Collette Creary-Myers on joining the Film Forward programme

Film Forward Step Up Role: Art director in film

Collette took a degree in Photography, Film & Digital Media at Westminster University, where she often provided designs for her fellow students' projects. After graduating she worked in the art department on productions at 3 Mills Studios in London, while also working on small projects to gain experience, “slowly working my way up to more complicated designs”.

She was born in Jamaica and grew up there and in the West Midlands and London. After initially thinking she might be a writer, it was at university she realised she “had a thing for spaces” and that design was her creative path, kickstarting an interest in production and a career in the screen industry. “I want to make worlds,” she says.

Collette, who recently worked on Lenny Henry's Three Little Birds, Daniel Kaluuya’s debut feature The Kitchen and is currently working on two short films, says her experience of being the only person of colour on set “is becoming rarer” but, she adds: “I was born in a place that is predominantly Black, so I never saw myself as an anomaly and I have a strong identity.

“In that regard I can be in a space with people and feel distant, or they can end up feeling like family. It all depends on the individuals and how they see the world.”

She says the industry can be divided between those who “view you as they imagine you to be or those who see potential in you”. The latter group, she says, “see your hunger to succeed and push you”. She mentions Jules Hussey, a producer on the BBC/Netflix series You Don't Know Me, as a career mentor. “Her honesty and encouragement was very important,” Collette says.

She acknowledges that there's unconscious bias in the industry - “Everybody has got it in some way, whether about gender, race, age, or something else”, but she doesn't allow that to hold her back. “I just focus on what I'm doing.”

Collette welcomes the Film Forward initiative as “it gives people real opportunities to progress” their career, not least, she says, by providing contact with people in the industry that somebody at her level would perhaps not normally meet.

“The film industry is in a sense a gated community,” she says. “There is often a good reason for the gates because you have to check whoever is coming through them cares about the work and is capable of doing it. Film Forward is opening another gate for me.”

The programme’s focus on championing the candidates through networking opportunities and production placements helps provide the rounded experience and connections needed to advance in the industry.

Collette has been on several ScreenSkills courses and applauds the work it does. “For 14 years I have been working my way up and learning the correct way to do things and ScreenSkills fills the gaps in my knowledge that I may have. It's not just technical training, it's also about the more 'intuitive' aspects – etiquette training, for example, how to behave on a film set and networking.  There's so much to learn on so many levels and I hope being part of Film Forward will help in getting me where I need to go. I'm ready to make that leap.”

Collette says she has a three-year plan for this stage of her career. “You have to invest in yourself, and I want to focus on developing my technical skills, such as learning new software in design, or Excel for budgeting. That will help me to progress to bigger projects and in learning how to manage them.”