An employee-owned TV company has clinched a deal to launch a pioneering training programme for its staff and freelancers with the “world’s best film school”. Caernarfon-based Cwmni Da has signed a three-year agreement with the National Film and Television School’s (NFTS) recently established Cardiff hub, NFTS Cymru Wales to boost its team’s skills.
The company has always invested heavily in training but what’s new is that from now on the tutors travel to Caernarfon instead of the other way round, with previous courses being held in places like Cardiff, London, Liverpool and Birmingham. The upshot is that it reduces costs and staff time which means they can stage more courses and train even more people.
It’s now just over two years since Cwmni Da made broadcast history by becoming an Employee-Owned Trust which employs over 50 people and pumps £5 million a year into the local economy. Cwmni Da was founded in 1996 and has a long and successful track record making factual, entertainment, drama and children’s programmes, in the Welsh language for S4C but also for UK network channels and international markets.
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The deal with NFTS Cymru Wales was brokered by Cwmni Da’s current managing director, Llion Iwan, who is also a council member of Skillset UK. The training includes courses on technical, production and business skills as well as research and interview techniques and pitching ideas.
The courses are delivered by some of the industry’s top practitioners, many of them award-winners in their own area of expertise. Llion Iwan said: “One complaint throughout the industry is that budgets are so small, timetables become squashed and the one thing that suffers is the time for training.
“This was a fantastic opportunity to partner with NFTS which is consistently the only UK film school to be listed in the Hollywood Reporter’s top international film schools list and has been described in the Observer newspaper as the ‘world’s best film school’. We can also choose which courses to hold and crucially, the dates to hold them which gives us more control, reduces the drain on staff time and cuts costs, enabling us to invest in even more training.
“What we’re doing is creating a virtuous circle. By improving the skills of our staff, they will benefit personally from professional development while at the same time improving the quality of our programmes.”
