The internet's DIY directors

The internet offers an open showcase for budding film directors. So will the next Bergman be found on YouTube?

You only have to spend a lazy half hour browsing YouTube to realise that more people than ever are making films. But does this explosion of amateur filmmaking on the web mean that there’s now less of a financial barrier between talent and its discovery by the film industry? Well, no – not unless your idea of talent involves nauseating films of cute kittens and stop-frame documentaries of men growing their beards over a period of months. For this is mostly the kind of stuff that clogs up YouTube and other sites dedicated to user-generated film content. There are specialist websites such as atomfilms.com that offer a platform for more professional new work, but the point is the same: an open platform such as the net only guarantees that a voice will be heard, not that it will be worth listening to. The internet might be great for distribution, but it’s far less effective as a method of quality control.

Number of workers in the film or video industries in the UK

That said, the cheapness of digital-camera equipment and the ubiquity of home-editing software have prompted a trend towards ‘auto-archiving’ that at best results in imaginative films for mainstream distribution such as Jonathan Caouette’s ‘Tarnation’. But, at worst, the democratisation of film equipment precipitates unbearable examples of navel-gazing. For a cinema of quality that is both progressive and builds on its heritage, there remain two essentials: training and education. Neither comes cheap.

Film schools are expensive. It costs nearly £40,000 to complete the two-year MA course in filmmaking at the London Film School – whose chairman is Mike Leigh and whose tutors include Leigh, Les Blair and other filmmakers. Elsewhere, you’ll face a bill for £15,000 to take a more specialised two-year course in, for example, screenwriting or editing at the National Film School in Beaconsfield. These fees may be off-putting, yet there are a number of scholarships and bursaries available for students at both institutions, many of them funded via Skillset, the national training organisation for the audio-visual industries, and both schools try hard to accommodate talented students who can’t afford it.

Per cent of workforce within different age groups working in film or video

Away from the major film schools, cinema still remains relatively neglected by the education system. Unlike fine art, say, or classical music, it’s still difficult to embrace film seriously at the level of a BA – that is to say at the level at which the government supports ‘free’ tertiary education for all. Certainly many art courses offer film elements and there are a number of university courses dedicated partly or wholly to filmmaking, but most of these courses lack the resources and the reputation of the more well-known film schools and certainly don’t rival the fine art BA courses at the country’s major art colleges.

There is an increasing number of community schemes to encourage young people into filmmaking, such as First Light, an initiative that funds groups of budding filmmakers, whether in schools or local youth clubs. Importantly, such schemes help to identify talent where there’s little or no money to develop it.

Cost of a two-year course at the NFTS without a scholarship or bursary

Increasing access to filmmaking beyond its traditional male and white face is, of course, crucial and the UK Film Council is to be applauded for schemes such as First Light. Collaboration and openness are key to fresh visions, so why aren’t we seeing more playwrights, dancers, choreographers, artists and poets working in cinema? How about another Film Council initiative dedicated to discussing the possibilities of cinema with practitioners of entirely different media? We’re thinking of a minimal fund of cash to finance cheap short films by experienced artists who have yet to apply their ideas to film.

Certainly a lot of the barriers to making films are attitudinal, which is understandable when huge dollar figures are bandied about the media whenever budgets and box office are mentioned. The more promotion of low-budget filmmaking, the better for encouraging young people to try their hand at films. Film London is currently funding such a scheme, Microwave, which is helping people make feature films for less than £100,000. The examples of established British filmmakers such as Michael Winterbottom, Shane Meadows and Paul Andrew Williams help too: each of these directors favours a frugal approach to imaginative filmmaking.

95% working in film production are white

The example of Shane Meadows is enough to caution against exacting too much of a science from this subject. Meadows, the director most recently of ‘This is England’, his fifth feature, started his career with a video camera and a bunch of mates, helped by community funding. Earlier this year, we reported on a one-off scheme in south London to encourage a bunch of young people from Lambeth to make a short film over a period of a few weekends. The three teenage boys, aged between 15 and 19, had never made a film before or considered doing so.

Yet after a few sessions with a local actor-filmmaker, a volunteer, they had completed a ten-minute short which the BFI Southbank screened in a programme of short films. Their film was simple and a little crude, but from a series of conversations with an expert and a few days with a camera, they had decided on a subject they wanted to explore – street violence – and landed on a metaphor with which to do it: toilet rolls. Imagination doesn’t cost anything at all.

For more info visit www.skillset.org, www.firstlightmovies.com, www.filmlondon.org.uk/microwave

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