Carol Owens

TRANSCRIPT OF CAROL OWENS INTERVIEW BEHP – REVISED BY CO

Carol Owens - Interviewee

Paul Collard - Interviewer

29th November 2017

SPEAKER: M3 [Paul Collard]
This is a British Entertainment History Project interview with Carol Owens at home in Ealing. The date is the twenty ninth of November 2017. The camera operator is Steve Brooke Smith and the interviewer is Paul Collard. So Carol thank you very much for making yourself available for a British Entertainment History interview and for the record, could you tell us about your origins and your family background.

SPEAKER: F2 [Carol Owens]
Certainly. Thanks very much Paul, for the intro. As you say my name is Carol Owens. I was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in July 1956. I'm British, talking about my and my family background and origins, there was no involvement in the media industry at all apart from a possibly apocryphal story that one of my father's ancestors had opened the first cinema in Liverpool. I've never been able to find any information about this, not that I've researched it formally yet.

My father had served in the Second World War and afterwards he got the opportunity to study geology at King's College in London, and he then went into industrial minerals engineering and that took him to the north east of England which is where he met my mother and she had been working as a as a legal secretary and also working in County Hall in Newcastle. As I said I was born in ‘56 and one of the things that impacted on us as a family was my parents’ great love for light opera and I remember from a very early age the joy they took in singing and performing etcetera and being on stage so that sort of slight theatricality was there in the early days.

When I was seven we moved down to the Midlands because my father left industry and got a job lecturing at Birmingham University. So that moves us on to schooling. So I went to school in Worcestershire and I was also from very early age passionately interested in art. I was drawing and painting virtually from as soon as I could hold a pencil or a paintbrush. That's what I was doing and I also did ballet classes as well from a young age. I passed the eleven plus and went to Redditch County High School grammar school and there were lots of opportunities there to do artistic things as well as study. There were light opera musical performances there as well. And I also met my husband-to-be in the lower sixth which is quite a long time ago and we have been very happy and together ever since.

The interest in film started also quite early on. I'd always been interested in watching TV and watching movies and I got my first Super 8 camera when I was 16 and shot little films. Nothing too sophisticated but just to get the experience of making my own pictures, and I was also really inspired by feature films such as “2001: A Space Odyssey” which I just thought was absolutely amazing and not just the effects and the story, but the use of music in the film as well was something that I was really impressed with. I also really loved the landmark series documentary Music & Arts series of the 1970s. So things like “The Ascent of Man”, “Civilization” etc that were bringing together you know art and philosophy in some ways. So those are the things that really inspired my interest. However my headmaster at school got it into his head that I was going to be a civil engineer so he had me down to do Maths, Physics and Geography for A level but I really wasn't terribly happy about that and my parents got me some professional careers advice. I did a sort of analysis and things which I wasn't familiar with at all, it was new to me.

But having been in management since it's the same sort of questionnaire you know, to try and discern where your true passions lie, and it came out that although I was interested in some aspects of science my main interests were in the arts. And so I changed my A-levels to Art, English and Geography and I looked around for a suitable course at university and the only one, the only university course at the time that was offering anything to do with film was Leeds.
So it was part of a fine art degree, four-year fine art degree on which you could specialize in film. So that's what I did.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
So moving on to you know your further education. Can you tell us about your journey through further education.

SPEAKER: F6 [Carol Owens]
Yes absolutely. The Fine Art course at Leeds was a four-year course. It was long because there was a lot of practical stuff involved in it as well, it wasn't just academic study and the way it was structured was the first two years people did the same sorts of things so we all did painting, we all did printmaking, photography, we all studied history of art and then in the second two years you specialised in something either in photography or painting or whatever, and I specialised in filmmaking and I was making art films with a clockwork Bolex 16 mm camera.

SPEAKER: M? [Paul Collard]

Fantastic.

SPEAKER: F? [Carol Owens]

It was absolutely and I was also learning about cinema history as well and my first tutor on that was Philip Strick who was a film critic; professional film critic as well. And in my second-year vacation he got me some holiday work for a 16 mm film distributor in London in Surbiton. And it was it was very interesting really because it was checking the prints as they came back from people that they'd been rented out to. And they supplied people like you know the Royal Yacht Britannia. The Queen would hire films from this company but they also sent films out to prisons, which was a challenge because if there was anything slightly racy in the film, the risk was that the prisoners would actually cut that section out and keep it. So when the prints came back we had to check them for length to make sure nothing had been taken out and kept. I wasn't allowed to do those films but I was involved in checking other prints and I was reconstructing prints of “2001” ironically enough so I was very motivated to do that.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
So how and when did you get started in the media business.

SPEAKER: F8 [Carol Owens]
Well if I can just go back to some more stories about Leeds. There was quite a bit more to say. So in my third year vacation I was studying for a dissertation on “Jean Renoir: Artist and Partisan” was the title of it. So as a filmmaker. And that was great because I had to go and study in Paris.
I was doing research at the Bibliotheque National and the Bibliotheque de L’Arsenal, and at IDHEC, the Institut des Hauts Etudes Cinematographiques, and that was that was really interesting. I enjoyed that a lot, and in my final year at Leeds I was making my graduation film.

Now I'd been doing, as I said I'd been making films with my clockwork Bolex and editing them all on our little Acmade picsync which was okay but not ideal. But one of the other opportunities at Leeds was to get a taste of television and slightly more professional ways of doing things. There was a student television society called Network 4 which used the studios in the professional centre. We'd make a weekly magazine programme and we also had an electronic news gathering kit as well. So I remember going out and directing a little story about the first release of “Star Wars” and interviewing people coming out to the cinema in Leeds to see what they'd made of it. And that was all very interesting. So I was usually either the newsreader presenting or a cameraman in the studio for Network 4. Nick Witchell is an alumnus of Network 4 as well, but while I was there I'd met John Murray who was head of the film unit and I got very interested in the way that he worked and the professionals in the film unit worked and he also introduced me to this magical device called a Steenbeck which was an absolute game changer. You know, I'd not seen anything like that. And when I came to do my final year film I made use of the facilities in the professional unit to actually help me through it rather than having the pic-sync to do it on. So that was great. And the film itself was really interesting. It was about a lady called Marion Barraclough who had been a model, a child model, for magic lantern slides in the early years of the century. So she'd been born in nineteen hundred and as a little girl aged seven or eight, she was photographed by Bamforth’s of Holmfirth, who were setting up a photography and an early film company. They later went on to make saucy seaside postcards you know like “Skegness - so bracing”, that sort of thing. But at the time they were, they would do magic lantern slides and what I was able to do in the film was interview Marion about her experience but also reconstruct or show extracts of some of the magic lantern performances.

So we got the slides, we got a magic lantern, and I did the songs where I sang or my mother sang and a friend of ours played the piano and it was actually very touching. And it's, I'm very proud to say that it's in the National Film Archive not because of me but because of Marion because it's a little piece of history in terms of the early days of media in this country, I suppose.

