‘Create Next Graduates’ was a project created in a collaboration between ContentLab and Converse. The aim of this project was to pull focus on a group of emerging young creatives who we believe are representative of a larger youth community who are striving to ‘Create Next’ - in line with Converse’s head slogan for future progress. ContentLab split a larger group of mainly POC creatives into smaller teams for each to create a project responding to the brief Converse had set us.  My team consisted of Taja Lewis and Flora Scott as Co-Producers, Saskia Shah as our stylist and Operations assistant, and myself as the Director/DoP overseeing the production of this project.

My team’s idea originally centred on the limitations and losses students faced by universities being hit with the Covid-19 pandemic and how students had used certain methods in order to thrive and survive creatively - and mentally - through these times. Although, moving forward with the idea of inclusivity, we were conscious of the difficulties faced by young creatives who had decided not to take the university route and were still pushing themselves to create progressive work.

We intended for this project to act as both celebration of their creative endeavours in the spirit of Converse’s continual direction towards progression, as well as the blueprint for an initiative which aims to embrace and encourage creativity as a ‘spectrum’ of practices and disciplines with no concrete pathways or approaches. This is what makes a ‘Create Next Graduate’.