Series 2 has been green-lit! We were fortunate to collaborate with YouTube, which has its own streaming service called YouTube Originals. What’s the long-term aim for the project? Do you think there will be a second series?
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It’s great fun, and all of the episodes incorporate things relevant to the children, for example helping to save the environment or helping to fight for the right to become literate. Its aim is also to appeal to girls, with the hope of inspiring and empowering them to remain in education longer. It’s an African series, so it’s bringing diversity to children’s media, and it helps to target those communities in Africa where access to education is poor, or even non-existent. The aim is to inspire children to get into science, tech and maths. She turns her granddad’s loft into a tech lab, and in every episode she uses her STEM skills to invent something to defeat an evil AI robot. Super Sema is an African superhero series following the adventures of Sema, a tech whizz-kid, African girl. Tell us about the project, its mission and how your involvement has progressed. Super Sema is what caused us to contact you because we had seen your promotions about it. That’s how I first got involved with the Super Sema team! They asked me to write a track demonstrating the kind of music I felt fitted the project, and I was delighted to hear they loved it and had picked me for the job. One of which was Kukua, the makers of the animated series Super Sema, and it happened to be that they needed music at that time. Unfortunately we didn’t get through to the next round, but I had enjoyed working on the app, so I was a bit of a traitor, and I emailed the companies that did get through. It was being entered into a competition for funding from EduApp4Syria, and she asked me to write the music for it. It came about when my childhood best friend was working on an educational app to improve the literacy of Syrian child refugees. I ended up scoring a kids’ animated series called Super Sema when I spotted an opportunity. Have you found that work has come to you as you’ve become more established, or do you still actively seek opportunities? Everybody has to start at the bottom of the ladder.
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With student films you would often do the work pro bono, or you would do it for a very small budget, maybe not even being paid enough to cover your time, but it still counts as a commission. I can’t really remember exactly what my first commission was! The reason for that is because I started with mainly student films. How did you feel when you received your first commission? My career has been a mixture of good luck, and jumping on any opportunity to secure a job. You never really know where a job is coming from. Some people go to LA because there are so many films being made there, but there are also so many people there that the industry is a lot more saturated. There’s not really one way you can get these jobs. The hope would be that one day you get the chance to write for them, and maybe get to then score films yourself.
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For example, you get composers who maybe work with directors on some of their early films, and they just hope that the director continues to make bigger films with bigger budgets, and maybe takes them along for future projects.Īnother pathway is becoming an assistant to an already established composer, doing orchestration for them. It can be quite closed and be more about who you know rather than what you know. How did you decide what your next steps would be after your postgraduate?ĭuring the postgraduate, we were all exploring different ways to get into the film music industry because it’s difficult. I enjoyed working on it so much that it made me want to study it a bit more and score more films, so I did the Masters at the Royal College of Music which was more geared to that.
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I did a film music module in my final year for my portfolio and I’d scored a children’s animation. I knew I wanted to do music, but I wasn’t really sure which aspect most appealed. What led you to take your postgraduate? Did you have an inclination that you wanted to work in TV and film ?Īfter my undergraduate, I took a year out because, like many of us, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. I then did a Masters at the Royal College of Music and that was called Composition for Screen, so it was composing music for film, animation and any kind of media really. I had a great time studying there for three years for my undergraduate degree. I studied Music at the University of Manchester. Phoebe, where did you go to University and what did you study?