South Yorkshire Cultural and Creative Industries Network

Thursday 2 December 2021
Digital Media Centre - Barnsley

The region’s creative and digital organisations passionate about “banging the drum” for the creative and cultural sector.

"Barnsley is going to become one of the coolest towns to work in because it lets little things happen. And little things explode”. This was the prediction of

John Sanderson, founder and managing director of PitStop Productions, a Barnsley-based audio services provider to the video game industry, who was the keynote speaker at the latest Cultural and Creative Industries Network event.

Held at the Digital Media Centre (DMC) in Barnsley on Thursday 2 December, the inspiring event brought together a broad range of South Yorkshire creatives to share ideas and experiences whilst hearing about exciting projects across the region; plus funding opportunities for those working within creative industries and cultural organisations.

John was one of four speakers on the evening, which centred around the theme of ‘Embracing Digital to Boost our Creative and Cultural Sector’ with audience members invited to ask questions on the topic and put forward their own opinions.  

John added that “people are beginning to notice Barnsley, things are starting to happen” and that there is a “high amount of activity” in the creative and digital industries. Tracey Johnson, business centre manager at DMC, who hosted the event, agreed, labelling the region as “an absolute hotbed of talented people” and highlighting a range of programmes run by the DMC to “generate interesting thinking and creative businesses” in the area.

Sharing his own business success story working across both creative and digital industries, John revealed how PitStop Productions has gone from a one-man-band set up in a Barnsley bedroom, to an award-winning audio services provider, with a 45-strong team and studios in London, New York and LA. 

John also highlighted the importance of preventing fragmentation in the creative sector and pointed out there’s no reason why niche creative businesses can’t be set up in Barnsley. He said it was crucial to “create facilities where creative people can get together, gain skills and make”. This is something he is keen to achieve through Pitstop as he and his team continue to put Barnsley on the gaming industry global map.

“That’s the part of the journey I’m now incredibly excited about,” John revealed. “Where we might be making a difference, where we might be making something on the world stage.”

Tracey agreed there is a “buoyant games industry” in the area that “can only get bigger”. She shared what the DMC is doing with the same goal of bringing creative people together and supporting SMEs to explore digital innovation. This includes opening a MakerLab at the DMC in January “to help people develop new skills and ideas” and the development of a digital campus at the DMC over the next few years.

“We’re creating somewhere really exciting that brings together people, ideas, business, life, public realm. A kind of urban village in the heart of the town centre,” she explained. 

Tracey added that there was a desire to show that different things can happen in the region, stating that now is a “time to work together” and said the momentum and consistency of the South Yorkshire Cultural and Creative Industries Network events would really help to “stimulate ideas, generate connections and start conversations”.

During the event, Tracey also praised Kate Brindley, project director for arts, culture and heritage for South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, for securing £1 million worth of investments into arts, cultural and creative industries across the whole city region. Something, she said, the sector had been “hoping and wishing for, for quite some time”. 

Embracing digital to reach new audiences

The second half of the network event featured a stimulating panel discussion with representatives from organisations based in the region. 

One hot topic of discussion was the challenges and opportunities presented to creatives due to the Covid-19 pandemic and how the organisations adapted to reach existing and even new audiences during the lockdown periods. 

Devinia Skirrow, marketing and communications manager at Barnsley Museums and Visitor Economy, said that although challenging, the last year had “brought significant rewards with huge digital achievements and accolades for audience engagement”. She revealed how she and her team reacted quickly to the pandemic in moving Barnsley Museum’s offering onto digital platforms, engaging with the community and making its collections accessible to regional, national and even global audiences. 

Online activities developed by the forward-thinking team included children's storytelling, poetry, jigsaws, drawing, wellbeing films and a digital mayor's parade.

Sharing what made the transition to digital possible, she said it was about “being ambitious and dynamic, and not being afraid to fail." 

Jacqui Wells, deputy director at The Children’s Media Conference (CMC), a not-for-profit Sheffield-based organisation supporting the children’s media industry, revealed they were also quick to make the switch to digital in response to the pandemic. She explained their annual conference, which sees 1,200 delegates from across the UK and around the world gather in Sheffield each year, was hosted digitally for the first time in its history.

When asked what might have changed for the better due to the pandemic in terms of embracing digital, Devinia said Barnsley Museum had geographically reached a much wider audience. 

“It gave us the confidence to work digitally and provided an outlet for people to express themselves,” she responded. “The results spurred us on to be more ambitious with digital fully embraced by the team, setting a new benchmark for the future.”

Jacqui said that while the online conference had been a success for the CMC, taking the event online had also presented some stumbling blocks. 

“In holding the conference online, we can get people to come globally,” she said. “But you have to be in a room with people face to face in order to do a certain amount of networking.”

Kisha Bradley, the founder and CEO of South-Yorkshire-based Brightbox, spoke enthusiastically about her organisation’s valuable work in designing community-led ‘makerspaces’ within local libraries, giving people access to role models and resources to learn and develop new skills. Sharing her own personal career journey, she outlined the importance of role models and representation in pursuing careers and the responsibility of tech, engineering and creative sectors to value lived experience, include community, and dismantle oppressive workplace cultures to create better solutions for everyone.

The panel also discussed how to deal with negativity that can be experienced by creatives when “putting themselves out there digitally”. 

Kisha said it was a case of “having people in your corner” and “setting boundaries”, highlighting that “the world moves on quickly” and sometimes you just have to “let it go”.

John suggested that it’s best to have a strategy in place if the comments could be damaging to a business but agreed that “sometimes silence is your biggest weapon.”

Reflecting on the conversations of the evening, all speakers agreed that there are exciting opportunities to embrace both creatively and digitally across the region and that there is a great deal of positivity coming out of Barnsley. They added that the profile for the

Cultural and Creative Industries sector for South Yorkshire needs to remain high and that they would continue “banging the drum.”

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