Talk Digi To Me
Excited to talk digital marketing, business and entrepreneurship? Let's go!
I'm your host Carlie Robinson and with my guests we'll uncover digital marketing tools and trends, and gather insights into how to make your business more successful. We'll also hear stories from successful business owners on what helped or hindered them along their path.
This year marks 21 years in advertising for me and I'm celebrating by sharing my passion for digital marketing and my studio in Barbados with all of you!
Talk Digi To Me
Talk Digi To Me March FWD: Kerri Birch
Kerri Birch's remarkable 20-year journey through the film and TV production industry reveals what true persistence looks like in creative careers. From her early days as a set runner on German films to co-founding award-winning 13 Degrees North Productions, Kerri shares how childhood dreams of storytelling evolved into executive leadership in Caribbean filmmaking.
The conversation takes us behind the scenes of major productions, including how Kerri spent four years persistently pursuing the producers of "Below Deck" before finally bringing the show to Grenada's beautiful waters. Her stories about managing over 100 crew members during COVID-19 for a Royal Caribbean shoot in Dominica showcase both the logistical challenges and creative rewards of production work in paradise.
Kerri demystifies the art of location scouting, explaining it's far more than finding pretty backdrops. She describes evaluating waterfall locations in Dominica's rainforests not just for their beauty but for practical concerns like equipment access, setup space, and filming angles—considerations that make the difference between successful shoots and production nightmares.
As a female executive in a male-dominated field, Kerri speaks candidly about her perspective on the Caribbean film industry's potential, and highlights the need for simultaneously developing local talent through funding while attracting international productions through strategic incentives.
For aspiring filmmakers, especially young women, Kerri's advice resonates with hard-earned wisdom: "Do not let the "nos" deter you. Feel your feelings but don't stay there." Her journey proves that networking, persistence, and self-advocacy create opportunities in an industry where determination matters as much as talent. Listen now and discover how Kerri turned "no" into "yes" through sheer persistence and Caribbean creativity.
Welcome to Talk Digi to Me. March Forward, a women-only series in celebration of International Women's Day. We're talking to women in the field of marketing, media and technology, Women who make an impact, Women who dare to march forward. Presented by Carly Robinson from Robinson Creative.
Speaker 2:This is Talk Digi to Me. March Forward. I'm your host, carly Robinson, and today my guest, kerry Birch. Kerry has spent 20 years in film and TV production industry, starting out as a set runner back in 2005 on a German film called Betrayal in Paradise. Since then she freelanced as a production coordinator, a location manager. She's been the assistant director and casting director on various projects, including Sky TV's T20 TV commercial, j Cole's Can't Get Enough music video. She's done campaigns for Royal Caribbean, virgin Atlantic and the Intercontinental Hotel Group, among others. She is the co-founder, the executive director and producer at 13 Degrees North Productions. That's a Barbados-based and award-winning production company specializing in film and video production, production facilitation and location scouting, which is throughout the Caribbean. Kerry, thank you so much for joining me. I'm really excited. When I was a child, I thought I would become a director, a video director one day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I used to love playing with like a camera. And you're thinking in your head that is not what I do. I'm a real director, lady. No, but you know, I used to really love playing with camera and acting like we're on set and stuff. So I'm so excited to talk to you about what you do. You're making my dreams come true, by the way, so let's start.
Speaker 3:When you were a little girl, what did you want to become? Uh, how much time do we have? 15 minutes, girl, just kidding, okay. So when I was a little girl, I actually wanted to be a journalist or a writer of some sort. So I used to write. So I used to write like stories and I had like huge amounts of essays but just filled with stories, and I was trying to figure out how do you make a living in that and it felt like journalism was the thing. Um, to do so.
Speaker 3:Fast forward a couple years and I am a teenager and I am watching movies. I was I still am an avid movie watcher and I thought to myself I feel I could do. I feel I could do that. I feel I could, could make things, and I feel a part of me felt I could act. You wanted to be a director. I wanted to be an actress, yeah, but it never panned out for me. So it turned into I want to tell people what to do, and I feel that I could write and tell people what to do in the writing. And then, somewhere along the lane, it changed into me becoming a producer. Basically, I don't direct. I will tell you that, yeah, directors are very special human beings. I am not that so.
Speaker 2:So how did you? Did you study production, or did you just sort of start working in it and build it up from there?
