WPeople: Laura Hewison

Name: Laura Hewison
Job title: Video Producer
UCL Department: Communications and Marketing

What does your job involve?

A lot of what I do is advising people around the university who want to make a video but don’t quite know how. Sometimes I help them come up with ideas that we can work on together and we make a video. I like to work backwards, starting with understanding what we want to achieve from a video.

I am involved in nearly all of the video making process – I plan it, I write it, I film it and sometimes I even do the voice overs and then we make them live and send them out into the world.

Speaking of voice overs, people reading this interview won’t be able to hear that you have a lovely Australian accent. Tell me about where you are from and why you are in the UK.

I was born and raised in Australia and I went to university there. I studied Communications during my undergraduate degree and then I did a postgraduate degree in Broadcasting. I always thought that I would get involved in something to do with the radio and subject the Australian public to my dulcet tones and terrible taste in music.

However, when I got to university I did a little bit of film making and found that I really enjoyed everything to do with visual storytelling. I liked the planning of it and the practical side. I found that I just really love bringing things together and telling stories.

I came to London five years ago after working with a television network in Western Australia. I came because at the time I felt like it was the moment for me to take the next big step and that was a choice between moving to Melbourne, Sydney and London. By chance, my best friend was living in London and told me she had a spare room in her house. The next day I went to work and resigned and four weeks later I was living here in London.

My first job in London was with ITN but I decided to move to UCL because I was looking for something that would allow me to be involved with the entire process of film making.

Now that you have had a little bit of experience of higher education in England, do you see many differences between how it works here and how it is back home?

The main difference is that Australian higher education is hugely vocational. The whole idea is “what do you want to do for a career? Go to university and get ready to do that.” When I was at high school, I told my teachers I wanted to work in radio so they found me a degree in communications and sent me off to do that.

I think in the UK, many university courses are more about opening your mind and encouraging you to question things. In some ways, I would have loved to have studied anthropology or history and then gone on to a more practical course in film making. In fact, I’ve found that places like the BBC love you to have a more traditionally academic degree because they can teach you the practical skills on the job but they can’t give you the critical thinking skills and the ability to form arguments that those kind of degrees do.

You get involved in quite a lot of our Widening Participation work. Why do you think it’s important to improve access to higher education?

I was the first person in my family to go to university and I really had no expectation of what university was going to be like. I am really grateful for my degree and I really loved do it and what I got out of it but sometimes I wish that there was someone I could have spoken to about higher education when I was young so that I had more of an idea about how to make the most of it.

What was your dream job when you were a child?

When I was very small, I obviously wanted to be an Olympic horse-rider because I thought that was going to be the answer to all of my dreams… but then I discovered that I’m actually not very good at horse riding so that idea went out of the window.

Let’s move onto to talking about our new promo video. You were the one who planned the video and wrote the script. How do you go about planning a video like that?

It’s really about trial and error. Something that I’ve developed through a lot of practice is writing scripts that come across quite conversationally. Something I tend to do is work backwards from figuring out what I want a video to achieve and then that informs the rest of the process. I think about what I want people to do after watching the video or how I want them to feel and then write a script that I hope will inspire that reaction.

When I’m watching the video, I think that the music really makes it. How do you go about choosing what music to use for a video?

Choosing the music is one of the hardest part of making a video. I’ll either spend 5 minutes on it, or it’ll take me half a day. We’re really lucky here at UCL because we have access to a big online library that you can search through using keywords. It’s good because you can watch the video and think about how it makes you feel and then search those keywords, like “inspired” or “hopeful”. Quite often people will have made a track that they think fits that emotion and what I do is sit down with a bowl of popcorn and my headphones and listen to all of the tracks I find until I get the right one.

Is the popcorn a mandatory part of the film making process?

Absolutely. Popcorn is necessary for all film making. I will also accept various types of chocolate – especially Tim Tam biscuits, my favourite Australian treat. For anyone who doesn’t know what they are, they are a basically a far superior version of a Penguin biscuit.

Who are your favourite people to work with when you’re filming?

The best people to work with are kids. They are super enthusiastic and they haven’t developed a fear of cameras yet. Adults are a little bit more timid. Sometimes they see that little red blinking light and they can go a bit mad, they kind of get self-conscious. Kids don’t care about that, they just want to be on film!

When we were filming in the UCL Academy for the Discover UCL video, the kids were so happy to be part of it and they were so lovely to work with. I just wish all of my UCL promos could have those children in them.

Would you say that was your favourite part of the process?

I would. In all honesty though I enjoyed all aspects of putting this video together. I loved seeing all of the different parts of the work that Access and Widening Participation team does.

You’re really good at making people feel comfortable about being filmed. How do you do that?

Sheer enthusiasm! Sometimes I also use sweets.

Basically it’s about keeping an energy level that people will respond to and that corresponds to the kind of energy you want from the people you are filming. I think that if you are behind a camera and you are super down beat, then the people you are filming are going to react to that in a negative way. For me, a much better way to get people involved is to show them that you are enthusiastic about what you’re doing. It’s also important not to yell at people, obviously.

Make sure to check out new Discover UCL promo video on YouTube. You can also find many other video that Laura has made on the UCLTV channel.