SPEAKER: M1 [Paul Collard]
So you are well interested in this and already practicing before you actually enter the industry.

SPEAKER: F3 [Carol Owens]
Oh yes. Yes, very much so. I'd done a lot to get me kickstarted. And I wanted obviously in my final year I started applying for jobs and I applied for the Trainee Assistant Producer scheme in London BBC and also a Trainee Assistant Editor. I did an interview in Manchester for BBC Manchester as an Assistant Editor. And I think I went to Yorkshire TV or Granada or is it, not sure which which was which at the time, but I was accepted on to the London Trainee Assistant Film Editor course and it was going to be in late 1978, and in the interim they offered me a three-month contract at the Film Library doing funnily enough print checking. So working in Film Exam checking prints et cetera. But as luck would have it one of the people on the July course very sadly broke his leg and wasn't able to take his place up. So that spare place came to me and they said would you like to start next week. So I had a week between finishing at Leeds and starting at BBC Ealing Studios on the Trainee Assistant Editor course.

SPEAKER: M? [Paul Collard] No time for a gap year?

SPEAKER: F5 [Carol Owens]
No absolutely not. No straight in, straight in. The training was great.

I can, I can talk about that. It it started with a five-week theory course. So which was taught in the classrooms in Ealing Studios and that covered everything you ever wanted to know about film and things like d-log-e curves about density versus exposure and all that sort of thing. And there was an exam at the end of it and then you went on to do operational shadowing. So obviously at the beginning of the shadowing you were very much just the third person in the cutting room with the editor and the assistant. But as time went on you got to take on more of the responsibility of actually doing the job of assistant, so you know managing all the content that was coming into the cutting room and that was being worked on, liaising with production and the other disciplines as well. You know when the film was finished you do the sound track-lay and when the transmission print came back from the laboratory then just making up the rolls to, ready to go to telecine. So well, lots of practical things to do. Finding trims was always a major quest in some people's cutting rooms but it was it was very interesting learning about it and the programmes that I worked on as a Trainee were fascinating too. So the very first one was a series with James Burke called “Connections”. I also worked on the old “Tonight” programme, the current affairs programme which was extraordinary. And on the drama “Shoestring” which was also shooting at Ealing Studios, and so quite a rich and varied range of programmes to work on. And then my first film as full Assistant when I was made up was a film called “Public School” and the Editor was Paul Carter, the Director was Jonathan Gili and Paul won the BAFTA Craft Award for “Public School” and was was kind enough to share his prize with me. So that was that was delightful.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
So it sounds like you enjoyed your time as an Assistant.

SPEAKER: F3 [Carol Owens]
I did. I did absolutely and most of it I think was was in Documentaries and Music and Arts at Kensington house in Shepherd's Bush, a little bit in Woodstock Grove across the way. And some of it back in Ealing as well back in Ealing Studios. I worked on things like “Horizon” and “Omnibus” and “Bergerac” which was a drama. I've not done a lot of drama in my career. So mainly it's been Documentaries and Music and Arts.
SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
And then I believe you, you had an assignment.

SPEAKER: F6 [Carol Owens]
I did. Yes. I wanted to see if I could work as an Assistant Producer so I had interest obviously from being a filmmaker when I was a student. So I applied for and got an Assistant Producer attachment to the Network Features department which was then run by Roger Laughton and the first programme I worked on was a TV review programme called “Did You See…?”. And it was presented by Ludovic Kennedy and what would happen is Ludo would get a number of people on as guests every week, two or three guests, who would be asked to watch certain programmes and then come into the studio and discuss them.

Quite a lot of what we did as Assistant Producers was trying to find guests and get them interested and explain to them what we wanted them to do and then manage them when they came in. But there was also an opportunity to do film items, so things that were out and about, slightly different. And I did two for the series. So one was about the absolute explosion of interest in VHS as a format.

SPEAKER: M? [Paul Collard] The latest.

SPEAKER: F? [Carol Owens]

Yeah absolutely. This was in ‘82 or ‘83. But the Indian community in Leicester had discovered that VHS was a fabulous way of getting access to Bollywood movies. So there'd been this amazing outburst of interest and supply and excitement about this this new availability that people are watching. So I went up and met people there and made a video of the reaction, and the other the other item I made was about sitcoms.
So it's the modern approach to sitcoms. And it was an interesting time because in 1983 Channel 4 launched and the night that 4 went on air, “The Young Ones” was on BBC and you couldn't get any more anarchic and alternative than that.
So you know the “Terry and June” era seemed to be very much over and we were looking at a very different approach to comedy. So I interviewed people like Paul Jackson and Jonathan Lynn, who wrote “Yes Minister” for example. And that was another item that went into the show. Ludo was great to work with. One of the other really memorable events for me was a Christmas team dinner that we went on where he and his wife Moira Shearer the ballet dancer were there and that was that was very thrilling.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
And then the second half of your attachment.

SPEAKER: F3 [Carol Owens]
Yeah yeah, that was a very different kettle of fish. I was working as Assistant Producer on a programme in the “Reputations” series about R.A. Butler which was subtitled “The best Prime Minister we never had”. And it was presented by Anthony Howard the journalist, I think of the Observer and the Exec Producer was Philip Speight. And I was doing research getting, setting up you know finding the interviews, getting the filming arranged et cetera and the people that we interviewed were just astonishing.
So we we interviewed Sir Alec Douglas Home for example, Enoch Powell who was amazing. He could give an answer and never, never draw breath. There were no “so”s and “ands” and “sort of” or anything, it was just completely extraordinary delivery.
And as the programme went on I took on more responsibility and actually finished the programme as Producer and got a credit on IMDB for it. So I'm very proud of that as well.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
And then I understand that you returned to to edit.

SPEAKER: F3 [Carol Owens]
I did go back to editing yes. And I was involved in some very interesting programmes.
I worked with a great Chief Film Editor called Dave Thomas and we did two films in Eddie Mirzoeff’s “40 Minutes” series.
One was “Animal Antiques” which was with Adam Henson's dad Joe. Adam Henson is a presenter nowadays obviously on “Country File”. And we also did a programme about hunt saboteurs, and that was produced by John Percival and was significant or interesting because of an incident that we had where we had to reconstruct the sound effects of a fight that had broken out between the hunt saboteurs and the hunt supporters. They'd had three cameras out in the field and two sound recordists and so camera and the sound recordist would follow, one would follow the saboteurs, the other one would follow the hunt. And then there was a third wild camera doing GVs etcetera and mopping up. And a fight broke out at one point and I said two of the cameras got there and none of the sound recordists.
The only one sound recordist that made it was changing tapes behind a tree at the time and missed it. So we had to reconstruct this. We had this mad idea of going out to Ruislip Woods in our wellies and taking a bag of wood cuttings or whatever, wood shavings and staging a punch up. So it was me, the Editor, the Director and a Sound Recordist, sorry the Producer and the Sound Recordist trying to sound like a fight,

SPEAKER: M? [Paul Collard] Doing your own Foley.

