Work Experience

This week as part of my work experience I went to help out with a workshop with the Club Flix Juniors. Club Flix is a film group run by Suited and Booted Studios, for kids who are interested in film and want to start making some. All the children are under the age of 14. It was a very interesting day and the reason I am writing about it on my blog is because I feel it linked really well to what were are doing during our own film making process.

The group of children were given a genre of ‘Horror’, which made sense since Halloween is lurking over us. They then had to come up with an idea in a day and then make it in just two days. The filming process is the same as ours as they too only have two days of filming but to add to the pressure they only had one day of pre production, whereas we have several weeks, which allows us to be slightly more organised come shooting weekend.

As a starting point the children had to come up with examples of horror films and then specific clips within the films that they could storyboard to show how horror is conveyed cinematically. From this they came up with their own scary sequences. The workshop leader was very good at taking all their ideas and putting them into one whole short film. Once the idea was in place, a rough screenplay was written up, while the rest of us explored the building to find the best shooting locations. We also wrote up a list of props we needed to get hold of and talked about how lighting could be used. All this was done in a day, which just goes to show how much you can actually do in this space of time.

The script writing process was particularly helpful for when I have to write my own screenplay over Christmas. It was clear to me that there are just a few questions you need to be able to answer explicitly in your own mind before you have a really good screenplay and no matter how old you are making the film, the same rules apply.

To see an example of work completed by the Club Flix Juniors last year in also just three days, click on the following link which will take you to the Club Flix web page. You then need to click on the first film on the left where you will see a young boys face. The film is called 'Broken Circle'.


Club Flix