A couple of days ago I received a last minute call on a Sunday evening to do a PR job the following day. I'm happy to do PR and it was a fairly standard press junket with a premiership footballer who was doing some marketing for a new Disney computer game. So I arrived at the boutique hotel in central London and walked into the suit that had been hired to find Sean Wright Phillips sat on a sofa staring intently at a large flat screen TV on which he was playing a racing game called Split Second Reality. As a professional footballer Sean is obviously very competitive and as the various journalists came through for their 30 minute interview which followed pretty much a similar format, Sean took on all challengers and took great pleasure in beating all of them.
It was quite a long session for Sean and having already notched up several hours over the weekend mastering the beta version of the new game he played it fairly constantly for 5 hours through all the interviews, filming and photography.
Overseeing all of this was his manager and Aunty, Dionne Wright. Toward the end of the session she asked me if I was freelance because they were organizing a trip to Guatemala to visit a charity that SWP supports called Education for the Children. I joked that I had a passport and would almost certainly be available not realizing that she was actually enquiring exactly that. So after sending the photographs to the client I sent an email to Dionne outlining my experience with NGO's and editorial as well as sending a link to some pics I did with Oxfam. A phone call last night from Dionne confirmed that the email had gone down well and that they had been impressed with how I worked on the job, relaxed yet professional. She said that they think I will be perfect for the job and they are just waiting to hear if channel 5 are going to come as well to make a doco in which case there will be more money to play with. But even if they don't then apparently that doesn't necessarily mean I won't go. So I am awaiting the call to confirm details and the dreaded conversation about money, the one I always hate and the main reason I sometimes feel I could do with an agent. I have a figure in mind based on what other NGO's pay and how the pictures are licensed after wards but we'll see what their requirements and expectations are first.