SPEAKER: F5 [Carol Owens]

Doing our own Foley! And it was it it wasn’t easy quite a trick to track lay because the usable takes were only about 40 or 50 seconds each before you all collapsed into fits of giggles.
But yeah. So that was good. Another series which I worked on with with Dave was “The Year of the French” where we did two episodes, one on a peasant farmer and another one on the Camargue. So the peasant farmers was Jonathan Gili who'd been the Director of “Public School” and the Camargue film was John Paul Davidson.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
So you, you but you were acting as an editor.

SPEAKER: F4 [Carol Owens]
I started acting as an editor after that. Yes, so you've got opportunities to act on small things in between times but I started acting on a regular basis and in ’84, ‘85 I think, and I'd been strand editor on on “Timewatch” and “Bookmark” under Executive Producer Tim Gardam.
And I got made up to editor I think in ‘85 and one of the films that came out of the “Timewatch” assignment was a great documentary called “Battle for Berlin”. And that was in ’85 to mark the fortieth anniversary of VE Day and the director was Peter Maniura who had been also one of the people on the main “Timewatch” strand, and the presenter was Charles Wheeler who had been the BBC American correspondent for many years and was extremely well respected and well known and an absolute delight to work with.
You know he was he was totally engaged, you know came to work with us in the cutting room and the programme was enormously satisfying. We had some pretty harrowing archive footage to work through. So stuff that you couldn't possibly actually put on screen for that, for the audience at home. And we had some early colour footage of the bombing ruins in Germany as well which was always very interesting. We had one slightly difficult moment where they'd got a last-minute permission to go to Russia to do some interviews with Russian people. And in the haste to get back to the UK afterwards the film, the exposed film had gone through x-ray at the airport and we were really worried as to whether it was going to be okay. So there was a very difficult night and morning while we waited for Ranks at Denham to ring us up and say No it's okay it's fine.

SPEAKER: M? [Paul Collard] Cool.

SPEAKER: F? [Carol Owens] Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] And it was all right?

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens]

It was fine. Yes we managed it fine. I'd just like to go back and mention one other film, early film that I did which is notable in terms of what the person did in the rest of their career. I cut Adam Curtis's first longer film for the “40 Minutes” series, a film called “The Kingdom of Fun”. And that was about the Metro Centre up in Northumberland. And that was very interesting to work with him in the early years of his career. Thinking about other things I did, I did an Omnibus with Mary Dickinson on Fluck and Law, the guys behind “Spitting Image” their “Guide to Caricature” that was very interesting, the Exec was Anthony Wall and head of department was Alan Yentob at the time. I did a series called “Ballerina” with Natalia Makarova and was able to draw on my my childhood knowledge in ballet to a degree, not that I would ever say that you know very close to to Natalia.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] It would have been a very interesting production for you.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] It was indeed and it helped me put together when we did retakes I knew what the steps were so I could put the two together properly. The producer that was, it was Derek Bailey, and I did two series in I think ’85 and ’87, one called “Three Painters” and one called “Three More Painters” or “Another Three Painters” with Christopher Burstall as producer and they were very interesting. There were six films in all. I did three, first one in the first series and two in the second. Because they were presented by my old professor from the University of Leeds. So he'd been head of the art department in my first two years and it was Lawrence Gowing later Sir Lawrence Gowing. And the reason it was a challenge was because I knew that Lawrence had a devastating speech impediment which had caused us in in lectures to just literally hang on his every word. And it was just amazing the way that we got those films together because Lawrence could do a piece to camera as the introduction, he could do it for about 30 seconds, and then the whole of the rest of the film, the other 40 minutes’ worth whatever, was in voice over and shots of the painting, shots of places etcetera etcetera and I in cutting his his voice over I was very aware of all the gaps and the joins and the difficulty you know, but trying to make him make sense without making him sound artificial. So that was really in in a way that was my homage to Lawrence for having been an inspirational lecturer at the time.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard] I'm sure he's very grateful to you because you be quite a challenge for him.

SPEAKER: F5 [Carol Owens]
Yeah well, he called me his speech therapist. But they were great to work on and absolutely straight down the line.

SPEAKER: M1 [Paul Collard]
Your have you [unclear].

SPEAKER: F17 [Carol Owens]
Yes absolutely. Yeah yeah. History of Art painting. Yeah.

SPEAKER: M1 [Paul Collard]
Onwards. Your 1986 looks interesting.

SPEAKER: F5 [Carol Owens]
It was very interesting yes.
I did my first series with Barrie Gavin as producer and Simon Rattle. We were to do two lots of work together. This first one was called “From East to West” and it was about the influence of the east on Western music, Western classical music and the first program was just basically looking at all the different pieces of music that Simon wanted to talk about and using illustrations, artwork you know, comparable pieces from local regional music like the Balinese gamelan for example got in there. And the second film was was about a Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu which was a very different programme. So I'd always loved the use of music in films and was really attracted to this and I could read an orchestral score as well. So that was quite helpful because the way the orchestra was recorded they would be doing retakes occasionally and there was a mixed feed and an isolated feed and I needed to cut from them so I could mark up the the orchestral score as you would mark up a drama script to see what was going on. And it was very very challenging to make because the orchestra had been recorded in the BBC Maida Vale studios as a television for you know four or five camera production. The sound was recorded on to twenty-five track or twenty, I can’t remember. Multi-track stereo, 24 track stereo. I had to cut it on film.
And so it all had to be the film had to be film recorded on to 16mm with timecode in vision.
The music was mixed down to two sepmag tracks so one was left and right stereo and one was mono and timecode and then we were able to print out the time code of the separate magnetic track, synchronize it with the timecode on the picture, synchronize the whole lot together and hey presto off we went, and intercut interviews that were done on film with Simon for example and cutaways of art etc. So there was, there was quite a challenge.
But the cutting script I've got it here actually you may be interested to see it because it's not entirely conventional. This is my cutting script. [Shows postcards]

SPEAKER [Paul Collard] For the entire programme?

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens]. Yes. So this was for, what was it, 50 minutes. That's yes. And lots of talking, lots of talking. So I love today's today. Well indeed. So over. [Unclear]

Speaker: [Carol Owens] But no it was great to do and lots of assistance from the the assistant producer as well, Ann Hummel who worked with me very closely on it, the Takemitsu film was “13 Steps Around Toru Takemitsu”.
And it was much more arty and I borrowed some of the ideas that I'd worked on when I was a student as well to put in that one. So we finished up running two picture tracks so we could run image over image in a quite complex way. So when we did the telecine transfers to go on to the final version, we had two telecines running in sync, one with A picture track, one with B picture track so that we could we could do the superimposition later on. So I've always had a sort of mad ideas about how to push the technology.

SPEAKER: M3 [Paul Collard]
Yeah including according to your notes erm playing sections of your marked-up sound down the phone to Simon Rattle.

