Know who you're writing to
UK post-production houses worth knowing
A speculative letter to a facility you clearly haven't researched gets read for four seconds. These twelve are a working start: real houses, real specialisms, and what an assistant editor should actually know before addressing an envelope to them. Filter by track, or scan the lot.
What the facilities are actually asking for
Skills for the starting position
This list isn't generic career advice. Every skill below is pulled from what these facilities and the wider industry actually say in job listings, apprenticeship specs, and their own careers pages: ENVY's job openings and Academy, BBC Studioworks' post-production apprenticeship spec, ScreenSkills' runner profile, and reporting on how houses like Molinare brief new starters. Each one has what it is, how to actually build it, and a year-by-year track from second year through to your first weeks in a facility.
The letter is the audition
Writing a speculative letter that gets a reply
Speculative approaches to post houses aren't job applications in the formal sense; they're a bid for a place on a call sheet when a vacancy opens. What that letter can honestly claim changes as you move through the course, which is why the two worked examples below are pinned to a specific year, not a generic template: what a second year can credibly ask for is not what a third year approaching graduation can, and the letter should say so.
4Ds in practice: delegate the draft, keep the discernment
Draft a speculative letter with Claude
Fill in the fields honestly. Claude will draft a letter in the style of the examples above, but a draft is a starting point, not a finished submission. Read it against the annotations in Section 02 before you'd send anything like it: does it sound like you, and does it actually earn the reader's four seconds?
Uses the Anthropic API from inside this page. Nothing is saved when you close it, so export the draft first if you want to keep it.
Your draft will appear here, editable, once generated.