BFI Future Plan and education

I went to the BFI Future Plan consultation in Cardiff which provided quite a lot more information about what they are actually planning, compared with the published New Horizons document.

First thing to say is that there are some really good ideas - for example they are proposing to invest to enable screenings in about a thousand non-cinema venues such as village halls and other community venues. This is a great way of making the collective cinema experience available to people who aren't within easy reach of cinemas.

For education, it seems that since the New Horizons document was published they have decided to focus education investment on three areas: a website, film clubs for every school, and cinema and outreach work.

The website or 'digital platform', which is mentioned in the document, is intended to be a 'one-stop shop' for learners and educators, including information, video on demand, filmmaking tools, social networking etc.

The 'unified offer' - watching, making and understanding - described in the document turns out to be getting film clubs into all schools, rather than anything targeted at the curriculum.

The third strand is about cinema and outreach.

When I questioned the emphasis on informal education rather than the curriculum, I was told that there would be more emphasis on the curriculum - and negotiating on this with Government - once the new Director of Education is in place.

It seems that some of the items included in New Horizons aren't priorities for investment - for example, the document talks about "increasing the number of film education specialists" but in the seminar there was no mention of this or CPD. And New Horizons doesn't make it clear that all the focus of the 'unified offer' is on film clubs rather than the curriculum.

The Future Plan is open for comments until June 10th.

iPad video

I've only recently acquired an iPad. I downloaded the iMovie app but I've been rather disappointed with it. One of the most frustrating things about it is the automatic half-second transition it inserts by default. You can't turn this off, so you have to manually convert the transition to a cut every time. Not good if you're trying to teach continuity editing. Vimeo have produced a free app, which includes a video editing tool, but unfortunately it's fairly clunky. But I recently discovered Avid Studio. It's the same price as the iMovie app but it's far better: it has a proper timeline and clear tools, with a separate audio track and in and out points. Well worth getting. Here it is with our Beach practice footage.

BFI Future Plan

The British Film Institute has recently published 'New Horizons for UK Film', its future plan. This is out for consultation until June 10th. It's good to see that the BFI is planning to prioritise education, but there are a lot of questions. Key to the initiative is a 'new unified offer' to schools and colleges, covering 'watching, viewing and understanding', but without a lot more detail on what this means - and how the partners they name will work together - it's hard to evaluate the proposal. It would also be good to know the detail of the proposed 'best online resource for film education in the world', as web resources can swallow huge amounts of money, not always to good effect. You can comment online and at a series of seminars around the country (there's one in Cardiff on Friday).

Elephant

I haven't managed to catch all of The Story of Film but the 90s one was fascinating, particularly the interviews with Baz Luhrmann and Gus van Sant. Van Sant was particularly illuminating about the genesis of his Columbine-based film Elephant, and was frank about the inspiration it took from Alan Clarke's film of the same name about sectarian killings in Northern Ireland. Van Sant's Elephant came in for criticism from US commentators who objected to the idea of making an arthouse film about a high school massacre. I went to a BFI Easter School in Belfast, several years before the Good Friday agreement, where Danny Boyle - then an unknown, but actually the BBC producer who first had the idea for Clarke's Elephant - showed the film, and it came in for a lot of criticism from Northern Ireland teachers who made similar criticisms.

L'arroseur arrosé

I quite often use this as the basis for a storyboarding exercise. 'The sprinkler sprinkled' is the first ever fiction film, and the first ever film comedy, made by the Lumiere brothers in 1895.

I quite like this piece by Laurence Price which was for a while the main description of the film on iMDB:

"L'Arroseur Arrosé is a cry from the depths of the proletariat for social emancipation, whereby the disenfranchised masses represented in a life-justifying performance as the Boy can only find justice through subversion and revolution. Indeed, the conclusion of this epic drama can been seen as a confirmation of the inherent violence in a Hegelian dialectic of class conflict; the chilling figure of the Gardener (a possible reference to ecclesiastical authority?) viciously suppresses the rights of the Boy to self-expression. The perennial nature of this conflict is undermined when both parties rush out of the "garden"; no resolution is possible except mutual annihilation."

Soundtrack

We're working on a new version of 'Making Movies Make Sense' in partnership with Cineclub. This guide to film language, out in the Spring, will have all-new HD video clips, more editable footage and activities, and will be aimed at Key Stages 2 and 3 (around 8-14). I used a sequence from the resource on a soundtrack creation workshop at the Soundtrack Festival the other week. Here's the soundtrack which one group created using Garageband.

Why film is important

Article by Don Boyd of the London Film School in yesterday's Guardian: We're all filmmakers now