A Midland production company is pioneering an innovative process borrowed from the world of business to come up with and develop new comedy ideas.
Immense Productions is looking for actors to help generate content ideas for television, cinema and the internet, using commercially-deployed techniques to develop new products and services.
The new company, founded by film producer Steffan Aquarone and Guardian humour writer and business consultant Guy Browning, draws on Guy’s previous work in commercial product innovation coupled with Steffan’s film-making experience.
“I’ve been working in industry for several years and have developed pretty robust ways of developing ideas,” said Guy. “It struck me that these have never been trialled in the media and entertainment world.
“It’s about getting people to start their thinking from somewhere else. We’re not getting a group of geniuses together, just intelligent people who, given the right stimulation, can think differently about a problem. We are there to give that stimulation.
“I thought if I can do this for dull things like pensions and pet foods, if we can give people the opportunity to try this with things like entertainment, the world is our oyster.”
Immense Productions aims to bring ideas generated by the techniques, which involve a mix of lateral thinking, random thinking and thinking around and through a problem, to the production stage immediately.
“The reason we are looking for actors is because we are looking for people who can bring the ideas to life immediately, so we can turn those into real bits of content,” said Guy.
Immense Productions is inviting applicants for the process through its website www.immenseproductions.co.uk.
Successful applicants will go to an audition at the Edinburgh Festival in August where a team will be selected for the first idea generation workshop in Oxford in September.
