Screen Beats: the young film maker ’s revolution!

view ‘Screen Beats ’ films

The premiere of the ‘Screen Beats ’ short films by young people from Humphry Davy School, Camborne Science & Community College with the CPR Learning Space, Newquay Tretherras School, Bodmin College, Looe Community School and Saltash Community School at the Cornwall Film Festival was a key landmark for the young people involved as well as their schools.

Screen Beats aimed to instigate six new after-school film clubs whilst offering some of the young people involved their first ever taste of film-making, right from storyboarding ideas, through pre-production to shooting and editing, o­n-location shoots to screening and distribution. The music video project gave a huge input of energy to the start of these clubs, with largely positive feedback from the young people, creatives and schools.

Film maker Tony Hill, who worked with Bodmin College students o­n Screen Beats, said he was “very impressed with the inventiveness, diversity of approaches and high level of technical achievement of the final pieces shown at the Film Festival.”

Feedback from the participant schools shows that students are now highly motivated to make their own films, both in and out of the school club groups, and in some cases are attending other workshops in related fields such as animation. At Looe, the young people have already completed their first film with the new film club. “It has inspired the young people to go o­n and make more films with their own agenda … and the opportunity to do this in a creative environment. They have learned that they can express themselves in an adult fashion …”, say school staff. A key factor was that: “they soon realised that they were not going to be treated as school children but as people with real ideas that were going to be used in a creative manner.”

Tretherras reported that there was a “superb partnership between the film makers, students and teachers. Students were motivated and encouraged to continue using and developing their skills.” They also said that as well as developing organisational and technical skills the project also had given students the confidence to experiment, that it had raised their aspirations, and that it had taught them skills in compromising and how to work effectively in a team.

It seems that school staff members have also become interested in sustaining the work and setting up other film-related projects including documentary-making. The o­nly snag to this is that some schools have reservations about being able to afford the right professional equipment needed to make the most of these clubs and the energy already apparent, and are actively searching for resources and funding to sustain development of the clubs and the work.

A report was commissioned to track the experiences of six particular young participants in the Screen Beats project, five of whom had been appointed as project peer mentors for o­ne of the younger secondary school groups. Each had acquired film-making skills through their involvement in the dSK8 project, and the small group were offered the opportunity to use their film-making expertise to support other young people ’s learning during the making of the Screen Beats videos, working closely alongside the professionals.

When asked what new skills they had learnt, o­ne said, ‘I learn by [testing out ] my ideas.. If you do that and you think, ‘that ’s wrong,’ then you can try something else. If you ’re just shown the right way then you won ’t really learn very well.’ Responses from the young people showed that they admired and respected the professional film-makers. ‘It ’s given me more confidence to know that [the filmmaker ] knows what he ’s doing, and to suggest ideas and stuff.’

Peer mentoring for all has been a very new concept and when asked how they had supported others ’ learning, o­ne of the group said: ‘[I’ve been ] helping all the other young children at Camborne school who ’ve never made a film before. Like, they asked us questions about what to do and stuff like that.’ Another said, ‘I haven ’t done a lot of like peer mentoring before …It ’s quite exciting for me.’ ‘If everyone wants to have an input, that ’s fine by me. Everyone ’s got ideas.’

It certainly seems that energy and enthusiasm has been fired o­n all levels through this project, and we look forward to an explosion of talent from the young film makers in and out of their clubs.

To see the stunning results of the Screen Beats films visit www.dshed.net/screenbeats. Oh, and if you are interested in sponsoring the school clubs, you can contact Cass Dennis at Creative Partnerships o­n 01872 275187 or email cassiel.dennis@keap.org.uk