With the end of the tax year looming the Young Shoots project is now coming to an end. Here is a summary of the project and its achievements:
Schools
Our aim was to recruit 10 primary schools and 2 secondary schools and we now have 10 primary schools and 3 secondary schools regularly holding film clubs. One school launched in October with the majority fo schools launching after half term in November. Four more schools started their film clubs in January and the last school to join the project, launched in February.
Audience numbers:
The average attendance at our film clubs is 23 children per film club. Most film clubs are targeted at Key Stage 2 children, with one school showing films to Key Stage 1, three of the smaller schools, opening their clubs up to the whole school; the Secondary school clubs were held for Key Stage 3 children.
How often:
Seven film clubs meet and show films every week. At one school they watch the film one week and review it the next. Two clubs show films on a fortnightly basis, one shows a film every month and one holds a screening every term.
Film choices:
Film choices reported by primary schools at the end of the project included, ‘Fungus the Bogeyman’, ‘The Neverending Story’, ‘Out of Africa’, ‘Hoodwinked’, ‘Over the Hedge’, ‘The Jungle Book’, ‘Bugsy Malone’, ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’, ‘Ice Age 2’, ‘Bee Movie’, ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’, ‘Up’, ‘Monsters vs Aliens’, ‘The Curse of the Wererabbit’, ‘Two Brothers’, ‘Happy Feet’, ‘War Games’, ‘Totoro’ and ‘The Iron Giant’.
Secondary schools showed films such as ‘The Sting’, ‘Teenwolf’, ‘The Incredibles’, ‘Metropolis’, ‘The Terminal’ and ‘G-Force’.
Despite our efforts to encourage schools to show more adventurous films the list above is mainly made up of mainstream choices however as our clubs have been running for a maximum of 4 months it may be that once they are more established the film club leaders might start to encourage a greater diversity of film….One school that did do this with choices such as ‘Out of Africa’ and ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ are Lord Scudamore and in March they were nominated as a FILMCLUB Star School for ‘uniting, engaging and challenging young minds through the power of film’. Scudamore will receive special Star Club posters and be invited to a celebratory Star Day in London!
Youth Clubs
We wanted to recruit two youth clubs to join the Young Shoots project to hold at least two film screenings between October and March. We did this by initially emailing all the youth clubs RMC’s youth team had worked with. Later on we sent an email to the Head of the Youth Service at Herefordshire Council, who spread the word amongst Council employed youth workers the region.
We recruited Hinton Youth Club in July 2009 and the Y Zone in Ross in September 2009. Both of these settings have worked with Rural Media on previous projects and both youth workers attended our first induction on September 24th. Young Shoots worked with Herefordshire Library to make their collection of rental DVDs accessible to our two youth clubs.
By the end of the project both youth clubs had held screenings and the Y-Zone The youth forum based at the Y Zone applied to the Youth Opportunities Fund for money to buy screening equipment enabling them to run independently when Young Shoots ends. The youth forum were successful in their application and are awaiting delivery of their equipment.
Villages
Another of Young Shoots’ aims was to set up four one off events in rural villages that run Flicks in the Sticks screenings. We hoped to facilitate two events targeting 8-12 year olds and two events for 13-19 year olds. These sessions aimed to introduce young people to the magic of film and filmmaking and to engage them with the Flicks screenings that happen in their villages all year round.
The events we held were:
Saturday 21st November, Micheaelchurch Escley : Screening of ‘Wallace and Gromit- The Curse of the Were-Rabbit’ followed by a claymation workshop for 8-12 year olds.
Saturday 23rd January, Ewyas Harold: Screening of ‘Coraline’ followed by a claymation workshop for young people aged 10 and over. This screening was targeted at young teenagers to enable us to attract an audience from the local primary school and the film club based at the high school which involved Years 7 and 8.
Saturday 27th February, Ledbury Market Theatre: Screening of ‘Let the Right One In’ followed by horror filmmaking workshop for 15 -19 year olds.
Saturday 6th March, Little Dewchurch: Screening of ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ followed by a claymation workshop for 7-12 year olds.
All of the people based in the villages were extremely enthusiastic and supportive of our efforts to get young people into their venues to watch and make films; despite their best efforts however the events for under 12s were much more successful than those for teenagers. In Michaelchurch Escley the youth club leader recruited our audience and in Little Dewchurch the school secretary sent our flyer home in the children’s book bag ensuring the popularity of this event. We did have teachers and youth workers promoting our events directly to the older children but it seems that the teenagers just did not have the energy to get out of bed on a Saturday morning!
In conclusion
The Young Shoots project has been extremely successful in that it has given us the opportunity to explore how young people in a rural county can be given greater access to film, we now hope to use our findings to extend and improve this provision in the future.
We would like to thank everybody who has been involved and supported this project!