Speaker 3:So what I did was I did do a filmmaking workshop when I was 21. That was with the film group and the film group was headed by Mamu Patel Nala and Ian Smith at the time and I think what was happening was I kept talking about wanting to to be in film and I tried to go to film school. That didn't pan out. So I ended up doing mass communications at the Barbados Community College. I want to say I majored or I made my focus broadcast. So when you go, when you do mass communications, typically they want you to do either print or broadcast. I knew I would get that print. I wanted to do broadcast, but only television broadcast. Wanted to do broadcast but only television broadcast.
Speaker 3:So I pleaded for them to allow me to skip radio broadcast and just do television broadcast and they said yes, yes, they said yes so that's what I did, and then from there I just tried to get involved, like I said, in filmmaking workshops and also tried to get on filmmaking sets. So one of the first sets that I was on, I was actually an extra for a Canadian documentary, um what was done by CBC Canada, and it was on the sugar. It was on, uh, slavery and sugar, you know, in the Caribbean, in Barbados specifically, um. So I was an extra in that. And then from there I met people who worked in production and then they will just tell me, you know, when productions were coming in. So I kind of learned on the job essentially.
Speaker 2:Yeah, networking has been the name of the game, correct.
Speaker 3:Yeah, networking goes a long way, yeah.
Speaker 2:How long have you had 13 degrees north now? How long has it been? So 13 is 10 years old.
Speaker 3:Yay, we turned 10 last year in september. Yeah and um, but I've been working in production obviously um longer than that, but yeah um, what are some of the recent projects that you've worked on, that you're specifically? Proud of so recent projects, funny enough. So we do this thing called top 10, um. One is going to drop today. Actually, well, as we are speaking, maybe um, and it talks about the, the jobs that we really loved um throughout our 10 years I am particularly proud of. Is it bad when I say all of them?
Speaker 2:But yes, you can't. You don't love all your children equally. You have to pick one favorite.
Speaker 3:I think I think one. Okay, so there there are two. Yeah, one would be below that. Definitely. When we, when we Produced that with, that was in grenada, and I think that is special to me because it took me four years to get that job um, essentially because they were no longer shooting in the caribbean, they had left after I think it was hurricane maria and and hurricane maria had devastated I think it was Hurricane Maria and and Hurricane Maria had devastated I think it was Maria had devastated um St Martin, where they would normally shoot. So they had left the Caribbean.
Speaker 3:And through networking again, I worked on one show, a newer producer who was working on that show. So I decided I said, well, I went to Grenada, I saw how lovely it was. I had to sail through the um Grenadian countries. I went from Grenada to Karakou, to Padi Marhani, and I was like this will be perfect for this show. So I immediately did a proposal and I sent it to them through my friend who was one of the producers, um to send off to the zets. And I did it every year, every year for four years until they said, yes, um, would you like to show us granada? And I was like, yes, I would love to show you granada. So that was that was dear to me, because I do love. I love granada and I love, I love all the caribbean islands we were, but I love grenada. There's a vibe there and I think, just the perseverance of it all, yeah, and then you really yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And then the other one I would be the shoot we did in dominica. We did a shoot for royal car, royal Caribbean, and we worked with a production company called um Small Fray Productions and they were out of LA and we did it during COVID. So, and it was our first production in Dominica. So when they contacted us we were like, okay, well, we, we do have um contacts down, we do have contacts down there, we're going to go down there and build a team. So we ended up spending like a month down there between the initial location scout, then we stayed on, we interviewed people, built up the team and this is well having to go through COVID testing like every three days and you know that sort of thing. And we had recently I was going through because it was a pretty big crew, cast and crew and I was going through some documents from before then and I realized that there were like 100 and something people on that shoot. Well, but as it was going on, it didn't feel like like because everybody, because you're just working with everybody.
Speaker 3:So you know. So I was like I looked at, I looked at Kurt um, who's my husband and my business partner, and I was like I didn't know we had that much people. We were like so he was in charge of hundreds of people. Yes, right.
Speaker 2:During COVID yeah.
Speaker 3:So yeah, so those two would be yeah.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. So what does it mean exactly to be a location scout, Because you've mentioned that a few times? And I know you've done a lot of work throughout the Caribbean. Is it just taking pictures of places and saying, oh, this would be a nice?
Speaker 1:place to have a movie coming.
Speaker 2:What does it mean really to?