SPEAKER: F5 [Carol Owens]
Yes roughly. Yes that's right. When working on the film with Simon he’d be talking about a piece in the music and I'd have to identify the bit in the score that I thought he was referring to. And so I'd be sitting at the Steenbeck with Simon on the phone and saying “you know when you talk about so that, that well is it this bit?”. And basically holding the phone up to the speaker on the Steenbeck to play down the line to him and he'd go “Yeah yeah that's that's absolutely fine” or “No no it's a bit later actually if you go you know a few bars that's, that's the better bit”,

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] Harnessing technology.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] Yeah. Absolutely.

SPEAKER: M3 [Paul Collard]
More of that later. And then in ’88, ‘89 you became Chief Film Editor.

SPEAKER: F6 [Carol Owens]
I did indeed. Yes I progressed. So I'd say that the Chief Film Editor role gave you responsibility for a block of editors and you would have sort of typically a dozen staff, so half a dozen editors and half dozen assistants that you would be giving line management and help to but also the chief would be a supervising editor on a on a big series and I was chief film editor on a series called “The Road to War”, which was with Charles Wheeler again presenting and it was a six part series looking at the interwar years and trying to understand what had set the scene between the end of World War One for the second world war that made it virtually inevitable, and I was working on three of the films. So I was doing Britain, Germany and America. Again lots of lots of archive footage that we could we could put in. Interestingly the interviews weren't now done on film they were done on this new lightweight video technology. So all the interviews came in on I think it must have been betacam but the one of the impacts on us in the cutting room was the fact that they ran a hell of a lot longer than an interview would have on film because it was, tape was perceived as being cheap. So the shooting ratios on the interviews were alarming.
You know I think in some instances…..

SPEAKER: M2 [PaulCollard] So that gave you problems immediately compared with the other ratios you would work with on film in the cutting room.

SPEAKER: F6 [Carol Owens]
Yeah absolutely yeah. In the cutting room yeah. And you know we had to get them transcribed so you could navigate your way through all these hours and hours of stuff that were coming back but it was it was very interesting you know.
SPEAKER: F8 [Carol Owens] So some of the interviews were with remarkable people that had fantastic stories to tell. And I pretty much, I completed the British film but I had to hand over Germany and America because I had to go on maternity leave.
SPEAKER: F6 [Carol Owens]
And that was in in the summer of ‘89 and my son was born in September ‘89 and one of the rather sweet things that happened was years later when he was at school studying history, his teacher played the British film in class so they got it on on VHS or DVD. I can't remember which.
SPEAKER: F5 [Carol Owens]
But she ran the Britain film and my credit came up at the end, and my son said “That’s my mum!” and of course he'd heard the soundtrack before he was born but he'd never seen the pictures.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
That's very good. He had heard it from inside. So you had a career break.

SPEAKER: M1 [Carol Owens]
Yes indeed

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] And eventually returned to work.

SPEAKER: F9 [Carol Owens]
Yeah. I was I was off for six months. When I went back to work in 1990 I went back into a series for Music and Arts called “Relative Values” about the art market and did two films in that one. One was “Au Lapin Agile” with director Nick Rossiter. And the other one was “The Collectors” with Hannah Rothschild and they were really interesting. I enjoyed enjoyed working on the films. But it was obvious that things were changing. You know change was in the air and it was also quite difficult reconciling the edit schedules and the workload with childcare. So I was wondering whether you know where I was going to go. But one of the important issues was that the vacancy came up for Edit Operations Manager and I applied for this and was appointed so I had you know, well I finished I closed my cutting room on the Friday and started in management on the Monday.
SPEAKER: M4 [Carol Owens]
And one of that one of the things that I really wanted to do was to reform the way that things like performance was managed, that people got their appraisals done etc. and that the young staff coming up got opportunities for development.
SPEAKER: F11 [Carol Owens]
Well the way that I had for example, so I'd go I went into it with lots of you know commitment as to how it was going to make things better for people.
SPEAKER: F5 [Carol Owens]
It was it was sad to leave editing in many ways.
SPEAKER: F6 [Carol Owens]
You know there are aspects of the job that I absolutely loved, the people, the camaraderie the teamwork, and just the the intellectual and emotional satisfaction of putting the programmes together. I'm mad about structure. But you know finding the 49 minutes and 30 seconds that tells the story and moves the audience. That’s what it’s about.

SPEAKER: M1 [Paul Collard]
So true so true so that that's the major transition.

SPEAKER: M2 [Carol Owens]
Yes absolutely

SPEAKER: M5 [Paul Collard]
Are you moved into a management role. And you know what happened during the early part of that.

SPEAKER: F5 [Carol Owens]
Well as I said I had gone in thinking it’s all going to get wonderful and change came along the line very very quickly. So there was something called the The Birt Report that came out I think in ‘92 quickly followed by an initiative called Producer Choice, and John Birt had done a review of the way that resources were used in the BBC and decided that we needed to be much more efficient and we needed to take out headcount. And what Producer Choice was doing in a way explained why he had to come to this conclusion because the strategy was to create a trading relationship between the production teams and the craft and operations teams. So you know the producers would have the freedom to choose whether to use in-house resources or go out. Unfortunately the in-house resources wouldn't have the option to take external producers instead of BBC producers. So it was a bit of a one way thing. But this meant massive change. So on a number of fronts. So in the first instance there was the need to shed headcount which led to redundancies, we had to do a redundancy program which we called ‘selection for retention’ to try and make it more positive. We want to keep you rather than we want to get rid of you. And also a restructuring in the department. So we had to become a trading, fully fully trading cost unit, cost centre and get all the the the financial aspects of that up and running and understood. We also were merging the film editing department with video tape editing. So there were 220 staff altogether across the two divisions and could not be more different at the time so the film editors were seen as a sort of fairly arty bunch and V.T. editors were rock solid engineers you know that come up through broadcast operations and engineering and somehow we had to think about how we create a new, a new culture for them. It was difficult. There were some very positive things though so we were able at the time to implement the first computer based scheduling system. So as part of the efficiency drive to get this system in, we'd never had one before it had all been entirely manual, but we brought in a system called PM1 and that's the first time I encountered professional consultants, management consultants who helped us do the requirements definition to to actually make the case for buying this system. I used that knowledge later in my career. The other things I was able to do was I we had a business plan seminar that we ran for all staff. We cycled about 600 people through it which basically was talking about the the new direction, why we were doing it, why the BBC needed to change; running something called the Allocations Game which was showing them how things would work when we were trading. So we’d get people to role play. They'd be divided into teams where you'd have some who are being producers, some who were being the post-production managers who are the equivalent of salesmen I guess, and some who were being the allocations office and the idea was to feed through programmes, get them allocated to particular editors and all that sort of thing. And I think the allocations office obviously took the brunt of it because people say I need this person now! You can't have them they're busy, No, well what do you want me to do. But it opened people's eyes. I think they'd taken a lot of the way the operation run for granted and this was revealing it to them. And another positive aspect was was I set up a series of craft masterclasses so that people, senior practitioners in the different fields like the video effects workshop for example, could do presentations to colleagues in the department to explain what they did because you know they didn't talk to each other before that point, they hadn't had the opportunity.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] So you were right at the heart of that huge transition and you were sort of working out some of the practices and disseminating good practice.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] Yeah try and trying to do as many positive things as possible on the, on the one hand and dealing with the redundancies and you know industrial relations aspects at the other side as well, so the rough with the smooth.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] So that's the internal market.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] Yes. Yes indeed.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] Very closely followed by another major change.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] Yes yes. Non-linear editing. That was really another game changer for the way people worked. So the first systems came onto the market around about the same time, I think what would it be ‘93 ‘92. Around two to three. And we thought we'd have a bit of a shoot-out. We weren't going to go down one way immediately. So we got two systems, we got Avid and we got Lightworks. And by and large the film editors tended to like Lightworks because it had a pseudo-Steenbeck controller, and the V.T. editors took to Avid and they'd not really had much experience of offline before, they'd had VHS offline suites but nothing not not the freedom that film gave you to do a complete restructure in no time at all. And what we had to do then was to give technical training to the film guys to to make them comfortable with the computer technology et cetera. But the VT guys we had the opposite problem because they they just went completely mad with it, some of them. The creative freedom was completely unprecedented and we had one editor who actually broke the Sony edit controller in the conform which it could only handle nine hundred and ninety-nine edit decisions and he'd exceeded that, he'd gone over the number. It was it was just wonderful. And I I coined the term creative inflation because you know, because you could make 850 versions of the program, you did. So that was that was great to see that taking off. And one of the challenges that I I saw coming along was how to get the next generation on the engineering side into the creative way of thinking so that they could start taking that on. And so I created the role of assistant editor in the VT community and we had to to be fair we had to interview all seventy nine of the recording operators to for 25 slots to make sure that everybody got a chance to put in for this. And in order to help them with their induction, for the successful candidates I worked with the National Film and Television School to create a creative course. So an introduction to create the creative aspects of editing not the the technical and engineering, which we ran it at Wood Norton and the new ex-VT assistant editors went up there and worked through it and I think they learnt a lot and they enjoyed themselves enormously.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] So you you were fast tracking them really.

