want to communicate all this fluffy personal nonsense. Blogging as I’ve described it here just doesn’t interest you in the slightest. Allowing for the fact that you probably haven’t read this far (which, if you’ll forgive me, demonstrates a limitation of the magazine form - online this “post” would stand alone and those for whom it might be relevant would find it through Google regardless of what came before or after it on the blog itself) the blogging form still has value to you.

You’ve probably heard the term Web 2.0. If you’ve investigated it a bit you might think it has to do with something called User Generated Content and heralds a revolution whereby professionals are overthrown in favour of the amateur masses, or somesuch nonsense. While this is a side-effect of the blogging revolution it’s not what’s really important about it. What’s really interesting is that the internet is starting to be populated by data that is structured and interchangeable according to established standards.

To illustrate what this means think of a library full of books. Every book is different with unique content but there are aspects of the books that fit into categories. The title, author, publisher, Dewy Decimal categories, dimensions, ISBN, and so on. This information can be indexed by the library to not only identify what shelf the book is held on but how it relates to other books in the collection, very handy for books that cover a number of different subjects.

Most blogging services, along with services like Flickr and YouTube, structure the information you put into them in a similar way. So a blog post has at the very least a title, date, category, and the content itself. And because this is based on accepted standards all this information is interchangeable. Which means anyone can take your content and stick it into a giant database automatically. And then people can ask this database questions and find relevant and accurate information which may well include your content.

You might hear people talking about arcane and mysterious arts like Search Engine Optimisation but this is pretty much all there is to it. Put your stuff online in a manner in which Google can understand it and you’ll appear in the relevant search results. If you have photos on Flickr that are accurately tagged in relation to their subject then they’ll appear in the searches for those subjects.

You don’t have to run a “blog” in the accepted sense of the word in order to get into this game. It’s just that blogs automatically structure themselves in this way and since they’re very easy to use it makes sense to take advantage of this. This YouTube video called Web 2.0 Machine explains this rather well. And when you’re doing this, have a think about how that little search query works for a piece of video. It’s all about the metadata, a piece of jargon which simply means “data about data”. Give you stuff metadata and people will find it. If you don’t have properly structured metadata your website will just sit there with nobody finding it, no matter how lovely it looks.

< Week 6: first impressions

Next in the series: in conclusion >

Shelley is a freelance writer and researcher and has recently set up her own company, Arts DeVille, an agency offering high quality dance, music, pa work and project management services, which evolved from various work in the creative sector since her degree in Media, Culture and Society in 2003.

www.artsdeville.co.uk
info@artsdeville.co.uk

Rich Hardiman got into writing as a student journalist while at university, where he now works full time at the student union. In the absence of anything else compelling to do he’s moving on to a masters degree next year, which he hopes to pay for with freelance writing and interviewing.

richard.hardiman@gmail.com

In the brief pockets of time between working as Deputy Editor on 4Talent Scotland, Development Researcher at Synchronicity Films and freelance Czech/Russian/French-English translator, Colette enjoys drinking Lambrini and watching TV. Bored of Facebook, she is using the time saved to write a rom-com about intergalactic arms-dealers. This will be awesome.

cmagee@channel4.co.uk

Pete Ashton is a Birmingham-based blogger specialising in helping individuals, businesses and organisations understand, follow and engage with the social internet. He set up Created in Birmingham with Stef Lewandowski, a blog linking up the city’s creative and artistic communities, and ran it for a year, joint-winning the Guardian Media award for best blog in 2008. He’s been blogging for eight years and now offers his services through his digitial communications consultancy ASH-10.

http://ash10.com

http://peteashton.com

Rachel is a 24 year old journalist and MA student, studying Creative and Critical Writing at Sussex uni. She works at Projects Abroad, a gap year company, as Chief Writer, and freelances too. She is obsessed with travelling, medicine, the Weakerthans, ted.com, Eric Blair, collies, apocalypse and Agent Fox Mulder.

rach.george@gmail.com

Claire Spencer is a Birmingham-based writer, and spends her days occupied with financial journalism, and freelances on music and the creative arts under the cover of night. As well as writing for Financier Worldwide and 4Talent, she contributes to the BBC and online music zine Noize Makes Enemies.

virginiaisawitch@gmail.com

This post forms part of a series. Read the first installment.

