Using Music in Film & TV Talent Lab with Catherine Grimes (Ages: 16-25)

Catherine Grimes is running a music in film and TV talent lab at Accidental Theatre on Friday 23 October, a two-hour session for emerging filmmakers aged 16 to 25. It's a practical look at how music actually works on screen, from the legal side to the creative, and it's led by someone who's spent three decades doing exactly that.

Over the course of the evening, Grimes takes you through music copyright, the producer's responsibilities, how to commission a score, and the role of post-production. If you're making films, these are the bits that usually feel like a black box—the copyright and the commissioning in particular—so having them laid out in one go is a useful way to get your head around the whole process. It's a session for the early stages of a project, when you're figuring out how to get the right sound and how to pay for it without getting in over your head.

Grimes herself is a Belfast-based music supervisor with over 30 years' experience in music business affairs and creative work for TV and film. She's worked on plenty of local productions you'll recognise, including Blue Lights, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, The Lovers, Trespasses, and Close to Home, and she's just come off the feature films My Duchess and Frank and Percy. That's a lot of different kinds of screen work to draw from, so the session comes from a place of actual practice rather than just theory.

The venue, Accidental Theatre at 12-13 Shaftesbury Square, is a hub for collaborative arts in the heart of the city, housing offices, rehearsal space and recording space and bringing together playwrights, actors, filmmakers, DJs, choreographers, musicians, poets, painters, technicians and curators. The lab runs from 18:00 to 20:00 on Friday 23 October, and tickets are £22.