FOCAL Regional Event 2024: Panellists
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Visit pagePanel 1: Natural History
Ant-Zebra of Acquiring Rights
Ben Clarke
BBC Natural History Unit
Based in Bristol, Ben leads the commercial team managing the NHU’s end-to-end deal pipeline. Ben draws on 20 years' experience in the media industry in strategic and commercial roles with Deloitte, Ofcom, BT TV and now BBC Studios.
Donna Sayyed
Getty Images
Donna has over 10 years’ experience in sales and support leadership. The past 8 years has been spent with Getty Images as a Director in Sales and Service. Donna has a key focus on video and archival licensing, leading teams responsible for processing and licensing content. Donna has a demonstrated history in building and driving strategies to support commercial goals and improve customer experience. Donna prides herself on always putting the customer and the content at the heart of everything that she does.
Nicole Wilkinson
Getty Images
Nicole has over 20 years’ experience working with the BBC’s vast archive collection. She began her career in 2001 as a Sales Executive with BBC Motion Gallery where she was responsible for licensing BBC content to broadcast, production and agency clients for a variety of film and TV projects. In 2014 Nicole was part of the sales team that transferred across to Getty Images following their representation of the BBC’s archive. Due to working remotely from her hometown of Bristol she forged close working relationships with a variety of regional production companies specialising in natural history documentaries. In 2021 Nicole crossed over to Getty’s bespoke ‘Product Specialist’ team as a Senior Product Specialist and is now responsible for project managing high volume productions requiring complex BBC offline content. Whilst she manages the supply of all offline content from Getty’s varied content partners, a large part of her daily workload is focussed on the BBC’s archive and specifically Natural History content. Nicole prides herself on exemplary customer care and her tenacity in sourcing the best content for her clients’ projects whilst maintaining a friendly and approachable manner, even when faced with the most challenging of requests.
Tim Aldred
Nature Picture Library
I'm the Head of Sales and Marketing at Nature Picture Library. I love wildlife, and I love photography. I've been lucky to incorporate both passions into my work, helping businesses, charities, and content creators maximise their visual impact. I've worked with clients like National Geographic, WWF, BBC Wildlife who settle for nothing less than the world's best nature photography. Armed with a Zoology degree, I can confidently address wildlife and natural history inquiries. My flair for creating captivating photo stories, using my creative design and copyrighting skills, is a hallmark of my service, and a wellspring of inspiration my clients.
Tim Harris
Nature Picture Library
I’ve worked in the photo library industry for more than 40 years, mainly for specialist agencies in the nature sphere. I joined Nature Picture Library in 2009 and am now Managing Director and Head of Content, responsible for photographer relations and managing our distribution.
I have a strong interest in the area of rights and licensing and was for many years chair of the BAPLA Rights Group. My degree is in modern languages, which still comes in useful when dealing with clients, photographers and partner agencies worldwide.
Panel 2: Natural History
Open Planet & Wildscreen ARK
Charlie Whittaker
Wildscreen ARK
www.wildscreenark.org is an online nature hub for young people, bringing together a large collection of freely available natural world imagery and video content, as well as high-quality teaching resources. Our goal is to mend the gap in nature connectedness experienced by teenagers, giving them opportunity to explore and learn more about UK nature online.
The imagery and footage on Wildscreen ARK is contributed free of charge by supportive filmmakers and photographers who share our goal of democratising access to nature’s stories, for impact. The content is served to ARK’s users through an innovative interface that networks content by its similarities including shared heritage, characteristics and conservation.
Wildscreen ARK is generously funded by The Linbury Trust with additional support from The Garfield Weston Foundation. The organisation worked with Bath-based software development agency, Rocketmakers, to develop the ARK prototype, who provided additional pro bono support through their Collaboratorium fund.
Emily Renshaw-Smith
Open Planet
Emily is Executive Director of Operations for Open Planet. She passionately believes in the power of storytelling to change the way people view, interact and feel about the world and has worked in factual programming and documentaries for 25 years. Prior to Open Planet, Emily was Head of Content for Comic Relief where she lead the transformation of the charities’ appeal films towards working with local filmmakers and hearing from community voices.
Panel 3: Regional News
From South West to the North, How to Find the Right Content?
Amy Gardener
BBC News Libraries
Amy is the team leader for the BBC News Library based in the Midlands, West and South. She has been working in the BBC News Library for the last 5 years.
The BBC Archive contains millions of television, radio, music, documents and heritage items, including items from network, regional and international news.
Sophia Gorton
ITV
Sophia is a Clip Sales Executive at ITV, with 10 years experience licencing ITV's programme and regional news collections.
The ITV Archive holds over 250,000 hours of archived ITV programmes, feature films, sports and regional news content from across the UK.