Toby Haynes: From Graphic Design To Doctor Who

Falmouth University recently welcomed back one if its most successful alumni – television director Toby Haynes.

During an evening a year and a half in the planning, Haynes recalled his career path all the way from arts school to calling the shots on some of the BBC’s biggest shows, including Doctor Who and Sherlock.

After studying for a foundation degree at Falmouth (back then Falmouth College of Arts), he moved on to study graphic design at Kingston University before earning a place at the National Film and Television School.

“When I was growing up I wanted to be a filmmaker, or work in films, ever since I knew that Star Wars was actually made by people and didn’t just happen,” he said. “It can be quite mystifying going into film and TV and how you make that leap from one thing to another and, because I don’t particularly like doing public speaking, I thought the best way of illustrating this is by showing you the films that I’ve made along the way. For me, this will be like when you drown and you see your life flash before your eyes.”

After spending the day with students on the BA Film course Haynes spoke for nearly two and a half hours about his journey. He played a number of trailers and scenes from short films and episodes that he’s directed to an audience who listened with rapt attention throughout.

The first few short films he played were those he made as a student. The idea for his first one, ‘Nam, came about during a summer holiday in Falmouth.

“I was in Kimberly Park and it was a really hot summer and I was looking across Kimberly Park at the, kind of, there’s a pond, I don’t know if you know it, and there’s some palm trees and I remember saying to my friend ‘if you squint, and do this’,” he said, holding up his hands to make a frame with his fingers, “‘it looks like the beginning of Apocalypse Now over there’. He turned to me and said ‘yeah, it’s like…it’s like ‘Nam!’”

It was evident watching the films that he had an eye for directing. However, he explained that the transition he faced from making fun videos with his friends to attending film school was a struggle.

“The weird thing was having come from art school, film school seemed like a very sort of straight place. You know, there was less experimentation going on there than there was at art school, more, kind of, learning the rules and ‘this is the way you do things’ and I found that quite difficult to deal with at the time. I was still desperate to make crazy films.”

After finishing film school, Haynes found himself facing nine months of unemployment. Desperate for any kind of work, he accepted the offer of a Channel 4 programme that no one else wanted due to its focus on suicide bombers. In the space between 9/11 and 7/7, he directed The Baader Meinhoff Complex, starring Olivia Colman and Eddie Marsan.

Following on from this, he was invited to work on Hollyoaks. He claimed that the experience he gained working on an established television programme was paramount to his development as a director.

“I’d suddenly been thrown into this microcosm of the film industry, or the TV industry. You learn very quickly what the right and the wrong things to do are and where you can push it and where you can’t.”

The production company Kudos came calling, and he was asked to take the directing job on a new CBBC progamme called MI High. The story of a group of children who are secretly spies operating in a school, MI High provided Haynes with the chance to flex his talents as a director of a more action-based script. Being a BBC programme, his work was noticed by other production teams and he soon found himself working on what would end up being two rather ill-fated shows (Holby Blue and Spooks: Code 9) before getting his big break on BBC3’s supernatural comedy Being Human.

It was his work on that show and the BBC One drama Five Days that led to Haynes getting the script that every director wants – Doctor Who.

“Being asked to make a Doctor Who episode was a really exciting prospect and it wasn’t just any episode, it was The Pandorica Opens, which was the season finale of the first season with Matt Smith.”

The success of his work on the two-part finale meant he was asked back to direct not only the 2010 Christmas special (starring Michael Gambon), but the first two episodes of Matt Smith’s second series, The Impossible Astronaut and The Day Of The Moon. Obviously impressed with his work, Doctor Who head writer Steven Moffat kept him in his phone book and Haynes found himself directing another finale, this time for the second series of Sherlock.

After playing the scene from The Reichenbach Fall where Sherlock Holmes jumps to his apparent death, Haynes explained his joy at being involved with such a successful show. Being careful not to give anything away, he teased the Sherlock fans in the audience with a little hint.

“It was a great thing to work out because we knew that we had to do, I don’t know if this is giving away spoilers for any of you who may or may not have seen the episode, but we do see Sherlock again in that episode. There is something going on in that scene. There’s not a lot I can say! It was really important that we worked all these aspects out for it to pay off in series three. It was great just being at the genesis of all of that and being at the meetings and being able to put input into that.”

Before finishing, he was able to play an exclusive clip from the third series of Wallander, where he’d been directing Kenneth Branagh as the eponymous police inspector.

Haynes delivered an insightful and inspiring evening’s discussion, proving that Falmouth University students have the potential to be incredibly successful. It was a fantastic opportunity to get a first-hand account of what it’s like to work in television.

If you want proof of the talented individual who has helped to create some of the best television of the past few years, watch Andrew Scott’s BAFTA acceptance speech. He thanks one Toby Haynes.

