BFI Film Course

Delighted to say I've been accepted into the BFI's Film Course at Norwich Culture Works East!! Will be learning all the tips and tricks to making a professional short film with professionals from the industry! And with any luck be able to attend another course with the BFI itself in London making a feature length!! Exciting times.

Few shots from the first taster session. Me and team working to create a short stop motion piece. Became reasonably successful.

Sessions running every saturday and wednesday until half term week which is film week, 5 days to write, shoot and edit either a short fiction film or a documentary piece! Personally, hoping for the fiction film.

First session:
Script Writing, led by industry expert, Bell, we mainly focussed on actually generating ideas and expressing different emotions in our scripts. We began with a sci-fi stimulus of how an habitably planet had recently been discovered in the vicinity of Earth and we were to create a story around what would happen back on Earth. Me and Alex decided we would go with the most plausible outcome, of how the U.N would commission exploration missions to the planet to discover it and learn about it before allowing everyday civilians to relocate there as a chance for a new life. We then turned on the sci-fi at how a new pathogen would infect all the colonisers with devastating effect on them and ultimately board a supply ship back to Earth to infect all the human race!
Moving on, we then turned to the actual writing of scripts and how to write effectively. It did feel like a rather prolonged english lesson.
We volunteered to be given an emotional stimulus on how to enter the room. I was given the emotion of anger. Once everyone had finished, we were then asked how we would best describe each others entrances without using any adverbs e.g. Henry angrily entered the room would be deemed inadequate, rather: Henry stormed the meeting room and began insulting his colleagues.
We finished with being set our film task which we would attempt to complete over production week (27th - 31st October). We were set to create a sci-fi short film, lasting less than 5 minutes which was to be completed within the 5 day time span, all the way from pre to post production.

Second Session:
This week was all about our skills at directing actors and how to best work with them and get the best performance out of them, with help from the assistant director of Anna Karenina!
We began by pinning down what qualities we would expect a director to have:

We decided a director should be:
Trustworthy, have great people skills, be a perfectionist, determined, have a clear vision of what it is they want to create, organised, confident and resourceful to name a few.


The point of this exercise was to make us aware of what type of person in our group we would most likely be, as in which of us would be most suitable to be director, editors etc.







Up next was a far more practical exercise, where volunteer directors were given a scene to recreate by use of anyone of us to act as either characters, props etc.

Point of this exercise was to show us it can be harder than we might imagine to get even the most co-operative people to act and behave in the way you may want them too.

Here (left) you can see Ben trying to direct myself, Rhys, Peter and Jessie to form a military line up, with Jessie being the sergeant.

Following this, we then each had a turn in verbally expressing what we wanted each actor to do, different from the previous task as we were allowed to physically move actors into position. We were set a task for us to make the other one do and attempt to explain it to the actor as simply as possible without using the sentence, or any of the words in it, which we were given the task. So for mine I was asked to make Peter hope on one leg. I therefore asked Peter to act like a kangaroo but on only one leg. Very successful I believe in comparison to others, however was deemed extremely laid back in approach and not involved enough with my actor. Just the type of person I am. 

This contrasts with Rhys's directing of Lewis where he was given the stimulus of getting him to crawl under a chair. Rhys opted for the more hands-on approach to directing Lewis by actually showing him the action he would need to do without actually telling him.

The exercise showed us the importance of directing actors as simply as possible in order to avoid confusion, but also to interact with them as much as possible, not only in order to become more clear in your instructions, but also to form a sense of trust between the two.

Overall, I feel both sessions went really well for all of us. Certainly developed my skills in directing and in generating ideas for scripts from both days. We were all certainly feeling confident for production week!