Leeds nostalgia: you could become a student of history

Creative Skillset, the industry skills body for the creative industries, along with Film London and FOCAL International are offering five London-based traineeships to new entrants to the film industry. Placements are available at world-renowned companies and institutions in London.

Media archivists and archive technicians rescue, preserve and restore film, TV and digital media so that future generations can be inspired by the brilliance of our media heritage.

Trainees will receive expert training and work in industry for up to 24 weeks with major top media archive collections learning from skilled professionals about film archiving, intellectual property rights, digital marketing, and the role of heritage and archives in the film industry.

Director of Yorkshire Film Archive, (YFA) Sue Howard said: “As one of the leading public sector archives, YFA is critically aware of the need to attract committed, enthusiastic and highly skilled new entrants if the archive sector is to survive and thrive in the years of transformation from caring for analogue formats to becoming organisations successfully operating in the digital environment.

“The YFA has a team of experienced staff who are willing to share their expertise, and their commitment to making the sector a strong, interesting and vibrant community. In turn, YFA itself will learn from the trainees, who will bring new ideas and thinking into the sector and into YFA as an organisation.”

The YFA is a registered charity which finds, preserves and provides public access to moving image made in or about the Yorkshire region.

It also manages the collections held by the North East Film Archive (NEFA), as part of its charitable remit. At present it is appealing for old film footage of Hull in preparation for Hull City of Culture 2017.

The ITV Archive has thousands of hours of classic footage from across ITV output spanning the news, arts entertainment over decades since the mid 1960s.

Trainees receive a training allowance at the equivalent of the living wage throughout the class-based training and placements.

Archive manager at YFA Graham Relton said: “This is a great opportunity for someone wanting to enter a sector which is changing all the time. We’re looking for some vibrant people who will bring energy to this business and also some of their own ideas.

“We have a foot in the past and a foot in the future, because we preserving original films in a digital world and also ensuring films made in the digital world are preserved for the future.”

Applications are open now and the closing date for applications is Monday March 30.

See further detail at the Creative Skillset website here: www.creativeskillset.org

For more information contact the Archive Partnership Manager, Madeline Bates – [email protected], or call 020 7713 9800.