Speaker 3:do that To, to have a have a movie coming. You know, like what does it mean really to do that? To be a location scout? Um so, location scouting it isn't just it. A part of it is, yes, taking the photos and saying, oh, this would be a nice place to have a movie, but really and truly, it is finding unique places to shoot. It is also finding places that are conducive to shooting as well.
Speaker 3:So a production may you know, a production may want a particular location and you're not just looking at it from the point of view of how pretty it looks, but you're also looking at it from the point of view of how accessible it is. For example, in Dominica we needed a waterfall and I remember we went to this waterfall and we always said we were just doing our due diligence. That's what we were saying. We're doing due diligence because it takes 45 minutes to hike down to this waterfall and it's not a treacherous hike, but it takes 45 minutes to hike down to this waterfall and we have to go down there, up and down, because it's never just straight across. It's Dominica, right, yeah, and you're in the middle of the rainforest, the rain is going to fall at some point in time and you're hiking down there with cast that include children and also all your gear. This is never happening, also, all your gear. This is never happening, but it was a nice walk for those who went down and saw the waterfall.
Speaker 3:So you have to make sure you know the location is accessible. You have to make sure you have adequate space for parking or a base camp, or building a base camp if you need to a base camp, or building a base camp if you need to um, because, again, if we were down there, we would have had to bring in everything tables, chairs, tents, toilets, um and still have space for for all the filming, yeah, and all the um. You know the generator and all that other stuff. So it's not just looking at how pretty it is, but again, again, it is looking at how accessible and also you're looking at. You have to look at the location as well from all angles. A lot of people think, oh, this looks really great because you're looking at it from one angle, but when we're shooting, we're shooting multiple angles, so we always have to turn the camera the other way to get the reverse angle. So it makes no sense to have something pretty on one side, and then on the other side there's a wall of garbage yeah, this character cannot turn.
Speaker 3:Do not let them walk across exactly so yeah, so it entails a lot um, but it's so much fun. I really really love scouting. I'm actually gonna be scouting. I'm actually going to be scouting when I leave here.
Speaker 2:You can scout right here I mean let's talk about the film industry in the Caribbean.
Speaker 1:Are we?
Speaker 2:taking it seriously enough? Do we need to be doing more? Give me what the temperature is like.
Speaker 3:What is the temperature? Alright, let me start home. Let me start in Barbados. We do need to be doing more. We need to be doing more in terms of not just looking at our local filmmakers and really, um, helping them to build their own capacity. We need to be looking at funding for filmmakers as well. There are a lot of good ideas out there and there are a lot of people writing really good stories. It's just that there's no access to funds to actually film them. Outside of that, we have to look at again.
Speaker 3:If I go back to the capacity building, how do we build capacity? In one of the ways that I usually promote, that is and I guess, because I did it is through having people come to the island to film and having the practitioners on the island, like the filmmakers on the island, being a part of those productions. Transfer of knowledge Correct on the island being a part of those productions. Transfer of knowledge correct, um. And again, I think that is a big one for me, because that is literally how, how I learned myself. Um.
Speaker 3:But we also need to make barbados more attractive in terms of things like, um, you know, tax rebates or cash rebates for people who are coming to barbados to film because they could go anywhere else in the world. There are places in the world that are giving like 65 percent back on what you spend um on in their country or in their region. And I'm not saying to give back 65 percent, that's you know. But but I'm saying we really need to be a little strategic in how we look at it. We need to, and there are incentives on the table here in Barbados, but they've been on the table, I want to say, for two years now. So that's why. So, when I say we need to be doing more, it can't just sit there and we hope that something is going to happen For the wider Caribbean. I think I've been reading I can't remember her name, but I think her name is Lisa Hanna, but I stand corrected. She is a lady from Jamaica and she's actually been writing some articles in the Observer in Jamaica about their own struggles in the film industry as well, and they're a little similar to what's happening in Barbados, which is which was really actually surprising to me, because I see Jamaica's like late years ahead yeah, this huge of where we are um, and they are really capitalizing on shows, coming to Jamaica and filming and I see, like I watch your credits and I see my friend's dance going up in the credits and I'm like
Speaker 3:yes, you know, and it gets them. It gets them on the international stage. It is, like I say, building their capacity, which means that these people, these Jamaicans, can now be making their own, um, their own stories. I think what her, what her argument is there's not that space for funding for those filmmakers, um, and I think that throughout the caribbean, we kind of have to look at everything, we have to look at it holistically, but I think we also have to understand that things have to happen simultaneously, so it's not going to be this thing happens and then this thing happens yeah we kind of have to be pushing.
