Gemma Germains (Lecture write up)

Gemma Germains

Gemma Germains is a founding member of Well Made studio, a leading studio in Liverpool. After spending a decade working in the creative industry she has lots of opinions and advise to pass on, this is what her lecture was based around today. Showing us the exploitation of unpaid interns, the best ways to get experience and many tricks of the trade. 

The Well Made studio consists of Gemma, Doug and Joe. Doug and Joe work as the designers and Gemma promotes there skills to different companies.

The studio has been live for 2 years and has worked with some very high profile clients from Pedlars to the wombats.

In Gemma’s talk she raised some very interesting and controversial points. She started by explaining her situation and what she does. She then explained in detail how she got there, comparing the extreme highs and the equally extreme lows.

To visually represent her journey Gemma stuck post-it notes on the wall in a time line format. She starting with University this was situated in the center of the wall and ending with now (Well made studios) which interestingly only got a little bit higher than university. There were many points that built up the timeline such as getting pregnant and becoming homeless one year into Uni (this being a rather low point), working on the Arctic Monkeys first and second album (This being one of the highest points) and also finding her self at a PR company in a high ranking role that she hated (This was a rather low point). 

Gemma then went onto discuss her view on unpaid internships or should I say her utter disregard and hatred for them.  She explained how they were slowly destroying the creative industry and turning it into a mass of clones. This was happening due to the fact that everyone trying to enter into the creative world after university is told they have no worth and with out two years of experience they are meaningless or unemployable. So the only way of getting the needed experience is through an unpaid internship, but the problem with this is that the only people that can afford to do this are quite well to do young people that will get backing to work unpaid for two years, other people that don’t have the backing from parents or need to care for other and support other fall away from the creative industry. This is turning the creative industry into one huge clone that can only relate to one another but not the whole world. 

Another problem with unpaid interne ship is that it makes you very disposable, if a company is paying you they have an incentive to keep you and nurture you helping you progress but if they don’t need to pay you a company will just let you get on with your work, not really including you with large important projects or important interesting work. Then once the intern realizes there is now future for them in the company there work quality will drop, they will be fired and another intern will be hired.

So Gemma proposed that none of us should partake in unpaid internships boycotting the whole idea and if everyone had the same idea companies would have to change their ways.

 But this raised the question what would we do about experience, as obviously the whole of the world isn’t just going to stop all at once. So Gemma put an idea forward instead of joining another company start your own!

Start your own business with like-minded people, this wouldn’t only help you gain experience in a sense of furthering your experience in your chosen field film, photography, graphics etc. It would also give you experience of how to run company skills most people only graze until much further down the line.  

There was also a lengthy Q&A where Gemma answered any queries people had, such as how to fire a client, the best ways to go about getting a client, whether or not go to university etc.

I found her idea starting you own company very interesting. It was strange as me and a friend had been toying with the idea of setting up our own website to show case our work and the work of our close friends as we have a rather create circle of friends. It seems like this lecture was a sign, the kick up the arse that we needed to actually put our ideas in place and start to put the site together. 

The idea is to just show case our work but after a while we may move it into a more business orientated site. 

I found Gemma Germains lecture very interesting and it opened my eyes to a lot of things, I don’t totally agree with all of her ideas but I defiantly think she’s talking sense. She gave me lots of ideas and if I only take away one thing from her lecture its that you don’t have to follow the crowd, you don’t have to be unhappy and used as a slave for two years to get a job. Do something different, make a change, show other people there are other options.