Into Film is a new charity born from the legacy of two leading film education charities, FILMCLUB and First Light. Both organisations had considerable experience in delivering film-based programmes of significant scale and reach to children and young people across the UK. In October 2012, the respective Boards of FILMCLUB and First Light endorsed working jointly on the bid to deliver the BFI's 5-19 film education scheme, knowing if successful, they would merge, which they did in September 2013.
Into Film embraces a model that uses insight from the experience of the two founding organisations and their networks and partnerships developed over the last decade. It recognises and understands the challenges involved in working across the different levels of education, film infrastructure and provision across the nations and regions. Its operating structure harnesses the legacy of skills, expertise and capacity to successfully operate in a new funding universe and a changed economic climate, to generate innovation, and to evolve and respond to changes in technology, infrastructure, curricula and practice.
Into Film embarks on its programme with one overriding mission: to put film at the heart of children and young people's learning and cultural experience in the UK.
Running from November 2014 - February 2015, See It, Make It involved professional filmmakers working with film clubs in clusters across the UK.
Each club received a number of theoretical and practical filmmaking lessons, learning about the details of the film production process, before making their own short film across six sessions led by the filmmaker.
In addition to the planned filmmaking sessions, the filmmaker was also required to support the development of skills for the club leader in an initial CPD session along with the other clubs in their local cluster to ensure they could continue with the filmmaking activity in between sessions. This may have included working on a script, sourcing costumes, creating props and shooting additional scenes when the filmmaker is not present.
We worked with a cluster of clubs in the East Midlands: Boston College, Haven High Spalding High and West Walton Primary.
Darren spent 6 weeks working with the groups, encouraging their imagination and pushing them to create the best short films they could. We believe that young people should have full agency over their own work and Darren wanted his groups to be as daring as possible. It was important that the groups took complete ownership over their projects and felt like they had the creative license to achieve whatever they wanted.
Each group was required to make a 2 minute film with at least 12 frames and 3 techniques used, using one of the titles given by Into Film. Our groups had incredible diverse ideas about what they wanted to create and how ambitious they wanted to be.
