RELAYS at Watershed has teamed up with our friends at Encounters to run a Film Journalism Workshop over the Festival with a group of nine young people at various stages of their training or careers in the film industry. They’ve called their blog Inside Encounters and aim to cover as many aspects of the Festival as they can through video diaries, interviews, reviews, reports and photographs.
The photo above shows the Film Journalist team plus guest speakers at our first session, Zoltan and Zsuzsanna from Daazo (a webiste and magazine for ‘sharing and celebrating short films in high quality’), and Rachel Segal Hamilton from Ideas Tap who helped with promoting and recruiting for the workshop. Head over to our Citizen Journalism blog for more details about the project.
You can see the last post about our third citizen journalism project here but we’re already discussing a new and imminent project with Dr Emma Rich from Bath University and RELAYS colleagues around sport and disability, more news as details are firmed up.
Negotiations are already underway with a range of people in Weymouth around finding accommodation for our citizen journalism students and acquiring access to a technical base for next summer’s planned visit to report on the Olympic sailing and windsurfing and also hopefully to the opening events.
Meanwhile come back soon to find out details of an Olympic-related event at Watershed in late November – our friend David Goldblatt has written a book with colleague Jonny Acton called How to Watch the Olympics and we’re having a book-launch evening to celebrate.
Students and young people from the b-side project had a day-long training session at Weymouth College on 15th July with David Golblatt on ‘how to be a citizen journalist’ and went on to apply their newly acquired skills at the Open Weekend. This marked a year until the Olympics begins and on Weymouth’s lovely sandy beech and in nearby Portland there were a number events and activities on offer as part of the celebrations.
The young journalists used e-mail, photos, video and iPadio on smart phones to cover the events, interview the people who’d organised them and report on locals’ and visitors’ thoughts on the forthcoming Olympics Sailing events in Weymouth. The material was uploaded to the Weymouth 2012 posterous blog and you can find out more about the project on the Watershed RELAYS blog
We’re delighted to learn that ‘Tick Tock’, one of the 3 films made in our Short Cuts project last year is to be shown nationally across all 20 of the BBC Big Screens from tomorrow, Saturday 23rd July.
The films will be part of the regular new content showcase on the Big Screens at midday Saturdays, 1230 Fridays and 1800 Wednesdays until the end of August
The two other films, ‘Frank and Chris’ and ‘Counterpunch’, will be screened on our neighbouring Bristol Big Screen.
Counterpunch has also been selected for the Co-operative young people’s Film Festival 2011 in October.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been working on a pilot RELAYS project here at Watershed (see post below) with our partner school Fairfield High and our sports broadcasting friend David Goldblatt. You can learn more about the project from our blog and also find out how the young journalists got on with live blogging and iPadio reporting at the Bristol City v Doncaster football match on Saturday 2nd April. Bristol City Football Club had generously provided free access to the Press stand and post match press conference for some of our students. This was our first attempt at using smart phones for journalism and although we lost a few blog posts, didn’t quite manage to get great photos, couldn’t always connect to iPadio, the young team nevertheless did achieve a massive amount and we all had a really good afternoon! One of our students said ‘I really liked the press conference it made me feel pro’! (more…)
We’re delighted to announce that the three films made for our Short Cuts project have been signed off by First Light which means we can now share them with everyone.
The three films are ‘Tick Tock’ made by Fast Forward with Young Bristol, ‘Frank and Chris’ made by The Foyer with Connexions West, and ‘Counterpunch’ made by Digital Fish at Knowle West Media Centre.
Watch these films below and let us know what you think by submitting a comment.
Some of the films have already been shown at a BAFTA youth mentoring showcase on 17th March and we hope the films will now be submitted for festivals both by First Light and by the young filmmakers’ mentors. News about these developments will be posted here.
Counter Punch, produced by Knowle West Media Centre
Today was the first session of our new RELAYS project with Fairfield High School’s BTEC media students to support them in honing their technology and social networking skills to the point where they will be ready to report back, live, from a football match in Bristol in April. They’re setting up blogs and ‘phlogs’ where they can phone in their reports and post photos and video, and learning how technology is changing the way we receive news, and how they can create news themselves. We’ve set up our own blog for this project which you can find here
After seven months, all the hard work by our 3 groups of young filmmakers was showcased at a special event at Watershed on Sunday 21st November. The 3 excellent films, Counterpunch, Frank and Chris, and Tick Tock were well received by an enthusiastic full house of friends, family and project supporters. The event was part of the Fresh Flix strand presented by Watershed and Encounters International FIlm Festival. Amongst the audience were two BAFTA mentors – courtesy of the Media Trust – who provided some valuable feedback to the young filmmakers, great to have media industry professionals seeing top quality work made by Bristol’s young creatives.
The Short Cuts programme is working with up to 45 young people (aged 14-18) across Bristol to help them to develop, plan, produce, edit and showcase a short film. Partnering with Watershed to deliver the programme are Knowle West Media Centre, Young Bristol, Connexions West and Encounters International Short Film Festival.
As funding from First Light has come through “Film Nation” – a project run by the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games – the project will produce three short films (< 5mins) that explore the Olympic themes of “friendship”, “respect”, and “excellence”.
Bristol University and the 2012 Relays Project have teamed up with Watershed and Bristol CYPS to deliver a programme that engages young people in sport and culture by enabling students to produce their own films.
Two of the films produced during the Be Active programme are available to watch below.
