Please find the WFN Newsletter for the month ending November 2022.
Should anyone wish to add/write anything to the next newsletter, please feel free to email it to me at info@wildlifefilmnetwork.com
Points of notice for this month:
New – 1. New members
New – 2. Not a lot is happening at the WFN at the moment
New – 3. We are going to have a rest from zoom meetings until the New Year
New – 4. There will not be a ‘Christmas meet’ in December
New – 5. We are altering the timings of our face-to-face network meetings for 2023
Repeated – 6. Uploading photos to your Profile Page
Repeated – 7. We would like to hear from our international members
Repeated – 8. Please start using the Forum
Repeated – 9. Please talk to your friends and colleges about joining the WFN
1. We gained 1 new member last month:
Sadly, we have not gained any new members during November.
I know I have said this a lot, but…
Please remember to encourage everyone you know or work with to join the Wildlife Film Network as a member! The more members we have, the better the network will be.
At the moment (Christmas), things have simply stopped. I know it is the time of year because I have chatted to a few of you about it. But please remember that this is your community, it is here to work for you, and it will only do this if it expands to its true potential; and to do this fully its membership needs to grow considerably more than where it presently stands.
It is our intention for the WFN to be the first place for people to look if they are wishing to engage in / or employ the services of; anyone working in wildlife film making or wildlife conservation, and it needs a lot more than its present membership to do this!
2. Not a lot is happening at the WFN at the moment
Not a lot is visibly happening at the front end of the WFN this month, as we have been working on things behind the scenes. We are presently working on three major new projects to be launched during 2023, as well as starting to organise our wildlife film courses for the summer of 2023.
We have also discovered that there is nothing more annoying than trying to work with Google and the Cloud to get something working in a specific manner when Google wants to play hard to get…
and that the categorisation of information given to you from a 3rd party is very hard to deal with if there are not enough physical headers in the data feed…
and well as suffering from the long days of wet, miserable and cold weather along with the rest of you!
(Here’s to hoping that Spring arrives several months early, and Spring and Summer are as fantastic as they were last year)
3. We are going to have a rest from zoom meetings until the new year
Due to the fact that everyone seems to be very busy this time of years doing everything apart from filming (surprise, surprise) we have decided to have a rest from our zoom meetings until the new year. This is…
- Due to people not attending a meeting for several weeks,
- Due to us not having a very good internet connection and therefore having to run around trying to find a suitable spot to host a meeting, only for no one to sign in.
4. There will not be a ‘Christmas meet’ in December
There will no longer be a ‘Christmas meet’ in December as nobody responded to the “Where would you like to hold the meeting” question in the 10-question questionnaire. Well see if we can work on this a bit better for next year!
5. Altering the timings of our face-to-face network meetings for 2023
Due to the response to our 10-question questionnaire we are considering altering the timings of our face-to-face network meetings for 2023.
This is due to…
- We have had the option of WFN members suggesting where they would like to have a meeting for the last 6 months on the website / in the newsletter, and sadly, nobody made a request. Hence, we did not hold any meetings.
- We have only ever had a maximum of 4 people turn up to a face-to-face network meeting, and we are hoping that having less meetings may also encourage more people to turn up to the ones we have.
- As we are now starting to run film courses again (after Covid etc.) we are looking to slot our network meetings into the gaps between our courses, as they are 8 weeks long. Consequently we are looking into only holding a meeting on a quarterly basis in January, April, August, December.
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Below are comments brought forward from previous newsletters.
6. Uploading photos to your Profile Page:
It has been pointed out by a couple of members that they have had issues whist trying to upload all their Profile Page photographs in one large upload. We would therefore like to politely suggest that when uploading photographs, you click on the ‘save Profile’ button after two or three photos to save this being an issue.
7. We would like to hear from our international members:
We are aware that whilst the WFN is a great place for our International Members to display their experience, skill set and contact details; it is very hard for them to become involved in the actual day to day interaction of the website as they are not in the UK. However, we would like to encourage them to become as involved as they can with the WFN either by writing something we can add to a monthly newsletter, or by posting a thread in the WFN Forum.
8. Please start using the Forum: (It’s free to use)
I know that Forums are a bit out of date now, but we have added one to our website as a way of people being able to hold a written conversation about things outside of the Zoom meetings etc. It’s a great place to talk about production techniques, equipment used, problems you experience whilst producing a film and any other subject. It’s also very useful as it doesn’t have to work around time zones so could be an extremely good way of communication with our international members.
9. Please talk to your friends and colleges about joining the WFN:
I am sure I will end every newsletter with this for the next few months at least – But the WFN will only ever be a good as its membership. The larger and more diverse the membership is, the better skills pool we will be able to reach into to find crew to produce our DFU wildlife documentary / films. So please feel free to mention joining the WFN to anyone who you feel may be interested.
Please remember: We are not just wanting to have memberships from wildlife camera operators. We are also looking for sound opps, editors, scriptwriters, location scouts, presenters, narrators, graphic artists and music composers, producers and directors (to mention just a few) as well as scientist working in any subject related to wildlife, and environmentalists and conservationists. The bigger the mix, the better!
