We had a blast in our Belfast Creative Learning Centre this summer, running taster academies for our Screen Academies. Participants got involved in our Handmade Film, Film and Animation and Games Jam Summer Schools — learning new creative media skills and meeting other young budding creatives.
Handmade Film Summer School
Kicking off the summer, we dived head first into our Handmade Film Summer School.
Throughout the week-long course, young filmmakers got to grips with filming techniques and equipment, craft skills, film language and the collaborative effort required to make film...and in particular a Sweded film.
What’s a Sweded film you may ask? It’s a film recreation of an existing film or trailer lovingly crafted with creativity, imagination, ingenuity, with a love for the source film’s legacy....and absolutely no budget at all.
Sweded films are named in honour of the recreated filmic efforts made by Jack Black and Mos Def’s characters in the film Be Kind Rewind—in which two hapless video store clerks accidentally wipe the entire stock of VHS tapes of all their Hollywood Big Budget content, having to then recreate each one themselves from scratch—explaining away their resultant look to viewers by explaining that they were Swedish versions.
For our Sweded film, we chose the legendary Jurassic Park. Like Jack Black and Mos Def, our summer school participants had absolutely no budget, relying entirely on a carload of craft materials and seemingly useless recycling sourced from Play Resource Centre.
The result is something incredible. Our assembled team of creatives did an absolutely brilliant job, gaining them a huge round of applause during our showcase day!
Games Jam Summer School
We also pressed START on our inaugural Games Jam Summer School. For the uninitiated, Games Jams are a worldwide phenomenon that involve like minded gaming folk coming together either in person or online over a short period of time to make games from scratch.
Our Games Jam invited young people to come together, over 5 days to make games — starting with a literal blank piece of paper and ending up with a playable games level. For this year’s event we chose two diametrically opposite themes for our participants to work to: Make ‘Em Laugh!, and Make ‘Em Scream!
Our incredible participants created a spooky pixel art based mystery game with a pumpkin headed protagonist…A forest based adventure survival game with piranhas…A bring your kid to work day at the monster lab platform…A futuristic post apocalyptic exploration game…aA unsettling elevator escape room game…And a progressively more unsettling slice and dice cookery game.
We were astounded by the quality of the ideas and the games produced. We are very much looking forward to doing this all again…when we can take the Screen Academies Games Jam to the next level!
Film & Animation Summer School
Last but certainly not least, we held our final Summer School of 2024. A group of 16-19 year old aspiring young filmmakers and animators came together over a week of creativity to create a series of films combining both traditional moving image and animated elements.
Our team were given their brief— to make films using captured interview audio gathered from off-the-cuff interviews with the public that they themselves would capture and curate, creating a film of no more than three minutes duration to reflect visually those audio responses.
Our film makers were taken through a masterclass on camera techniques - Having them reflect on camera fundamentals such as ISO, Shutter Speed, The Exposure triangle, Colour theory and White Balance.
Our Animation participants were provided with a masterclass from two talented Ulster University graduates, who were on hand all week to provide both guidance and inspiration to our animators.
The result? Two beautiful short films of impeccable quality.
Didn't make it to our Summer Schools? Don't worry! Our Screen Academies will be open for applications soon. Be first to know here.