Tis the season...for what, I'm not sure this year. But one thing we do know is that for the past 9 months some of our best companions have been podcasts. To bring Season 3 of Now & Next, the podcast I host, to a close, a double shot of episodes have just been dropped for your earbud fulfillment. In one we meet an indigenous actor, producer, and filmmaker who as a kid wondered why there was no one who looked like him in Home Alone. Today Jacob Pratt is based in LA, and his latest project is creating Indigenous themed content for Disney. The other episode picks up on this theme of home alone-ing and offers a preview of a forthcoming research report on how people in the game industry are adapting to working from home. Enjoy.
Now & Next Podcast S3 E8 – Isolation Nation: Insights into #WFH
Have you ever said to yourself ‘if only I could work from home whenever I wanted’? And then followed up with a list of all the ways in which it would be better than the daily grind of an uncomfortable commute, overpriced coffee, and hours spent pushing paper and clicking keys at your desk, interspersed with hours in meetings and boxes of muffins? Now, for better or worse, most of us know what that’s like. Spoiler alert: it’s not as great as we thought it would be.
On this episode of the Now & Next podcast we’re taking a closer look at an industry that was one of the first to go to full work from home mode: the game industry. In some ways it was a fairly straightforward transition, because the majority of developers, designers, producers, and testers were already working independently and on screens for much of the time. But has the transition really been that seamless?The guests on this episode of the podcast are Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan and Jim Munroe. They’re long time game art industry professionals who have been tasked with finding out what the shift to working from home has actually been like for game industry personnel. They’re putting the finishing touches on a research report about the sector’s transition from studio-based work to home-based work called “Isolation Nation”. Marie and Jim provide us with a sneak peek into some of their interview-based findings so far, such as the challenges of people having to be their own boss at home, the tendency to work too much, as opposed to working too little, and mechanisms for keeping morale up when the opportunities for the usual team building events are limited due to the Covid-19 restrictions.
Marie describes the research project this way: “People are really isolated right now, and I say that’s more the case for people making games, especially small studios. And we think life is easier when people can solve problems together and share knowledge. So the goal of this project is to gather knowledge from people making games all over Canada, in small studios, in larger studios, or people working alone. And then gather that knowledge together into one resource so that people can share the things that they’re struggling with, and how they’re getting past them.”
On this episode, learn more about:
- How did the gaming industry respond to Covid in terms of getting people set up to work from home? (02:37)
- How team health is affected by working from home (09:00)
- Ways studios are trying to build camaraderie and trust with people that joined during the pandemic (11:25)
- Studios dealing with mental health challenges (15:00)
- The most surprising discoveries Marie Claire and Jim made from doing this research (18:35)
- Getting creative work done while being stuck at home during a pandemic (22:30)
- Find out about The Game Arts International Network (GAIN), the organization behind the forthcoming 'Isolation Nation' report;
- Check out Gameplanner, a resource created by GAIN and intended to help indies plan their exhibition and networking strategies;
- Hear from several leaders in the Canadian gaming industry about the challenges and opportunities that come with working in a socially distanced world
- Read In a Self-Isolated World, Developers Are Learning to Make Games From Home on The Verge
- Read Work From Quarantine: How COVID-19 Has Upended Game Development on ShackNews
Now & Next Podcast S3 E7 – Breaking On-Screen Stereotypes from the Inside Out
As a child growing up in southern Saskatchewan Jacob Pratt found himself watching TV – as most kids do – and wondering why he saw no one who looked like him. Jacob grew up on the George Gordon First Nation reserve, about 100 km north of Regina, and remembers that the only images he saw of people from his culture on TV and in movies were stereotypes like people dancing around drums or as members of a tribe from the 1800s riding into town on horseback. “Why is there no one that looks like me in Home Alone?”, he thought to himself.
Dig Deeper:
It took several years for Jacob to process, and ultimately answer that question for himself. He built his career in the entertainment industry one step at a time, first as a dancer, then as an actor, and more recently as a producer and director. It was along this journey that Jacob realized that the stereotypical images of Indigenous people he had seen his whole life were not just created by the industry, but reinforced by it. “And then I started thinking to myself, well, how can we reverse or eliminate those stereotypes? And the first answer that came to me was: use the same medium that created and reinforced those stereotypes to reverse them.”
On this episode of the Now and Next, Jacob Pratt talks about his journey from a town of a few thousand people on the prairies to the heart of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, where he recently completed his Masters at USC, and launched his own company, Skoden Entertainment. Skoden is an Indigenous story-focused entertainment production company whose first client happens to be Disney. But this is not the story of an overnight success. Far from it. While still based in Canada, Jacob hosted, produced, and directed several shows on APTN. And it was while doing an internship at Disney, as part of his Masters program at USC, that he forged the relationships that would lead to his current work with the entertainment industry giant.
On this episode, learn more about:
On this episode of the Now and Next, Jacob Pratt talks about his journey from a town of a few thousand people on the prairies to the heart of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, where he recently completed his Masters at USC, and launched his own company, Skoden Entertainment. Skoden is an Indigenous story-focused entertainment production company whose first client happens to be Disney. But this is not the story of an overnight success. Far from it. While still based in Canada, Jacob hosted, produced, and directed several shows on APTN. And it was while doing an internship at Disney, as part of his Masters program at USC, that he forged the relationships that would lead to his current work with the entertainment industry giant.
On this episode, learn more about:
- How using the entertainment industry can be a great way to reverse stereotypes created and reinforced by the media (02:20)
- The biggest challenges in bringing Indigenous stories created by Indigenous filmmakers to a wide audience (6:30)
- The story of how of Jacob got the deal with Disney (09:00)
- Skoden Entertainment’s plans to impact Indigenous communities more directly in the future (10:30)
- Learn more about Use Your Voice, the project Jacob created for Disney Channel
- Jacob is still very active in Canada where he currently has three shows on APTN: Wild Archaeology, Louis Says, and a self-produced show called Land Wandered
- Read Sask. man working on project for Disney wants to redefine how TV and movies portray Indigenous people on CBC
- Read Indigenous Representation in Media
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