Words: Pete Ashton
Illustration: Raymond Weekes

Now, reading all this you might be saying, “This is all well and good but, frankly, I can’t write,” and that’s a fair comment. After all, you’ve chosen the medium of film or clay or needlepoint rather than wordsmithing for a reason. How do you join this global conversation if you sort of write like a 10-year-old? Here’s a few ideas for a few sorts of creatives:

Cartoonist: Diary comics are a no brainer really. Don’t worry if your life is boring, just think of it as a daily drawing exercise.
Pottery: Video the creation of your pots, especially if you use a wheel.
Animator: As you’re working on a piece post up stills and trial clips.
Photographer: Go play on Flickr for a while and feed your work (and others’) into your blog.
Textiles: Photos of works in progress. Model clothes yourself.

You can probably adapt those ideas to all manner of things and no doubt think of many better ones.

But the big thing here is not to worry about creating something worthy of a Pulitzer on your blog. Use it to record what you’re up to. If you’re selling at a market take photos. If you’re giving a talk, record it and make the audio / video available. If you’ve been thinking about issues related to your craft, jot down some notes and ideas. Treat it as a scrapbook for your journey as a whatever-you-are.

And here’s the thing. No matter how mundane it might seem to you it’ll be fascinating to those who can’t do what you do, especially if they’re interested in the stuff you do, and they’re the sort of people you want to be interested in you.

< Week 4: getting personal

Next in the series: first impressions >

Words: Miles Johnson
Photography: John Stewardson

In a small central London room a fiery debate has just erupted. “I just think it’s not that simple,” says Lucy Kirkwood, 24. “Female friendships are more complicated than that.” The rest of the group sit up from their coffees, awaiting a reply from the middle-aged man chairing the meeting. “Lucy,” he says with a hint of frustration, “for me, female relationships are about power; are about control. That’s what all the girls we’ve talked with have said.” There’s a pause. Everyone sits back to think again, and takes a swig of coffee.

Click to enlarge/shrink. Left/right arrows cycle through images.

On first appearances it could be a particularly engaged university tutorial. Ten or so people are stuffed onto sofas, most of them in their teens and early twenties, and each has been passionately arguing their position for several hours. But there are a couple of mature students sat among the youngsters, one of whom looks suspiciously like the comedian Robin Ince.

There’s also a kid in the corner sipping from a juice carton who, from a different angle, could be the spitting image of Posh Kenneth from Skins. Just as everyone is about to leave a cheery announcement comes from the chair that settles any lingering confusion: “Congratulations on the Bafta nomination, guys!”

If you haven’t seen or let alone heard of Skins yet, you’re presumably a resident of a particularly out-of-touch old peoples’ home, or had your cable connection accidentally switched to North Korean state television. In two seasons, the show’s chronicling of the trials and tribulations of a group of sixth-form students from Bristol has gone from a semi-cult hit adored by its target under-25 audience to one of Channel 4’s triumphs of the last five years.

Whereas most depictions of British teens fall somewhere between gun-toting hoodies and bleach-blonde proto-WAGs, the creators of Skins pride themselves on having crafted a show about young people that doesn’t shirk controversy or paint an overly rosy picture. Indeed with awards, high ratings and a new season in the pipeline it seems things could not be going better.

“It’s not usually that heated,” says 23-year-old Skins co-creator Jamie Brittain an hour after the writers meeting, seemingly more relaxed now away from the creative coalface. “This time round was a little more intense than normal; we’re obviously all excited about making the new series.”

It would be hard not to be excited in his position. Not only does Jamie have to sort his laundry for an award ceremony later that night, but his phone has been ringing constantly with mysterious calls from Japanese numbers. “The explanation for that is a bit strange really. When we were filming one of the online bits I accidentally left my phone number in one of the scenes after the edit. Now I am getting constant calls from Japan from people there who watched it.”

Being ‘big in Japan’ is a measure of success in any field, unless you’re Spinal Tap. But it’s not only the show’s ‘conventional’ success of good ratings and awards that have seen television industry types get their pantaloons in a twist. Targeting a teen audience notoriously difficult to pin down, the show’s arsenal of blogs, social networking profiles and podcasts – a development now referred to a ‘360-degree marketing’ by those in the know – has had executives across the land weeping with envy.

If, for example, you felt the need to get closer to the show’s young Asian character Anwar, you could check up his MySpace page. There you would not only discover his penchant for Lethal Bizzle, but would also have access to a web-exclusive video diary with the character discussing his girl problems. Head to Posh Kenneth’s page and the fan can enjoy a loving Wordsworthian ode to Jal interspersed with his signature brand of street patois.

If even then your appetite for all things Skins was still not sated, you could plug into Bebo video updates, or switch to iTunes and download the podcast presented by Daniel Kaluuya, the actor who plays Posh Kenneth who is also a writer on the show. Including phone-in questions from audience members and interviews with the cast, the Skinscast, as it’s been termed, was at one point the most downloaded podcast on the whole iTunes playlist.