Oliver Poole:“I quite enjoyed myself in Lybia”

Oliver Poole is a war correspondent who works at The Independent and the Evening Standard. On Monday the 5th of March he visited University College Falmouth to give student journalists an idea of what it’s like to travel to and report from countries at war. Poole’s lecture did not follow the template of the previous guests at Falmouth, who discussed how they started in journalism or the success of their magazines. Instead he chose to share his first hand experiences, discussing in length and detail the security measures, the threat to the safety of journalists and the overall ground rules of reporting at the centre of a conflict-torn city.

He has travelled across the world, from Mogadishu to Cairo, Benghazi to Kabul (claiming that in fact, ‘Kabul ain’t that bad’.) He explained his surprise at how easy he found reporting on the Arab Spring came to be, especially in Lybia where the rebels wanted to talk:

“They wanted you there, so you could actually do your job. If you wanted to talk to people, you got out of the car and talked to people. It just was incredibly easy to cover.”

His frankness and dark sense of humour contrasted with the sometimes shocking details of his time abroad, at one point he explained how a good friend hired a recommended security team, only to find himself kidnapped by the same men once they’d left the safety of the city. He laughed as he recalled how this man had spent ‘6 months in a cave’.

He explained that there are levels to a story that extend deeper than just physical conflict, and that it can be found by acknowledging that there is more to a war than just people killing each other.

“It’s about the fact that all the layers of destruction exist around this kind of weird onion that we live in, this precarious world, this society and how precarious that is. And when this shit happens, and people start running around killing everybody, very few people really get killed. Everything else just starts getting ripped away, so you don’t have electricity, you don’t have water. No one ever collects the rubbish in wars.”

He also highlighted the extremes to which journalists now have to go to get the best story, giving examples of how they now find themselves running towards the shelling rather than away from it. Much of the Arab Spring was reported by young people who used Twitter and blogging to spread the word, and Poole claims that this is pushing working journalists to take more risks – something that probably shouldn’t be encouraged in a warzone.

Rebecca Matthews and Brendan Sleeman: “Get your brand right, know your audience”

The creators of Wed magazine, Rebecca Matthews and Brendan Sleeman, visited University College Falmouth on Monday the 27th of February to deliver an insightful guest lecture on how they earned their success, and what students can do to emulate it. Matthews, an ex-UCF student herself, admitted that initially she’d thought that ‘you needed 20 years in London’ to consider setting up a successful magazine, but a chance phone call from Brendan Sleeman brought them together just as she’d finished her professional writing degree.

The duo began work on a film magazine that can still be found inside the local Phoenix cinema in Falmouth. Deciding it wasn’t an original enough brand for them, they made the decision to move onto a specific genre – weddings. They saw the gap for the niche magazine and leapt at it.

“If you’re getting married in Cornwall,” Sleeman said, pointing at the free copies of Wed they were handing out, “that is the magazine. You have to buy that magazine if you’re going to get married. It’s got all the information in there.”

The magazine itself is a high-quality looking thing, and Matthews spent time discussing the decisions regarding the typography and design ideas that keep the product suitable for both brides and grooms. The magazine sells for £3.50 and Matthews is insistent that people will keep buying the hardcopy, even though they have a back catalogue of all their issues online. She commented:

“Print isn’t dead. People do want to switch off from technology and they want to curl up with a magazine.”

They use their impressive website and social media to keep people invested in their product. They point out that print and the internet should go ‘hand in hand’ and that the latter should not be seen as a threat. Their awareness of the importance of networking and sites like Twitter has resulted in their ability to hold wedding shows and events across Cornwall.

They ended by noting that the most successful writers have their own unique writing style, and encouraged ‘a strong sense of voice’ on our blogs.

The Wed magazine website can be found HERE

Sam Lynas: “Content is king”

Digital content producer Sam Lynas graduated from University College Falmouth in 2009. On Monday the 20th of February 2012 he returned to give a lecture on how journalism students can go about creating an online audience. After graduating, Lynas worked locally in Bodmin with Barefoot Media, a PR and digital marketing company. At the same time he was maintaining his own specialist blog ‘The Cornish Pasty Man’. No prizes for guessing what he wrote about.

He encouraged the students to really write about something original as he had done, commenting that: “If you don’t, someone else will. It’s ultra, ultra competitive at the moment, even more so every year.” He explained how writing online is a lot easier and therefore a lot more challenging than writing for a newspaper or magazine, where you must be BJTC accredited and have qualifications. He continued: “If you want to write online, at the moment there aren’t the same guidelines or boundaries in place [as opposed to print media]. So that means that anyone can do it, so all the competition there is in the journalism marketplace or realm is kind of multiplied tenfold.”

He made it clear that in the online world, content is king. Create an original, interesting and consistent blog and you will find yourself much more appealing to an audience. After playing a game of ‘Play Your Keywords Right’, Lynas demonstrated that using keywords that come up frequently in Google searches can promote your blog to a wider audience. At the same time he explained how researching your audience is one of the most important things you can do, as gaining an understanding of their age, location and technical ability etc. can actually affect the different ways you interact with your audience. For example, using more photographs or having a video-based blog for people who want to read about fashion is a better way of gratifying your audience than simply writing paragraphs of text with no visual aids.