SPEAKER: F5 [Carol Owens]
Yeah I mean but giving them the you know they had not had the opportunity to spend a lot of time seeing how people make creative decisions.
So the idea was to put them in a position where they could work with raw material and learn how to do it themselves and see examples of great work as well. And understand why it was good.

SPEAKER: M1 [Paul Collard]
Absolutely. And then you moved into a slightly different role by the looks of things.

SPEAKER: F6 [Carol Owens]
So there was another restructure, management restructure going on in Post-production & Graphic Design. And I was was given the role of Craft Development Manager which was logical really given everything that I've been doing. And so I had no more line responsibility. I'd previously been managing a team of six management as well as the 200 and whatever staff. And now I had no no line responsibility at all. I was functioning more as an internal consultant I suppose.

SPAKER: [Paul Collard] And this was in ‘94.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] Yes it was. Yes. And I did a number of projects in that role, so one was a feasibility study of CD-Rom authoring because BBC Worldwide was starting to get interested in the possibilities of doing that. I did a process improvement project for Film Traffic and Film Despatch to see how that might be made more efficient. And I also assisted in or contributed to the production of a live event called the Digital Revolution which was really to start getting people thinking about the impact that was coming down the line. We'd done non-linear. What else was there going to be? And also in that role I was given the opportunity to study for a diploma in business administration at Bradford University Management School. That was great. It was really interesting, it was things like change management, personnel, financial, business management et cetera. And it gave me the opportunity through working on the projects to do a sort of post hoc rationalization of everything that I'd experienced since I went into management. You know just really think about “oh right, so that's that's what that is.”

SPEAKER: F5 [Paul Collard] How long was the course?

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] I think it was about 18 months. So it went off. Yeah yeah.
SPEAKER: F10 [Carol Owens]
And it was it was six modules which would be a week up in in Bradford and then remote study. The reason that I didn't go on and do the MBA was because I got the dream job. I was appointed project director for the Digital Production Technology Project and that was reporting to the Director of Finance and I.T. Rodney Baker Bates with sponsorship from Managing Director Television Will Wyatt and Managing Director Radio, I can’t remember who who that was at the time but the the issue there was that they didn't want it to be another big initiative like Producer Choice had been. It was it was a knowledge project essentially. So it was trying to look at what we needed to be aware of for the digital future, so picking up on ideas that were around at the time. The issue of what it was going to mean for people as well was was of interest. So the Director of H.R. Margaret Salmon was also very interested in what we were doing.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
So this role was outside of, this is outside of the production sphere.

SPEAKER: F10 [Carol Owens] Completely it was. it was head office as it were so it was it was working right into the heart of the corporate BBC.
SPEAKER: F15 [Carol Owens]
One of the early things that I did which was an eye opener was I visited the National Association of Broadcasters Convention in Las Vegas for the first time and saw the sheer scale of the industry there. And as part of the same trip we visited Apple headquarters in Cupertino and there was a very young Jonathan Ives working there at the time showing us some of the ideas that they had. So I was picking up again on new technologies but thinking about what it was going to mean for production, what it did actually do for us and the way that I ran the project was as I’ve said was mainly about communication learning, so I ran something called the Digital Forum which was a quarterly conference I suppose in the BBC which brought together representatives from all divisions, and did a combination of presentations to them of new things that were going on, set challenges for them to work through as well so that we could get their feedback and get their ideas. That ran for 10 years, and continued running after I'd moved to another role. Another thing that I did was create a technology innovation centre called DigiLab which was known as technology Switzerland.
Because it was neutral territory between IT and broadcast and we could bring together demonstrations, tests et cetera, get things up and running in a safe space where people could come in, debate the issues, really challenge how how they were going to be using things. And you know run training as well when we were going to be doing pilots, so the other thing that we did in the Digital Production Project was (excuse me) pilot new technologies. So we did a pilot on self-shooting for producers on a series called “Morning Surgery” and we we trialled desktop editing for producers on another series called “How Buildings Learn”. And I was working with a with a great colleague at the times called Wes Curtis and together we worked through all these relays with BBC Research and Development and we identified opportunities as they came up of things that we needed to learn about and could then educate our colleagues in. In ’96 or ‘7, ’96 I think the very first media asset management systems were shown at the European broadcasting convention IBC and they seemed to be a candidate technology for pilots if ever there was one. So we set up two pilot projects one with two different systems, so one system Cinebase went into the Natural History Unit in Bristol for them to to experiment with, and we put a system called Bulldog into a series called “The Human Body” which was presented by Robert Winston, and to basically see how people could work with it to find out what we needed to make it a success, whether it was going to be useful whether it was you know just technology, and we learnt enough to stop. So I was mainly focusing on the “Human Body” experiment and it became evident very early that this was not going to work the way it was set up because there were no standards for what people call stuff. So you know they would be digitizing clips into the system and not being able to find them again.
SPEAKER: M4 [Carol Owens]
And we'd say “well what did you call it?”. And they said “well I don’t know, clip 1, my clip” or something. Well obviously this wasn't going to work. We had to get some structure in. So I borrowed a data specialist from the archive to go in and actually set up a series of defined terms so that people could say you know heart lungs whatever it happens to be start to get some sort of structure.
SPEAKER: F10 [Carol Owens]
But you know the most basic level it was things like you'd have Episode Two was “The Meaning of Life” but that would be in the system as “Ep 2”,  “MOOL” you know just completely impossible to do coherent searches, nothing at all. But you know this is ‘96 nobody’d had to think about it before. But it was a real wake up.
SPEAKER: F11 [Carol Owens]
Well it said we need to get the data right. We really do. And I met up with with a guy called David Chan who was in IS & IT Strategy.
SPEAKER: F10 [Carol Owens]
And he was a data champion. And together we put together a business case to make the first data model for the BBC. And his team had done research with various production departments to look at the way they used information. They worked with News and the Sports Library, Radio. And the lesson that came out of it was there was lots of information around but there were no rules. So productions would be entering the same information or nearly the same information multiple times into different systems which didn't speak to each other. And there was no way that you could actually collate stuff. And there was no way that anything was going to interoperate. So in our vision of the joined up digital future we really had to do something about this. So the term ‘metadata’ was was coined, I think initially by Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 book “Being Digital” and a lot of the time in those early years was just having to explain to people what the hell it meant.
SPEAKER: F11 [Carol Owens]
You know and at its simplest it's data about data, that’s the Negroponte definition, and in our case in the media it's the data about the essence, the media stuff.
SPEAKER: F16 [Carol Owens]
So we started work on this.
SPEAKER: F15 [Carol Owens]
We brought in best practice from from IT, introduced it to broadcast, and got the got the first version going.
SPEAKER: F10 [Carol Owens]
You know the, it was it was very alien to people but we were able to to help people to understand why we were doing it. As I said we'd made the business case to get the resources and the Standard Media Exchange Framework was born, to be known as SMEF, popularly speaking. So that's what we came out with.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] That was very beginnings of it.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] Yes that's right. That's absolutely right. And so in..

