Swansea Telly

Spill Media recently linked up with like minded groups from Swansea on a collaborative project called Swansea Telly.
Last month the project began, with the Spill trainers for the project, Annmarie and Chris, going along to Swansea Community Farm for their first set of workshops.

Swansea Telly, will see Annmarie and Chris going along to different groups every month, to train them in the basics of short film making. At the end of each month, the films produced, along with the films produced by the other groups collaborating on the project, will be available to view on the new Swansea Telly website.

Every month, Annmarie will be sharing the experiences from the workshops here on the blog.

“The first set of workshops for the Swansea Telly project turned out very well indeed. Myself, Chris and Spill volunteer Ben, delivered training to a small group of volunteers of differing ages and abilities, at Swansea Community Farm, in Fforestfach.

At the first workshop most people were a little nervous with the equipment to begin with, but very quickly became enthused and eager to try out the different shots and angles we had spoken about. It was great to see these people so enthusiastic about what they were learning.
The afternoon brought out some very strong ideas about the films they wanted to make. The mature element of the group wanted to make a mini-documentary style film about how much they enjoy volunteering at the farm. The younger members were aiming for something more for fun, and were set on making a horror trailer style short film.

Workshop 2 involved putting the trainees’ ideas into script form and it was great that for the documentary, everybody knew exactly what they wanted to show and say.
The horror trailer changed many times throughout the day, but by the end of that day, we were all scripted and had been out around the farm getting the general shots we were going to need for the films. A very productive day indeed!

The last workshop was great fun. As the weather was good that morning, we started by going out and getting all the shots of the different areas of the farm that would be spoken about in the documentary, and any outdoors tasks the volunteers would normally do. Then we went into the café for the interviews and to film any indoor volunteer work.

With the weather changing the dark brooding clouds added to the scary feel the group tried to portray for the horror trailer. It was a challenge, but great fun, managing to get the pretty farm environment to seem dark and scary, trying to get the happy volunteers to act scared and uneasy, and most of all getting the quietest person of all to act as the maniac in the woods. We had a lot of fun with this film though.

Screening day went down very well with all the other farm staff and volunteers who turned up to see what we had been up to. Popcorn was passed around, tears welled up at the documentary and chants of ‘more, more, more’ went up after the trailer.
All in all, it was a wonderful experience for my first time delivering training. I am immensely impressed with how much these people took note of what they were being taught, and the good quality of work achieved in the very short time we had. I can only hope that every different group I work with on this project will bring me as much pride, joy and fun as this one did. I learned as much about taking on new ideas and putting yourself into a job from them, as they did about how to make a film from me.”