The home of Nerve Belfast since March 2019, Havelock House officially closed its doors at Easter this year.
It has been the venue for a number of exciting and innovative programmes and short filmmaking over the years, all delivered by our talented staff and Industry partners — take a look at a few highlights below.
Production Academy Summer School
This week-long summer programme from August 2019 officially launched our Production Design and Film Construction Academy, funded by NI Screen and Belfast Harbour Commission.
Over 5 days young people worked with Costume Designers Enda Kenny and Lisa McLoughlan, and Make-Up Artist Connie McGrath to bring a painting by Russian artist Olga Suvorova to life.
The programme took place in the former UTV studio in Havelock House providing the young people with real industry experience as they learned skills in costume design, hair and make-up and set decoration.
Enrichment Programme
In 2019 Nerve Belfast ran a 10-week enrichment programme with 5 schools from North Belfast. 20 A-level students from Boys Model, Girls Model, Mercy College, BRA and St Malachys attended the programme as part of their school day and gained a taste of career opportunities in the film industry by working together to recreate the 'chestburster' scene from Alien.
During the programme they specialised in craft, production and post-production areas and learned about set design and construction, hair, make-up, costume and props, lighting, camera and editing as well as gaining experience working as part of a crew.
As well as being the home of our annual BFI Film Academy, Havelock House hosted a number of public launches with our partners CCEA and Into Film. In November 2019 CCEA launched two new teaching and learning resources focusing on digital music and sound and digital art and design at Havelock.
The Digital Art and Design resource was developed and written by Nerve Belfast’s Education Manager and we have since gone on to provide support and training for the resources for a number of teachers and schools.
See more information via CCEA website.
Only one year into our time in Havelock House, the first lockdown was introduced. While our use of Havelock House had been restricted since the first lockdown was introduced in March 2020 and most of our programmes were delivered online, Nerve Belfast has made innovative use of the flexible spaces in the building for our screen academy programmes and for making several short films.
We are sorry to leave such an historic location for film and television making, but our new home within the Odyssey building will see us working side by side with W5 and Microsoft on large-scale visionary projects such as the Nerve Centre’s Our Place in Space.