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] And that lasted a long time

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] It did last a long time. It's got wide usage as well.
SPEAKER: F15 [Carol Owens]
We did a lot of work with it. But again you've always got two tracks, you've got the explaining to people why it matters, why it's important and then doing the actual work. And so I tended to be on the explaining why it matters side of the business and building up a team of experts to to actually do the detail. So we were bringing in data architects from the IT industry and broadcast engineers because the other thing that we were looking at as well as SMEF was the way that that data would be reflected in the actual video files, the media files that people were going to be using, that's where the broadcast engineering element came in.
SPEAKER: F11 [Carol Owens]
And the the output of all this work. SMEF, if if I just explain what it is, it's a logical data model so it's a way of defining the information that you need to be able to manage processes, if you will. So it's identifying those things which are being described which we would call Entities and the characteristics of them that you need to know about, so the Attributes in the particular IS style that we were using. We also separated out the editorial information from the physical information because you know a programme doesn't necessarily change, regardless of whether it's on film or tape or DVD or whatever it happens to be. But it was this really sort of logical breakdown of the components and information that we that we needed. And just as an example you know a person would be an Entity and the Attributes might be person's first name, person's second name, person's National Insurance number would have to ensure uniqueness, and then another Entity might be a role and that would be information about the role, the Attributes of a particular role, and what the logical data model looks at is the relationships between the two. So a person might fulfill one or more roles and a role might be fulfilled by one or many people.
SPEAKER: F15 [Carol Owens]
And you can draw out all those relationships and so the the the document that you actually produced consisted of a data dictionary which defined all these terms, defined all the Entities and Attributes et cetera. And then drew out a diagram that showed all the relationships between them and the idea was that this could be used as a basis for system design, that you would actually pick up the logical model and convert aspects of it to whatever physical system you were building.
SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] And we, this was going to be pretty hard for people to understand. I hope it's understandable in the way that I've described it now.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] Yeah.

SPEAKER: F10 [Carol Owens] We knew we had a lot to do so we worked with with BBC Research and Development department to build a demonstrator. So they they built a three-part radio demonstrator which took the radio content and information about it through different stages. So there was this library stage and then there was a production stage and then there was how in the future people might access it at home. So that you could you could take metadata through that chain that would tell you what the piece of music was that was being played. You know who the, who the conductor was et cetera et cetera. So you've got additional data that would have been presented on the DAB interface. And we used that demonstrator at IBC ‘98 to launch SMEF. We did a whole series of seminars and I made a video to introduce it as well which interviewed some of the people that we used in the business case. So talking about data in the Sports Library, News et cetera and there are, a lot of interest was generated as a result and we we did a beta release for people to assess under license at the same time.
SPEAKER: F11 [Carol Owens]
And the way that we worked in the BBC, so that was the communication side of it, the way we were actually working was with internal BBC projects that needed data input. And so the model was managed centrally in a System Architect application, and then when a project was happening it would take that part of the model and lock it while they worked on it, so that they could do all their learning that they needed to do and to do all the development, update it if necessary. And then those changes were incorporated back into the central model and it was re-baselined, re-versioned and so we were always learning and it was growing with all the projects we did. Some of the projects were the the BBC World Service’s Go Digital project where they taking, going into digital radio production, there was a digital archive project in BBC Scotland and we did some of the early work that underpinned i-Player which which was very good.
SPEAKER: F15 [Carol Owens]
And when SMEF was baselined initially it was then made available under free license to other broadcasters and suppliers who might be bidding to the BBC for example, and needed to know what we were on about in terms of SMEF. So it got quite wide awareness.
SPEAKER: F10 [Carol Owens]
And a year year and a bit later I suppose, we did we did another event which I'll I'll talk about. It was called The Missing Link and it was held...

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] This is 1999.

