Mark Gatehouse, Team Leader for Creative Technologies, has been a tutor at Carshalton College for 5 years. Joining as an Interactive Media Tutor in the Creative Industries department, Mark has now taken on a new role in the IT team. With a varied and interesting career, wealth of expertise and knowledge across a number of creative areas, Mark provides a fantastic enthusiasm with his teaching and plenty of opportunities to learn.
Leaving school at 18, Mark joined Sainsbury's before realising he wanted to follow his passion for photography and completed the BA (Hons) Film and Photographic Arts course at the University of Westminster. Following his teacher training, Mark has worked at various schools, colleges and universities teaching photography, video production, games design and interactive media.
His career outside teaching has included working with professionals across the media sector including famous directors. Mark was an authorised photographer for IBM, shot images for Calvin Klein and SEAT, illustrated computer books, worked as an IT Director for an advertising agency and his studio was one of the first in the country to turn a profit from digital imaging. He has exhibited widely in London and won an RX Club award in New York for a medical advertising series.
Talking about his love for teaching, Mark said
"It is the continuously varied enthusiasm of students that makes the job interesting. Carshalton College is the perfect size to encourage students to develop interests across a wide spectrum of creative areas without being pigeon holed. I love learning, experimenting and having the chance to do this everyday makes me happy.
With the convergence of the creative and IT subjects in our department, we are now ideally situated to deliver a truly STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics) curriculum that fully engages with industry."
The department works hard to maintain strong links with Media and Games Development networks, enabling our students to gain access to industry specialists and take part in activities with real life briefs and exhibitions. These include the Worldskills Games Development Competition, where Games students, Sean Covell & Laura Nelson, rose to the challenge at the London regional heat and Sean secured his place as one of the final ten competitors (taking place in November in Birmingham) and Laura made it through to the reserve list.
There have been placements with Film Production companies, 36 students took part in a project to set up a working media company, work has been submitted to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, students presented responses to live briefs with Lloyds Bank and BT, submitted work to the Holocaust Exhibition with London Borough of Sutton Council and coming up before Christmas the students will be running a stall in Sutton High Street.
His advice to students interested in creative subjects would be
"Be open to new ideas, learn everything and not just the software, think outside the box, look for similarities and not differences and kick the doors open!"
Talking about the College, Mark said
"One of the great things about working at Carshalton College is that we work successfully as a team to get the very best out of our learners and to position the College at the heart of our community. This year we have a new HNC to offer local people the opportunity to access Higher Education and careers in Music. We are opening up our facilities on Saturdays to run a Coder Dojo for parents and young people to use our facilities for their own creative projects. In the spring we are holding a massive Creative Technology careers fair with some really great companies and Universities taking part. We are also working with our major sponsor Autodesk to become the first accredited Academic Autodesk Training Centre for Media and Entertainment!
Better find your sunglasses as the future looks bright"
For more information on all the courses within our Creative Industries department including Art & Design, Music Technology, Digital Media & Games and Information Technology, please clickhere
