In the past year the CPC has partnered with Screen Australia and the Australian Directors Guild (ADG) to offer commercial and content directing mentorships to female directors in its quest to drive diversity across commercial creativity, which the CPC considers critical to the development of distinctive, relevant and compelling ideas for business.
Funded by Screen Australia’s Gender Matters: Brilliant Careers initiative, the Commercial & Content Directing Mentorship pairs emerging female directors with commercial production companies to gain an insight into life as a director in the commercial and advertising industry.
At its core, Gender Matters is an unashamed express lane for women in an industry where just 16% of directors of Australian feature films between 1970 and 2014 were female.
Applicants were required to have an elementary level of skill and experience as a director, providing a two-minute show reel, a piece-to-camera pitch and a reference from a screen industry practitioner.
For the second year running the CPC is partnering with the ADG to mentor female directors looking to take the next step in their commercial directing careers.
Production companies participating in the program in 2018 were FINCH, Goodoil, Photoplay, Scoundrel (all NSW), The Otto Empire, The Sweet Shop (both VIC) , Beautiful Films (WA) and Taxi Films (QLD).