The filmmaker steering group is made up of individuals and companies working across the screen industries in the Tees Valley. The group will advise and help shape the content and direction of the Tees Valley Screen programme ensuring it meets the needs of the sector.
Jen Corcoran is a Teesside-based producer with a professional background in international sales and film finance. She is currently in production on HIDE AND SEEK [NASCONDINO], a poetic documentary portrait of a family in Naples with BFI / Doc Society. Formerly Head of Film at My Accomplice (THE GREAT HACK, THE QUIET ONE) Jen’s work has screened at Tribeca Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest and BFI Flare among others. Through her company Freya Films, Jen is developing a slate of film and television projects focusing on contemporary, female-led storytelling and new narratives from the North East. Jen was the Project Manager for Tees Valley Screen from 2019 – 2020.
Adam is a film producer and the owner of Couch Potato Films, an award winning production business in Hartlepool. He produces several YouTube channels, one of which boasts over 1.3m Subscribers, is responsible for International commercial projects and is currently in development on his debut feature film ‘THE MOONSHINE GANG OF CHEYENNE’, a £1.3m Western/Horror with writer/ director James Campbell, starring Steven Ogg, Pollyanna McIntosh and Richard Brake.
Adam regularly visits all of the key film markets, including Cannes, Berlinale and AFM, meeting with industry people in sales, acquisitions, distribution, finance and production. He believes networking and gaining up to date industry knowledge is very important and markets are the best places to do both.
Adam is also the owner of ‘Tower St. Creative’ in Hartlepool, providing serviced offices for creative businesses who want to be alongside likeminded people.
Caris Rianne is a film maker from Essex, having moved to Darlington two years ago she has used her production company Rianne Pictures to help drive film opportunities in the area with workshops and positions on set in their productions. Her films have screened in the US and Canada collecting 15 award nominations in total. Her company focuses on increasing the female voice in the industry with their production teams being 80% female in their recent projects.
Daniel John Williams is the founder of DJW Talent, an actor’s agency representing emerging and established talent across the North East. Their mission is to ‘Discover Talent in Hard to Reach Places’ and they aim to help each client prepare for the industry by offering them the chance to build portfolios, showreels, headshots and CV’s. They also provide actor training with The DJW School of Acting, a part time actor training programme in Stockton, Middlesbrough and Newcastle.
Gemma is a graduate of the MA Producing for Film & Television course at Teesside University. She is particularly interested in the issues surrounding accessibility of industry faced by people with a disability, including accessing training, gaining employment or meeting other creatives with disabilities.
In 2015 Andy wrote and directed the BFI Network/Creative England funded short ‘A 6 & 2 3s’. Set and shot in Stockton, it went on to play 20+ festivals, won 4 awards and was BIFA long listed for Best British Short. In 2017 he wrote and directed ‘Elsewhere’, again BFI/Creative England funded, starring Molly Windsor and Mark Addy. It’s currently playing festivals around the world. Andy is also a commercial filmmaker with two businesses in the North East, and has made promotional films for Stockton, Hartlepool and Darlington Local Authorities.
Ithica Films work with ambitious brands, creative agencies, companies and charities, providing a full breadth of film related services from consultancy and strategy and all aspects of production. Ithica cover everything from creative direction and script development, through to filming, design and post-production.
Maxy’s work has been described as “film from somewhere that’s fallen off the edge of the map, from a place as far from the centre of English society and culture as it’s possible to go, economically, socially and spiritually – as close to the edges and ends of England as it gets”. ‘Stranger On the Shore’ is a series of video poems made with Michael Smith about the eccentricity of the English coast. All three film were screened at the BFI Southbank in 2017 with Live Score. ‘PIG THE DOG, A Film’ made for Channel 4’s short form strand ‘Random Acts’ was broadcast on C4, exhibited at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and was selected as a Vimeo staff pick. ‘Another England’ is a cycle of four films exploring a town on the edges of English society. It is a meditiation on this marginal, sometimes otherworldly place, and the characters that haunt it.
Alyson Agar is an artist and lecturer living and working in Teesside. She has lectured for over a decade, her visual arts practice is rooted within lens-based theories and her photographic and film works explore dialogue between photographic and sculptural practices. Alyson’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has recently undertaken residencies in Iceland, Germany and the Ukraine. She is also the author of several photobooks, including Elevations (2017), Ukrainian Smile (2016), Solid Paradise (2016) and The Tricks: A Psychogeographic Survey (2015). In 2018, Alyson worked as a Researcher as part of a project entitled ‘Exhibiting Contemporary Photography in the Twenty First Century’. More recently, Alyson was selected alongside Nick John Williams as one of the first recipients of the Tees Valley Screen Artist Residencies programme. During this, Alyson explored augmented reality, immersive media and disrupted open source technology as a way to innovate oral history through video search. This research came to fruition in their project ‘The Living Archive – A Place, A Moment’, an immersive audio-visual installation in collaboration with Vlogbase, which premiered as part of Middlesbrough Art Weekend.
