June 2023 newsletter: What surgeons really want in TV Medical Dramas + OKRE goes to Docfest

June 2023...

✨ OKRE Speaks To Top Surgeon About Advising On Hit TV Drama

✨ OKRE Funded 'The Fish That Never Swam' Goes to Edinburgh Pitch

✨ Elizabethan Astrology and Medical Records Inspire Hit Game

✨ OKRE Funded Project 'My Blonde GF' Goes to Sheffield Docfest

OKRE Speaks To Top Surgeon About Advising On Hit TV Drama

Professor Kourosh Saeb-Parsy, Professor of Transplantation at the University of Cambridge, is one of the country’s leading surgeons and medical professionals. He found himself getting frustrated by some of the medical dramas on TV:

“Either they were factually inaccurate or else so very simplified that they lost credibility. They might as well be fantasy, this is not how real life operates…”

So when OKRE approached him to consult on a highly rated TV drama, produced by HTM Productions, he said it felt like an interesting and inspiring thing to do.

Here, we’ve gathered his top tips for researchers and TV producers looking to get the best from one another…

OKRE Funded Project 'The Fish That Never Swam' Goes To Edinburgh Pitch!

OKRE is thrilled to see The Fish That Never Swam selected for the acclaimed Edinburgh Pitch. The Fish That Never Swam is a documentary film that explores health inequality in Glasgow through the lens of Glaswegian working class filmmaker Kirsty Mackay.

Over two years we get to know four Glaswegians whose stories illustrate the findings of Scottish researchers that people in Glasgow are dying younger than the UK average. This is a story of trauma — on a large scale experience across a city, by the individual, and passed down through generations – told by someone from their community.

Find out why OKRE funded this project…and why this story is so important:

Elizabethan Occultist and Astrologer, Simon Forman, Inspires Hit Storytelling Game

Astrologaster is a comical and participatory story-telling game set in Elizabethan London, inspired by the casebooks of the Elizabethan occultist and ‘agent of the devil’, Simon Forman.

Developed by independent games developer Nyamyam in partnership with Cambridge University, this interactive game is now part of the British Library’s ‘Digital Storytelling’ exhibition which explores how technology has changed the way we tell stories.

Astrologaster was seeded at a Wellcome Trust games workshop where Jennifer Schneideriet from Nyamyam met Lauren Kassell, Director of the University of Cambridge’s Casebooks project…

The OKRE Fund Is Open For Application...

We’ve got the klaxon out again to let you know that the OKRE Fund is open to applications!

Strong applications will involve innovative creative TV, Film, Games or Audio projects, where entertainment creatives are looking to collaborate with academic researchers or people with lived experience (either directly or through intermediaries).

Projects must be in R&D or early-stage development. It is not a production fund.

The OKRE Fund is open to individuals and organisations.

Opportunities

We love to share opportunities we have at OKRE or those we have come across during our wandering through the halls of the internet!

BFI 'Made of Truth' Short Film Fund Is Open!

The Made of Truth: BFI Doc Society Short Film Fund invites emerging storytellers from all parts of the UK to share original and adventurous non-fiction stories that respond to the changing world around us.

Want To See Your Short FIlm at London Film Festival?

Want to see your short film in the 2024 programme? Submissions have now opened for the next London Short Film Festival, taking place in January 2024

Attending Sheffield Docfest?

WFTV is delighted to invite all festival delegates to join them at a drinks reception to celebrate the women of Sheffield DocFest 2023! Find out more...

OKRE Bookmarks

Here’s a selection of things our team have been reading, watching and listening to…

Can cloud gaming change the industry?

Writer's Guild UK Joins Protests? (Screen Daily)

UK writers’ union, Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) has invited its members to join a protest in London’s Leicester Square on June 14, in solidarity with the Writers Guild of America (WGA), whose membership are currently on strike...read all about it.

This is Going to Hurt...

Might this be the most realistic TV medical drama yet? Richard Fisher for BBC