Supporting Shorts: Changing How Films Are Made and Seen
The Supporting Shorts team outside Clothworkers Building North on the University of Leeds campus. Image copyright: TAPE. Used under non-commercial licence.
Project overview
This project celebrates ‘Supporting Shorts’, an inclusive filmmaking initiative led by TAPE Community Music and Film in collaboration with young people from an additional learning needs school in North Wales. From developing the Easy Write template for script writing, to acting, filming, editing in an inclusive manner, and to showing their short films in national cinemas, Supporting Shorts have shown that when barriers to filmmaking are dismantled, young people can reshape creative industries.
The Sapling fund will be used to cement our partnership with TAPE and provide scholarly authority to new outputs designed to enhance the societal impact of the initiative. We will work with TAPE and conduct interviews with screen industry figures and policymakers to produce a visually-striking, accessible zine and a policy brief. The planned activities are designed to expand the reach of this ground-breaking work in nurturing talent, skills development, and working inclusively in the creative industries.
Project team
- Professor Katy Parry, School of Media and Communication, [email protected]
- Professor Beth Johnson, School of Media and Communication, [email protected]
- Steve Swindon, TAPE Community Music and Film, [email protected]
What inspired you to develop this project?
The Supporting Shorts initiative has brought attention to who gets to make films, how they are made, and where they are shown. As a small charity in North Wales, TAPE have challenged established practices in scriptwriting, filming, editing and dissemination by making each stage of the film-making process inclusive. We met the young people at their school for a read-through of their film script – the very first people to use the Easy Write template from Final Draft – and we’ve also seen the finished short film at its premiere in Vue cinemas. TAPE have already shown that there is appetite for change in the screen industries, attracting support from organisations such as the British Film Institute, Carousel, Framestore, the TV Access Project, among others. We want to help formalise what we have learned from them into a policy brief and zine, produced collaboratively, to enhance the cultural and societal impact of this initiative.
What are you most looking forward to in this project?
We’re looking forward to interviewing the young people, TAPE team, and their industry supporters to see how this project could be transformative for other young people. A number of screen industry figures have already invested their time, money and energy into supporting this initiative, and we want to see how their insights can feed into a policy brief to be shared with policymakers and the creative industries more widely. There is a gap in post-16 education for young people who want to build their creative filmmaking skills, and this means that diverse talent from underrepresented communities is currently being wasted due to lack of provision and funding.