Alongside the overall quality of the programme itself, it seems clear that the multiplatform ingenuity of Skins has enabled it to reach and hold onto a loyal audience in ways previous shows could only dream of. It is, in its own way, the defining televisual project of the British YouTube generation. But at a point in television where television executives and producers are increasingly heralding the possibilities brought by new media platforms, do the writers of the show ever feel their creation is being distorted by the marketing men?

“There is obviously a gulf between what the show says and how Skins is marketed,” says Lucy Kirkwood, one of the writers on the show. “But I think there’s something quite fun about the marketing. I really like this season’s advertising campaign. It captures the spirit of the show and is quite dark.” Ben Schiffer, another writer, agrees. “I think it would be really churlish of us to complain about the marketing – it brought us an audience, and that’s great.”

Shiffer however sees the significant noise made about Skins’ various multiplatform tentacles more as a generational issue than something specific to the show. “Whenever I mention Skins to people, it’s always the people who work in the media who are interested in the multiplatform stuff. They are always the people who are like ‘Skins, oh yes, it’s the big multiplatform thing and you guys have done this, this and this.’ They are the people that seem to find it so new and interesting. But for the audience I think it somehow feels natural to them. They don’t find it particularly remarkable and that’s why I think it’s successful. We’re communicating with them on a really natural level, which isn’t new or strange for them.”

Daniel Kaluuya also sees the success of the podcast he presents and the Skins blogs, Bebo and MySpace presences as being more a natural progression to suit an audience that has grown up with the Internet, rather than a novel marketing ploy. “The important thing to realise is that all the online stuff helps the fans get more into the characters. We just take the characters seriously. On the podcast, it’s not like we just say, ‘Oh, these are make-believe characters, this is a make-believe land and these things aren’t really happening. It’s a TV show that quite a few people really care about and we always take it seriously, whether it’s online or not.”

Ben agrees: “That’s why Skins is perceived to be such a success – we’re the only show to have really captured that audience. Advertisers are desperate to hit the audience that we’ve captured. And we work because we don’t condescend to them.”

In a suitably 21st century take on the creative process, the writers also recognise the possibilities media like blogs allow them for character development. While pre-Internet shows relied on scripts in the traditional manner, creating MySpace pages for the characters placed a new developmental tool into the hands of the writers.

“If you looked at Chris’ MySpace page last year, he actually became much more fleshed out because of it,” says Lucy. “You see that he likes Adam and the Ants and can find out much more about his character than would be normally possible. Skins is about a group of friends, and the whole appeal in the first series was about meeting a group of people you would have wanted to be friends with if you knew them. When you first make friends you sort of do what a MySpace page does by saying, do you like this or that, what are your top five bands? It’s like an electronic friendship. It allows you to show a side of the characters that might seem forced if it was in the show.”

Each of the writers contributes to the online features by writing blogs and video snippets for the characters, a side to the show that allows a young pool of talent to cut their teeth away from the glare of terrestrial television before graduating to penning hour-long scripts. But the writers are also quick to emphasise that they don’t see the online material being in any way less important than the show proper.

“All the online material comes from the same place as the show, so we all try and aspire to the same level,” says Shiffer. “No one ever goes, ‘Oh it’s just for the Internet so we’ll just bang it out. We’re trying to broaden out the universe of the show, rather than just providing lame ancillary storylines because we heard it was a good marketing tool.”

But are they ever worried about the potential for the online content and podcast to become gimmicky and distracting from the more serious side of the show? “The audience doesn’t view it that way,” says Shiffer. “I don’t think our audience makes any qualitative difference between watching something on MySpace and watching something on telly. It’s not worse or immediately lower-status because you watched it on the internet; it’s just the same thing.”

Jamie agrees: “The podcast did very well, so it obviously reached a lot of people who didn’t view it as a gimmick,” he points out. “All the material is well read, well commented on and discussed. It seems to do well in getting people talking about the show and contributing to it through competitions, which can only be a good thing.”

While they are rightly confident that the multi-platform approach has helped rather than hindered Skins’ aim of portraying British teenage life in a realistic but entertaining way, the first series’ pre-air marketing campaign (featuring a bunch of handsome actors looking elegantly wasted) gave some the wrong first impression. The Guardian’s TV critic Charlie Brooker for one said that the first episode had him “harrumphing like a four hundred-year-old man.”

Since, though, Brooker and many others have repented – and now recognise the greater levels of depth the writers have strived to instil into the characterisation of storylines. The series is now well-known for featuring delicate issues in its plotlines, such as anorexia, drug consumption and racial tension.