Speaker 3:Sometimes one thing will be a little ahead and the other thing, but we can't forget, yeah, the thing. So we can't say, oh, focus on people coming in and building and forget that we need to fund local projects. We can't say, fund local projects but we forget, oh, we need to teach people how to produce yeah, right, they have to happen simultaneously.
Speaker 2:I think's interesting You're reading from the point of view of another female um in Jamaica, because in my understanding and you can correct me film is probably a male dominated industry. Um, have you had moments where you look?
Speaker 3:around, you realize you're the only woman on set as that um, the only, yeah, the only woman on set, on the production team or on the on the film right, but not actors, but not, yeah, but not like you know um, do we need more women in film?
Speaker 2:I think is the question I'm I'm gonna ask you from your point of view, where you're sitting today.
Speaker 3:I feel we need more women everywhere.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but I think, yeah, I think, I think, seeing, I think having more women in film it definitely can't hurt.
Speaker 3:I think I've had conversations with some males who were thinking that women can't do certain jobs in film the way they could do it, so the idea of having a female grip or a female um camera operator was like beyond them.
Speaker 3:Even though they understood it could happen and they see it happen, they still felt like it was kind of a man's job. I guess we've been conditioned to think that women are only, you know, to be a guest in the office or you know, that sort of thing. I mean, even I'm going to say, in my case, even if you look at me, I am the office person, I'm the producer, I do not, I do not handle cameras, I do not handle sound equipment, unless you would like them destroyed. But I would say, though, that it being it is a male dominated industry, and I would say, even with being a producer, there are times when I go into rooms and I have meetings with people, and I've been in a room, I have meetings with people and they thought that I was my husband's assistant or secretary, or they will be having.
Speaker 2:I've been in other meetings where, even though they're talking to both of us, they're just looking at him that's happened to me so many times in meetings you know you're in the room and full of men and you might be the one in the leadership position, but they automatically look at the man next to you or like it's that conversation happens. I don't think that they don't realize it's happening, but we do, but we exactly exactly so, um so, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think if they saw more females, yeah, then they wouldn't have a choice but to change their outlook yeah, basically, um, what advice would you give to young females wanting to get into film?
Speaker 2:um, young teenagers now who are looking at, oh my gosh, this could be a real industry, this could be a real job for me. Do you have any advice for them?
Speaker 3:I want to say get into it just be very persistent, clearly be very persistent, um, do not, do not let the nose what is? What is the phrase or the word I'm looking for? Do not let the nose deter you, feel your feelings but, don't stay there.
Speaker 3:I'm one of those people that truly believe that and just keep pushing. That's my advice. Get into anything else. To be honest, I think you have to take the initiative. What I find is there are a lot of young people out there who want to get into film and have been in forums where it might be their first film forum that they're in, and they will go. I didn't know where to go. Yeah, and the thing is, these things are out there. You just have to put yourself in that position and that is the honest truth and just keep having people see you and network Networking is key, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think you know having other females in your network is also helpful, and maybe even mentors that they can look up to people like yourself. You know that, really, that would really help. Yeah, um, last question if you had to go back and give little kerry, drawing in her in her notebooks, exercise books at home, any advice, piece of advice? What would you give her? What would you tell her?
Speaker 3:first of all, she'll be writing because she can't draw right, that's what I mean. Sorry, you're writing in your exercise book really, and Julia, if you just keep going, you could do anything that you put your mind to and you, despite what anybody tells you, you could do whatever you want to do and you could be whatever you want to be, because I know, speaking as adult Carrie, that throughout the years, there are many people who are like you want to be in film Because you know how Bajan say, film, you want to be in film, how you going to do that?
Speaker 3:And then there's still some people all now that go oh, this is all you do. Yeah, they probably don't think that's a real job. Yeah, so I would tell her that she could be anything she wants to be, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:So remember that, keep pushing, be persistent and network, network, network the heck out of everything you can get there, true? Thank you so much, keri, for joining me. This has been Talk Digi March forward.
Speaker 1:Do you have questions about your digital marketing toolkit? Contact Carly directly via WhatsApp at 266-4847, on Instagram at CarlyTalksDigital, or send your email to Carly at myrobinsoncreativecom. That's C-A-R-L-I-E at myrobinsoncreativecom.