Lynas’s lecture allowed us journalism students to feel slightly more ambitious about our future, and certainly gave us an idea or two on how to promote our blogs to the wider and hopefully more receptive world.

Lynas can be found on Twitter HERE

Paul Du Noyer: “I didn’t know I wanted to be a journalist.”

Paul Du Noyer claims he didn’t know he wanted to be a journalist. And yet, speaking to students at University College Falmouth on Monday the 13th of February, he described his career so far like a man who was evidently born to be nothing else. His CV speaks for itself; he began his career at the NME before moving on to launch not only Q, but MOJO and heat magazine too. He has intervied everyone from Elvis Costello to Madonna and for an hour and half he regailed the rapt audience with tales of his experiences in journalism and his honest advice on how to succeed.

Du Noyer became a full time journalist in the late ’70s and shared tips with the students on what to do at the start of your career, admitting: “What I learned at the NME, as a journalist with no experience whatsoever, is that it’s a good idea to try and do everything that they ask you. I had no specialism, I had no particular expertise in anything that I was aware of and I was so insecure. I thought I was so astonishingly lucky to have landed a job on the NME, I literally could not believe my luck…my policy was whatever they asked me to do, I said ‘yes’.”

Despite interviewing the rock stars of the age like The Specials, Elvis Costello and Joe Strummer of The Clash, he felt that at 25 he was getting ‘too old’ for the NME and decided to branch out further, launching his first magazine, a men’s glossy called The Hit. It was closed down after nine months. Unperturbed, he continued with his freelancing until some friends convinced him to try and launch another new music magazine, this time called Q. It was a success and can be found in any good retailer on the high street today.

Du Noyer explained that whilst jetting off around the world to places like Japan and America to interview rock and popstars sounds like the ideal lifestyle, it does have its downsides: “Interviewing people is probably the most glamorous, nothing’s actually glamorous when you do it, to be honest, but seemingly the most glamorous is when you travel abroad to meet these stars,” he added, with a sad smile, “it is awfully tough when they are as lost in showbusiness as someone like poor old Courtney Love is. She is completely doolally actually, she’s the only one of my interviewees to actually lose conciousness while I was interviewing her.”

He became the editor of Q, though stated he didn’t really want to do so and soon after went off yet again to do his bit in launching both MOJO and the incredibly successful heat magazine. Finding time (somehow) to write a number of books, Du Noyer has established himself as a bit of a revolutionary in the world of journalism, and is certainly someone that students who hope to go into writing for magazines can look to as an inspiration.

Du Noyer’s website can be found HERE

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Alison Hastings of the Press Complaints Commission: “I don’t think the PCC will survive in its present format.”

On Monday the 16th of January, Alison Hastings gave student journalists at University College Falmouth a lecture on the PCC’s ‘Editor’s Code’. Staying relatively clear of criticism regarding the PCC and its response to the phone hacking scandal, Hastings delivered an entertaining and informative hour’s lecture on the intricacies of their system. With five years experience at the PCC under her belt, Hastings is also currently a BBC Trustee and the vice president of the BBFC, (her advice after three viewings of The Human Centipede: Full Sequence was simple: “I wouldn’t recommend it.”)

The Press Complaints Commission has been established for close to twenty years, and recieves between six and seven thousand complaints per annum.  Hastings explained that fairness is important within the group of seventeen that makes up the PCC: “The lay members, i.e. the non-journalists, have to be in the majority, and that’s because there is an understandable perception that if it was just editors on it, or if the editors were in the majority, there would be a stitch up and they would look after themselves.” 

Clearly aware of the opinions that the public now holds of the press in light of the recent scandals, she hammered home the importance of newspapers printing apologies on the front page, where they are expected: “There is a public perception that you’ll be the victim of some inaccuracy in the paper and you get through to the PCC, you get them to say they’ll put it right, and they tuck it away on page ninety-six,” she explained, before adding, “this rarely happens in this day and age, because we get involved, but again, perceptions are very hard to budge.”

Hastings spoke in detail about different examples of newspaper organisations failing to comply with the Code. Public interest is a predominant factor in the actions that the PCC takes regarding breach of privacy complaints about crime or celebrity culture. If it’s a matter that is in the public interest, the person filing a complaint would most likely find themselves losing their argument. John Terry’s affair, for example, was front page news as he was England captain and it was a public interest story, not a private one.

When asked whether she thought that the PCC would survive in the future, she answered: “I don’t think it will survive in its present format.” Hastings then higlighted that in actual fact, the Code and complaints procedure has not come under scrutiny. The problem lies with the standards of the PCC, which she claims have been ‘neglected’: “I think that’s probably not tenable going forward. They should be holding people to account for standards more.”

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