People

Particle6 Productions, the award-winning UK indie founded by Eline van der Velden,  has appointed three new people and has doubled  down on its commitment to AI as part of a new growth strategy focused on wide-ranging, screen-based opportunities.

The new hires are Zoë Hustwitt, who joins the team as production manager, Daria Golubkova who joins as a producer/director and Moses Rathbone, who starts at Particle6 as a production analyst.

Zoë Hustwitt comes to Particle6 from BBC Studios, where she was a production manager, primarily working across music, events and entertainment, as well as factual, current affairs and science. Her credits include several years as part of the BBC’s Glastonbury team, as well as Later with Jools Holland, The BRIT Awards, The Royal Wedding: Harry & Meghan and Soul America.

Daria (Dasha) Golubkova, an experienced, multi-lingual producer/director from Ukraine, joins the team as a producer/director. Most recently, she was a senior producer and executive producer at TRBC Ukraine, the country’s leading broadcast media production and distribution company and home to major event content including the UEFA European League and The Oscars Live, as well as primetime shows such as The Masked Singer and All Together Now. She has also held posts at StarLight Media and Inter TV Channel. During her career, she has worked across numerous areas of the business including film, entertainment shows, documentary and formats, and has created several award-winning promos and advertising campaigns.

Moses Rathbone joins from Digitas, where he was a product strategist, and coincidentally part of the team that built the award-winning 2022 Glastonbury app. Prior to that he worked at Ogilvy as a strategist, focusing on delivering behavioural solutions to client communications problems as well as crafting stories for brand campaigns. At Particle6, he will be combining AI and development, driving the delivery of technology to the creative process. Both Moses and Zoë will report into Particle6 founder Eline van der Velden, while Dasha will report into Zoë.

Particle6, best known to date for BBC Three comedy series Miss Holland and Sky Kids series Look See Wow!, as well as being the UK production house for massive role-playing game Genshin Impact, is a forward-thinking and broad-based experimental indie with a passionate belief in research, testing and analytics. Founder Eline van der Velden, a graduate of both Tring Park School for the Performing Arts and Imperial College, where she did an MSc in Physics, is now using her creative and scientific backgrounds to recalibrate the business to ensure that it can be screen agnostic, working across a number of sectors to create content that reaches the widest possible audiences, with the biggest impact. Part of that process is fully embracing AI to help streamline tasks, manage workload and generate new opportunities. And, as these new appointments demonstrate, it’s also about creating new jobs, rather than replacing them.

Eline van der Velden will be talking about embracing AI at MIPCOM in October, in a MIP Talk entitled “Embracing the AI Revolution in Entertainment: Shaping Human-AI Collaboration in Production”, as well as speaking at Broadcast’s AI Creative summit in November.