My Internship at Showroom Work Station

I recently completed my internship in Digital Marketing and Events at Showroom Work Station, where I was able to take part in a bit of everything, from copywriting and editing to data organisation and graphic design. The role gave me a real look behind the scenes of what it takes to keep a busy venue running, including work on the Showroom website, member newsletters, ticket offers, and event promotion.  

One of the first projects I worked on involved promoting Dementia Friendly Screenings. This meant reaching out to charities, care homes, and dementia cafés, and building up a contact list to promote the screenings. It was a great introduction to see how Showroom places itself within the community, and the steps taken to make it a welcoming place.  

After that, I moved onto some more creative areas. I helped with photographing merchandise for the Showroom website, learning about lighting, angles, and how to remove backgrounds. I also helped with social media posting, creating short and long posts for upcoming releases. I also got to look over marketing materials from distributors, which gave a lot of insight on films I hadn’t yet heard of but became really interested in.  

A lot of my fascination with the work I did was with seeing all the behind-the-scenes stuff you never think about. Things like looking at targeted email campaigns and heat maps showing where people clicked helped me understand how much layout and design can influence engagement. I put this into practice by helping build the ‘Special Screenings’ newsletter. It was exciting to receive the newsletter into my own inbox, and to turn to my friends who also received it and say ‘Hey, I helped make that!’.   

My first longer piece of copywriting was promotional content for a screening of Kubo and the Two Strings, which was nice timing as a film I quite like. Following the theme of good timing, I was able to write a summary newsletter article for the Showroom’s LGBTQ+ History Month event, which was starting towards the end of my internship. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community myself, I felt like this was a great opportunity for me to communicate to an audience I’m close to, as well as being able to drag my friends along to film showings that I’d discovered from working closely on the season.   

Overall, I really enjoyed my time at Showroom Work Station. The internship helped me build practical skills in writing, design, photo editing, and digital marketing, and gave me solid insight into how an independent creative organisation operates. It was also just really fun! I enjoyed immersing myself in the cinema culture and it pushed me to engage more with Showroom. This won’t by my last time seen at Showroom, not when I’ve got a list of the upcoming releases I’m waiting for! 

Oli McGrath 
Digital Marketing and Events Intern at Showroom Work Station