Go Furness

A Message To Clara

Filmmaker Tom Lloyd recently worked with a small team of pupils from Walney School to produce a short film to give a flavour of what life if like at the school.

Tom take up the story:

Walney school had been approached by Eddies mum to see if they could come up with a film project to take to Mozambique to show Eddies sister Clara. Clara was hoping to come to England to join Eddie and study at Walney school.

Eddie had come over some years ago, not speaking any English, and had settled in very well. The idea was for Eddie to give Clara a tour of the school and a sense of what she might expect if she came to Walney.

I had recently completed a residency at Walney school for Creative Partnerships Cumbria, and had already worked with Eddie on a multi-media project. The school had been kitted out with some Mac comuters and an HDV camera which the students had started to get to grips with, making short films.

At short notice (Eddies mum was booked onto a flight to Mozambique a week later) Furnness Enterprise and West Lakes Renaissance gave some funding for me to work with Eddie and his friend Duane for a week, interviewing staff and pupils from the school to get a flavour of life at Walney school.

With such a tight deadline, we spent the first morning planning and setting up interviews. Then for the next day and a half, Duane, Eddie and I went out and shot the interviews and played around with timelapse ideas and post production tricks.

Then for the next day and a half, as I captured and compiled footage, they carried on getting the shots.

The original plan had been to record a voice-over in Portuguese for Clara (Portuguese is the first language in Mozambique) however time got the better of us and we had to give up on that plan.

Tha last day was grading, rendering and authoring the DVD.

The film has it’s faults (a couple of shots where the focus drifts and we had no tome to re-shoot), but by the end of the week, Eddie and Duane had proved themselves a worthy production unit, and a pleasure to work with.

The film made it to Mozambique where I am told it proved a great success.

You can watch the finished film, right here, on Go Furness – just follow the link on the right.

Posted by Phil Powell on 15th September 2008