Talk Up Yout TV Show

Executive Producers: Emprezz Golding, Nadia Stanley

THE CHALLENGE

Young Jamaicans have limited spaces to talk about the real and daunting issues they face.

THE SOLUTION

A prime time television programme beaming the voices of youth speaking up, into every home across Jamaica

Since 2011 The Talk Up Yout TV Show has been a unique oasis for youth voices in Jamaican media. Specifically designed to give youth a voice, the show addressed stories of hope, love, success and triumphs and broke the silence on unaddressed issues that affect young people such as the neglect of children in state care and the epidemic of street children.

As the flagship programme in the Talk Up Yout suite of media platforms, the show enjoyed 4 amazing seasons before I joined the team in 2015 to serve as Production Coordinator for Season 5, the first of the new format of episodes.

Starting that year, the programme transitioned from in depth interviews to panels of young people from various backgrounds sharing their various perspectives on a single issue and working together to find solutions.

As Producer/Production Coordinator for seasons 5, 6, 7 and 8, I worked alongside the Executive Producers - Emprezz Golding and Nadia Stanley to keep the production on schedule throughout the season from pre-production to post. This generally included a lot of scheduling, organizing, managing budgets and various teams from the production crew to the hospitality crew etc.

Importantly, as I continued to work with these two expert producers, I developed what I regard to be the key skill in producing - being able to so fully understand the programme and its objectives that you can anticipate issues and solve them in ways that benefit the production, respond to situations and crises calmly and efficiently and keep control over all the moving parts of the production by ensuring you are always aware of what’s happening anywhere.

It’s also taught me the highest regard for administrative work. A natural creative, this part was not easy but I learned to value the quiet, blissful days of pre-production where I’m emailing, calling and scheduling all day, and to use them to gear up for the fires of shoot days. I would spend the days before shoot days painstakingly mapping out each person’s (cast, crew, vendors - roughly 150 people) call time and everything they’d need to perform on the day. From big things like making sure the equipment fits through the doors to small things like making sure we never ran out of ice.

And then on actual shoot days I would be among the first on set at like 6 am and the last to leave after 6 pm and between - just a maelstrom of activity and within it all - me, having to stay centered and ready to answer a million questions. Where do I set up? Where does this go? Who’s next in the MUA chair? Who should be on set next? When is lunch? Where is lunch? But nothing beats the feeling of wrapping production and knowing it all went well.

My favourite parts of working on the Talk Up Yout TV Show were of course the three areas where I got to flex my creative muscles.

CASTING

At the start of each season I made social media posts inviting young people to audition for the upcoming season and logged the auditions as they came in. Then as first reviewer I watched all the auditions - usually more than 200 - and made a first cut. I was usually looking for a solid grasp on the particular issue they chose to talk about, some passion, and a solution proposal at the bare minimum. But my favourite auditions (and years later I still meet young people randomly and remember their auditions) were the ones where I got a glimpse of their personality.

There were the extremely creative auditions with background music, multiple locations, costume changes, skits, singing and dancing etc. On the other hand there were the born speakers who I could listen to forever - so eloquent and expressive even if they were just under a mango tree, holding a reasoning with me through the camera. After I made my selections, we’d review the top 100 auditions to select the final cast and sort them into episodes based on the issues they auditioned with.

After that I had the pleasure of calling each cast member individually to give them the good news and to talk with them a little more about the topics they chose for their auditions - just to better understand them and to support them in clarifying and articulating their positions on the issues before having to discuss it on camera with other young people. I’d repeat the process a few weeks later with them at the shoot, in that way the auditions became a way for me to just pour a little back into cast members and remind them that their voices matter. It was incredibly fulfilling.

SOCIAL MEDIA

The second place I got to be creative was in the marketing of the show. Throughout each season I would be in charge of content creation and community management for Talk Up Yout’s social media platforms while also doing traditional media interviews and sending out press releases.

I loved spending whole days making graphics and scheduling posts so that our followers would wake up with a nice motivational/inspirational post every morning, have something educational at noon and something fun in the evening. Using these posts I built a relationship with our followers, sparking important discussions, listening to their feedback and ultimately growing Talk Up Yout’s online community each season.

My content creation skills have greatly improved since then but my time messing around in Canva for Talk Up Yout was definitely a formative part of my creative development.

COMMUNITY

The final area I was able to be creative in is the TUY Communiy. Each season more than 200 young people auditioned for Talk Up Yout and although we couldn’t cast all those young people, we definitely recorded the issues they’d chosen to talk about in our database of youth issues. I was also able to call on both the young people we casted and some of the ones we didn’t for various other opportunities over the years. The vast majority of Talk Up Radio co-hosts are past Talk Up Yout panelists, they make up the production crews and project assistants we work with, they’re the first invited to TUY events and to participate in service and outreach projects and we continue to partner with them and support their work beyond our programmes.

My experience with the Talk Up Yout TV Show culminated with producing Season 8, which was a sort of return to the interview style episodes of seasons 1-4. After we cast the season, selecting one young person per issue, I travelled across the country with our videography team to meet them in their communities and record them telling their own stories. The powerful experiences, and ideas we were able to capture were a testament to my growth as a producer, as for the first time, my role was to ensure we had all the shots we needed but I’d been well prepared to do that over the years of working with the Executive Producers and supporting cast members in articulating their stories.

That’s the magic of Talk Up Yout for me. Looking back it was a safe, nurturing environment in which to learn the business of media, pick up incredibly useful, transferable skills, meet new people and expand my network while also doing some good in the world. For every young person I helped to articulate an issue they cared about, I found myself with a deeper understanding of someone else’s reality and that’s priceless. Big thanks to Emprezz and Nadia for investing in me and giving me space to pay it forward.