“The first ever episode did have its faults, but I think we’ve since shown we can deal with complicated issues and entertain young people,” says Jamie. Another writer on the show, Atiha Sen Gupta, agrees. “I think that’s the Skins philosophy really: taking a character that could be a stereotype, but doing it well. In series one, we had an anorexic girl but we subverted it. That gives the show its strength.”

There’s also been the odd critical voice attacking the show for glamorising drug consumption and casual sex, an argument the writers feel is unjustified. “People are going to take drugs and throw big parties whether there was Skins or not,” says Sen Gupta. This is also a point Daniel Kaluuya feels particularly strongly about. “I think it was Eminem who said something about people not being able to handle looking in the mirror and not liking what they see. Skins isn’t trying to glorify drugs; people just take them. People do drugs and have sex, so if we’re trying to write something realistic why can’t we put them in the show?”

Puritans aside, it seems more of the British television-watching public are beginning to awaken to the fact that Skins is not merely a fancy exercise in new media or empty pandering to a ‘youth demographic’, but is actually a show that could stand the test of time. On that matter Jamie, for whom the show’s characters were once merely vague ideas inside his head, is philosophical.

“I think it would be arrogant of us to assume we impact upon peoples lives in any major way, but it’s clear that this show means a lot to the people who watch it. We aren’t sure how long it will go on for, but we are defiantly going to do another series after the next. It means a lot to us, and we just want to keep it running for as long as feels right.” And with a talented and passionate gang of writers, an innovative approach to new media – and of course all those calls from Japan – Skins could probably continue for as long as they wish.

Alice is a second year Media and Communications student at Birmingham City University, specialising in Journalism. She is the UK communities correspondent for Environmental News Online.

www.environmentalnewsonline.com

James Hunt is a London-based freelancer who specialises in comics, console gaming and counterculture, as well as many other topics that do not begin with ‘c’. A former web-developer, he can currently be found writing for Comic Book Resources, Den of Geek, Micro Mart and his own review blog, Comics Daily.

rhunt@gmail.com

Paul Clarke’s career as a freelance music journalist has got him into all manner of weird situations across the world and his words into magazines like DJ, Jockey Slut and Touch, as well as the BBC and Channel 4 websites. He also moonlights as a restaurant critic for Metro.

paulburrito@hotmail.com

Chris is a student at Oxford University reading English. At the moment he’s freelancing for various magazines and most often write articles on creative design, culture or current affairs. A lot of his time is spent staying up very late finishing issues of the student newspaper, Cherwell, in his role as News Editor.

chris.baraniuk@some.ox.ac.uk

Suchandrika Chakrabarti is a London-based freelance journalist. She helps to edit Netribution and blogs at suchandrika.wordpress.com.

suchandrika@gmail.com

Editor of AU, the Northern Ireland based, music and lifestyle magazine, Francis Jones has written extensively on the Irish, national and international music scenes. He is also a longstanding music and arts contributor to print and online publications including Hot Press, DrownedInSound, and BBC Northern Ireland’s Across The Line.

Eileen Walsh is a freelance journalist and playwright, based in Derry, Northern Ireland, where she writes arts features, theatre reviews and book reviews for a number of publications. Having written a very successful series of radio dramas for children, broadcast last year on Inishowen Community Radio, she is currently working on a stage play.

Shannon Sickels is a theatre educator, creative programme designer, and writer. She has written for Diva, and Gay Community News. In New York City and now Belfast, she designed projects for children and young people, integrating arts, equality, and conflict resolution. She writes plays under her mother’s maiden name, Yee.

shannon_sickels@hotmail.com

Fiona is a freelance writer and editor in Birmingham. She has written for, amongst others, 4Talent Magazine / 4Talent Central England, The Birmingham Post, BBC Birmingham online, whatsOnUK and Aesthetica and is the Articles Editor for Incorporating Writing magazine. She loves all things Performance and will shortly be launching and managing the Midlands regional site for whatsonstage.com.

fionaferguson22@yahoo.co.uk

The 4Talent Awards 2008 are now open: across 20 categories, get your work judged by Channel 4 commissioners and the producers who supply them.

Categories are short doc, long doc, dramatic writing, dramatic performance, directing, comedy writing, comedy performance, presenting, on-air radio, off-air radio, music, music for production, music video, innovation, multi-platform, animation, journalism, photography, multi-talented and the mysterious wildcard award.

channel4.com/4talentawards

Simon Harper is a freelance journalist, copywriter and editor, specialising in writing about music and the creative industries in the West Midlands. He has written for the Birmingham Post, Bearded, Arena, the BBC and the Coventry Telegraph. Previous projects include Channel 4’s Directory of Disabled Contributors and the 4Homes website.

srharper@gmail.com