SPEAKER: F13 [Carol Owens] This is in 1999. Yes indeed.
SPEAKER: F15 [Carol Owens]
Just before the millennium, it was in Studio 3 at Television Centre. And the idea was to model the lifecycle of a media asset from commission to the home. And we got a range of BBC internal departments and commercial suppliers to serve as the bits of the chain around the the the workflow and each of them were given some information that was SMEF compliant and some content so you could walk through, you could physically walk through the chain and see the information at commission,
SPEAKER: F13 [Carol Owens]
when the first idea of the program was broached, you could then go to the researcher looking in the archive to see it was anything that was of value.
SPEAKER: F15 [Carol Owens]
You go through capture of incoming new content etc. through other post-production systems to play-out; what the scheduling system needed to know about the programme and what the the EPG, which BBC R&D were working on at the time, what the EPG might say about the programme and then finally to the information that the viewer at home might get. And the point was you know the missing link was metadata. None of this was real at the time but what we were showing was how things could be if the metadata challenge could be won. And I think we did about four sessions over two days. We had about 130 people through. We had a party from the EBU, came through the European Broadcasting Union which I'll talk a bit about in a minute. And we had two Directors General came through. So John Birt was just on the way out at the time but he he came through and everybody was very deferential explaining it all to him. And we also had Greg Dyke coming through, who was the incoming Director General who was on his way to the airport and just wanted a quick, you know “show me. Show me what you got”. But it was great to get them both in there. I mentioned the EBU party slightly earlier on. So after the SMEF launch in ‘98 the EBU started being interested in metadata and kicked off a project called P/Meta - P for production, meta for metadata - to try and develop or to see if it was possible to develop an inter-broadcaster exchange format. So I was managing this project for the Production Management Committee and we got contributions from RAI in Italy, from NOS in Holland, IRT the German and Austrian research department, Danmarks Radio. Various people got involved and we did a lot of good work on that while we created the first version of the P/Meta exchange scheme and built another demonstrator for IBC where you could see the different broadcasters exchanging content and with a little added dimension there was at the core metadata could be translated as well. So we had standard terms that would convert between languages and that was really interesting to to work with the other broadcasters and get their perception, their views on it and it also marked the opening up of opportunities to go and see and present all over the place really, I had some amazing presentation and management reporting tours at the time had to go on, and so I had, you just have to go to Geneva on a fairly regular basis because that's where EBU headquarters was, big conferences IBC Amsterdam, NAB in Las Vegas. I also presented in Montreux, Vienna for FIAT/IFTA. Where else? Reykjavik was an EBU one. Brussels, Madrid, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Bavena in Italy. Oh London as well.

SPEAKER: F17 [Paul Collard] Yeah. It's very extensive.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] Yes. Yes indeed.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
And so Carol this extensive round of presentations led on to an award I understand.

SPEAKER: F13 [Carol Owens]
Yes yes. In 2000 my team won the Royal Television Society Technology Innovation Award in the R&D category. And I was made Fellow of the Royal Television Society the following year for the work that we'd done on metadata which was extremely gratifying. And my role was was usually to do the translation between the techies and the creative and business communities and I relied on on my team around me to actually do the detailed stuff, but it was a great team. It was interesting that we were, we were convergence in motion as it were because of the IT and the broadcast engineering elements.

SPEAKER: M3 [Paul Collard] That was part of pioneering work wasn't it.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] Yes I think it was.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] When you think of the metadata status today and you know, that was the beginnings of it and the growth of it.

SPEAKER: F13 [Carol Owens]
But I was very keen that both sides should try and understand each other as well. And one of the things I particularly wanted to do was to get the the IT people to understand how broadcast and media worked. So in my fine tradition of designing training courses et cetera we did a session up in Wood Norton, the BBC’s training establishment, with the team to make a programme. So they actually got exposed to planning, production, going out and shooting. And interestingly enough everybody finished up in the edit suite arguing. So I think they learnt a lot about the industry as a result. And you know you have to understand why people behave the way they do. So it gave them an opportunity to see things from the other guy's perspective.
SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
Fantastic. And so I mean you had a period this continued right through to 2004.

SPEAKER: F5 [Carol Owens]Yes yeah. We did a lot of work. We were very busy.
SPEAKER: F13 [Carol Owens]
The team grew. We were hiring people in you know on the data side and getting a lot of engagement with the business because I think they were starting to understand more about what it meant. And then in 2004 the division that we were in, BBC Technology, was outsourced to Siemens, was bought by Siemens the global technology company who won a contract to provide the BBC’s technology services framework. And so the team continued, Media Data Group continued, but I turned more to sort of general management consulting and an overview.
SPEAKER: F14 [Carol Owens]
So I was responsible for for other areas not not just them, but it was quite funny because I was doing business development with clients as well. And one memorable trip that I did to Mexico to the state broadcaster there, I got all my preparation stuff done that it was going to go to market what we could do as a as a consultant and project delivery team. And I walked into the meeting room with the client and somebody said “Ah SMEF!”.
SPEAKER: F5 [Carol Owens]
And they knew the work. They knew all about it. So that's what they wanted to talk about initially before I could move them on to the reason that I was actually there for.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] So you were strongly identified with it.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] I was indeed yes yes.

SPEAKER: F17 [Paul Collard] Brilliant

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] known as Mrs SMEF

SPEAKER;[Paul Collard] Internationally.

SPEAKER: F7 [Carol Owens] Yeah yeah yeah absolutely.

SPEAKER: F17 [Carol Owens]
I moved on. So I I left Siemens in 2008 and went to Serco and they are a service company as has to be suggested by the name. And I was able to do some work on metadata there because one of the things that that Serco does is is work with prisons, it runs prisons run these prisoners. Yeah but they they are very very interested in rehabilitation and finding things for the prisoners to do that would stop them offending because you know that that's the success factor. People don't offend again. So we developed something called Project Artemis which was about the rehabilitation of prisoners

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] I was involved in that.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] Yeah yeah. And that was a real a real success because it took white collar prisoners and gave them digitised media to annotate and tag, and then that became useful for reuse and search became the mechanism for search.

SPEAKER: M3 [Paul Collard]
You know I do I do remember that. Yeah it was so popular that it was seen as as a as a reward to be put onto that project, to be able to do some of this. They saw real value in it.

SPEAKER: F13 [Carol Owens]
Yes they did. And the idea was to give them a new skill which they could use when they got out, but also to give benefit to the clients in giving them the human touch in terms of doing the the analysis of what was actually in the videos.
SPEAKER: F7 [Carol Owens]
So that was…
SPEAKER: F13 [Carol Owens]
That was great. The other thing that happened shortly afterwards where metadata came in useful was, in 2009 I was made Visiting Professor of Media Strategy at the University of Lincoln and that came about because one of my proteges from Post-production & Graphic Design who'd been working with me on the masterclasses, the craft masterclasses back in ’94, ‘93 something like that had gone into training and education full time and made a career change and had worked his way up to being Dean of the media school at Lincoln. David Sleight, and he suggested me for this and I was given this role and I was able to go up and lecture the final year students on the joys of metadata, what it all meant. You know what media R&D could lead to in terms of things that were of relevance across the industry and with the BBC’s permission I was able to use the video that I'd made for IBC years ago to just show them what it all meant and give them the real-life taste for what we were on about. And I did get feedback that that at least one of the graduates had gone on to have a career in data for Nintendo.

SPEAKER: F17 [Paul Collard]
Congratulations.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] Yeah. Round about the same time I would, I took the eight hundredth license for SMEF myself, the company that I was working with at the time and it was still available under license at the time and we were able to refer to it as a licensee.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard] So now…

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] That was Ascent Media you know.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] And that is you know how many years after you first developed it, it is a good nine years isn’t it?.

SPEAKER: F17 [Carol Owens]
Well 2009, I took the license in 2009. Yeah. So it's not yeah 1998 or so.

