Mark Pirrie, Co-Founder, Director & Producer
Mark started out in Essex as an assistant editor at a creative studio in a converted barn. He worked his way up to senior producer and began training the young creatives coming through. That’s where his interest in education started.
In the early 2000s he joined Britten Pears Arts, running arts and media projects for young people at risk in schools, prisons and young offender institutions. That work shaped how he still operates today: how to speak to a vulnerable audience, how to handle safeguarding properly, and why the people behind the statistics matter more than the finished film.
He stayed close to education from there. He spent a few years managing college accounts for national clients, while also teaching education programmes himself. Then came nearly a decade as Media Director at CareersINFO, an organisation built around skills, careers and education. That’s where he learned how colleges, awarding bodies and training providers really work. Partway through, he also took on Mugshot Media, CareersINFO’s in-house agency, so for years he was leading the creative direction and running the camera at the same time.
When he co-founded Breadcrumb in 2016, he brought all of that with him. Enrolment cycles, funding pressures, filming safely in a classroom: clients don’t have to explain how their world works, because he’s worked in it.
Today Mark focuses on directing and producing. He’s as comfortable interviewing a young person in a difficult situation as the CEO of a billion-pound business, and he approaches both the same way: with patience, care and real interest in what they have to say.
For Mark, the best story always comes from real people. His job is to help them tell it.
Whether it’s a student or a CEO, the job’s the same: make them comfortable enough to forget the camera, and then the real story comes out
