Just before the start of the school summer holiday, Miss Lynch of the English Department brought a blog post by ‘Screen Education Edinburgh’ to my attention. Reading it, I knew straight away that this would be a brilliant opportunity for anyone lucky enough to be chosen to attend. They had opened applications for young people, interested in film making, to apply to attend a one week residential course being run by The British Film Institute in Edinburgh. As Miss Lynch had thought, it sounded like something I would really enjoy being part of. Immediately I got stuck in filling out the 12 page application form and preparing the requested supporting material; I submitted a short film reel including footage from ‘BHS Does Strictly Come Dancing’ along with a music video I had put together. When I was sure my application and additional work samples were as good as I good possibly make them, I clicked ‘send’ not really expecting to hear any more about it as I figured the competition for places would be tough. Then the waiting began. Nearly a month later, when my family and I sat down to watch ‘Sunshine on Leith’ and I saw the BFI logo, I joked about it being obvious I hadn’t been selected. I was wrong, because, just a few days later, I received an email offering me a place AND informing me some of the people I would be mentored by included cast and senior production from, yes, ‘Sunshine on Leith’. BUT the email did hit me with one bombshell – all attendees were to write a script for a short film in advance and one of our first tasks on the course would be to judge each others’ work and select one script from our pitches to make into a short film over the rest of the week.
On August 2nd I arrived at Fettes College with my script ready to pitch and keen to see all the week would bring. It turned out that I was one of twenty-four young people there and we were told that we should try to make the absolute most of this chance because lots of others had applied. It meant that everyone got stuck into working hard and with the tight schedule, we didn’t have much choice. The tutors and everyone else were very friendly and supportive but it was clear that a lot was expected of us.
I was happy when my film script made it to the top six but, also, not too disappointed when it wasn’t chosen as our project for the week. The script we were to work on was titled ‘Touch’ and everyone thought it was a great story for us to try and tell in film. By the second day everyone had hit it off so the atmosphere for work and social time was really good. I was teamed up to co-direct photography with a guy called Rueben so we had to work closely together on-set doing all the exterior shots (park & street scenes, and some establishing shots) one day, followed by all the interior work the next. In between working on our film we had several Masterclasses covering most areas of working in the field of film-making aswell as a number of field-trips; the main one of these was to visit the set of a US tv show currently filming in Scotland. I’d like to write more about that but we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement so I’m afraid I have to keep my mouth shut.
‘Touch’ is about a girl who can’t enjoy a lot of the activities her boyfriend likes due to her disability from partial-sightedness. It tells of how she feels there is a distance grows between her boyfriend and her and how they deal with these issues. The filming seemed to fly by and soon we were in the edit suite. The edit took over a day and a half of the week just to get our project to a watchable first-cut. When it came to our final night on the Friday it was very exciting to get a first proper viewing of our week’s work. After the wrap party we all sat down in the common room waiting on the films to be shown on the TV in the corner. after the films were shown there seemed to be one huge sigh of relief from eveyone as the films, dare i say it where a success . When we all left on the Saturday to get back to our regular lives, everyone agreed it had been a busy but brilliant experience and most, including me, know we’d like to keep going hoping to use the knowledge and skills from the week pursuing careers in film production.
Some of us already have plans to work together again soon, but, right now, it’s back to this year making the most of being at Blair High – and seeing how it goes from there.
I’m looking forward to running the school Film Club for 1st to 3rd years on Tuesday lunchtimes and I hope lots of students interested in film & media will come along and enjoy.
Alex Tosh
