Arista begin first ADEPT course

Training and development agency Arista have welcomed the first batch of students onto their ADEPT skills development course.
Students from across the UK attended an introduction weekend in Holland and an intensive week in Denmark. The course will continue in November with a seven-day workshop in Italy.
ADEPT is a six-month programme split into two parts, Standard and Advanced, with developers and project teams (a writer and producer) formulated to work together under the watchful eyes of the Arista tutors Wendall Thomas, Peter Speyer and Stephen Cleary.
ADEPT students all have a few years experience in the industry, but the Advanced level looks for participants with good film and television production credits under their belts so they can make use of extensive lectures on worldwide development, document production, storytelling, character, action, plot, structure, theory and budgeting.
Arista maintain a permanent development centre in Belfast, and several participants were selected from Northern Ireland, including Anthony Rowe from Straight Face Productions.
He said: “I have to say that the experience of ADEPT has been a revelation and an inspiration for me - not only for the project I brought to the course, but also for every other project I have. It gave me rich and often surprising insights into areas of narrative construction and development that I had only skimmed over previously, and will certainly impact on all my future work. I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone considering signing up for the next course.”
All ADEPT participants have committed to a tough schedule for the rest of the year which includes a major online teaching agenda, workshop tutor classes and the prospect of taking a project from its early stages with a writer, producer and developer team.
After their chosen projects have been put on track during the first residential week, they are to be continually developed for two to three months, with online support and exercises, until the second seven-day course comes along.
This puts the emphasis firmly on development, using case-studies of projects and featuring lectures from people who have past experience of bringing projects to a stage where they become a viable proposition for the real world – just what the participants are aiming for.
Alongside the project work, ADEPT aims to focus on the development skills of the individual participants with ongoing online training, career advice and target-setting suggestions from the tutors.
(GB/JB)