SPEAKER: Paul Collard] Eleven years.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] Eleven Yeah yeah yeah.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] It had long legs.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] It did indeed. And I was also when I was working for Ascent and able to do my last piece of metadata consulting which was a project in Singapore, with Ascent Media out there. So that was introducing a broadcaster to a possible use of the EBU Core scheme. EBU Core took over from P/Meta. And so it was still going. Ascent Media was was taken over by Deluxe, that was the last change. My my next brush with metadata was in 2013, where in 2012, 2013 where I did some early work for the Digital Production Partnership so I was a freelance consultant by this time and I wrote the User Guide for the metadata application first release and also edited the first Production Handbook.
SPEAKER: F13 [Carol Owens]
And you know that that was very very interesting to be able to do what I do best which is -  well what I hope I do best - which is explain the complex to people, put it forward in usable language that people can work with. And you know I'm still involved with that, I’m contributing to some workshops on unique identifiers which is an important part of metadata as to how you uniquely identify a particular asset and stop it being confused with anything else. I returned to the BBC on contract in January ‘13 to work as service services lead, Services Workstream Lead on something called the Aurora program which was the re-procurement of the Technology Services Contract and that was to pick up when the previous outsource contract came to an end.

SPEAKER: F17 [Paul Collard] So nothing to do with DMI.

SPEAKER: [Carol Owens] No no no nothing nothing to do with DMI at all.

SPEAKER: F13 [Carol Owens]
And while I was there I bumped into a colleague who had been at the Missing Link event back in ‘99 who remembered me, remembered the work. He said “Oh you really must meet the architecture team you must show them the material that you've got”. And so I met up with the the newly appointed lead data architect responsible for the digital ecosystem, showed him SMEF, showed him the video of The Missing Link and he was absolutely blown away by it. He said “Isn't it amazing you saw these things coming” and it's great that you know now these things are possible. So what we showed in ‘99 was imagined but we're able to do it now. So I'm really looking forward to seeing the next phases when metadata gets real.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
Well that's that's a fantastic journey and you've really kind of given us an insight into how it came from small beginnings into what is today the one thing that binds all media together really, it's a fantastic story. I mean how do you Carol see the future of these crafts and professions developing in the future?

SPEAKER: F13 [Carol Owens]
Well it's an interesting one because there are good things and and worrying things I think on both fronts. So you know in terms of editing it's very sad that the sort of training that I had as a Trainee Assistant Editor just doesn't exist anymore. I think people would find it fantastically useful. But on the other hand now you've got you know media colleges, media courses that teach editing which we never had in my day. You know it just wasn't available, it wasn't done. You've also got the start of apprenticeships by the major broadcasters. But I don't know how far those are tuned into the craft or whether they're more general. The one thing that that I think is a challenge or has been a challenge is that a lot of the younger generation cut their teeth on YouTube and short videos. Well it's a huge step to go from a five minute piece on YouTube to a 50 minute documentary in a six part series. And it's really how you get the opportunity to grow, especially when the role of assistant in a cutting room full time is no longer there so you don't even get a chance to observe somebody else doing it. So I don't know the answer. I just think that it's going to be a challenge and what I do see is some of my my contemporaries who were editing at same time as me, many of them are still editing full time you know. No no sign of stopping, people in advance of me. People who were there before me also still practising full time and a number of my ex-editing colleagues are now in feature films which is brilliant.

SPEAKER: [Paul Collard] Fantastic transition to feature film very successfully as well.

SPEAKER: F17 [Carol Owens]
Yeah absolutely. So that's editing - in terms of metadata…
SPEAKER: F13 [Carol Owens]
There are still challenges. I think there are still challenges around standardizing it and getting it created. One of the things that we saw very early on was the problem that where you create the metadata is upfront in the media asset lifecycle - all the benefit is down the other end. So you know very little benefit to the people actually entering the data compared with the people who want to use it. And that gets particularly difficult when they're different companies you know and there is no exchange of value between the two organizations or sets of people. So I think that's held it back for for sure. And it's only now that people are seeing the joined-up value I think that that is going to change. One of the things that's going to make a difference going forward is automation, is going to be artificial intelligence, machine learning, all that sort of thing. We don't know the full extent of that but we'll be learning very fast I think over the next couple of years. But I think there is, there will always be a need for the human sense to teach the machines what they're looking for and to do the actual definition of what we need to know. Which is not something the machine can work out for itself.

SPEAKER: M2 [Paul Collard]
Seems like you have some future roles to play Carol in your experience - who knows. Carol thank you very much indeed for giving an interview to the British Entertainment History Project. It's been very interesting. Thank you for sharing with us.

SPEAKER: M1 [Carol Owens]
It's my pleasure. Thank you Paul.

SPEAKER: F1 [Carol Owens] [Out of vision, over photographs]
This is me in my cutting room in the basement of Kensington House in Shepherd's Bush on the last series I worked on before I went into management, “Relative Values”. I am sitting at my Steenbeck which is a 16 mm film editing machine with two soundtracks and one picture track. And you can see I've got the notes on the stand beside me. And you can just see the edge of the trim-bin sitting over there with all the cut-outs.

This photo captures the reconstruction of the punch up for the 40 Minutes programme on Hunt Saboteurs. So I explained that neither of the Sound Recordists had made it to the point whether the fight was happening. So we as the Post-production team had to do a do it ourselves Foley exercise if you will.
SPEAKER: F18 [Carol Owens]
In Ruislip Woods. So what you got here is you've got the the Producer John Percival, the editor Dave Thomas and the sound recordist about to restage said punch up. And this is just a detail. So we had a sack of wood shavings which we used as the punch bag. And it was just very funny because obviously we'd only keep going for a short period of time before everybody collapsed into fits of giggles.

SPEAKER: F19 [Carol Owens]
This is a photograph of me being presented or having been presented with my RTS Fellowship by Will Wyatt in 2001.

SPEAKER: F20 [Carol Owens]
This photograph is of the senior members, key members of Media Data Group, when we were given the RTS Technology Innovation Award in 2000. So from left to right, Arthur Haynes who was my principal data architect, Richard Hopper who was my principal broadcast engineer, myself in the middle, Wes Curtis who was also on the broadcast broadcast engineering side and who also worked with me on the Digital Production Technology Project, and finally on the right hand side John Jordan who was one of the senior data architects and had worked with me on the “Human Body” pilot years ago as well. What was this.
SPEAKER: F19 [Carol Owens]
This was 2000.

This photograph was taken in 1985 round the back of Ealing Studios looking out over the park. We'd been there to do the dub I believe of of “The Battle for Berlin”. And it's myself on the left-hand side, Robyn my assistant, Peter Maniura who is the director and Charles Wheeler on the right-hand side.

SPEAKER: F21 [Carol Owens]
This is an extract from the data model so it's an entity relationship diagram that shows the things in boxes where we leave each box is an entity and the attributes within it and the lines are the relationships between the different entities. I don't think about the detail is just that's to show how the information relates to other information.