Kids

Drink, drugs, gatecrashers – these are the perennial concerns of parents whose teenagers are hosting, or attending, a party. There’s a story doing the rounds about a Wimbledon couple who returned from a meal out to find their street cordoned off. The cause, they discovered, was the impromptu party their teenage daughter had decided to throw in their absence. Feature continues

Thanks to the texting telegraph, their house was inundated, the stairs collapsed under the weight of uninvited guests and neighbours had to call the police to deal with the crowds of hysterical kids. Scary stuff? Maybe – but at least that apocryphal tale involves no mention of poltergeist activity, vermin infestation, mental illness or a masked intruder with murderous intent. All of the above were features of my soon-to-be 15-year-old’s recent party – a creative, collaborative all-day affair at which booze, drugs and the local constabulary didn’t figure at all and no one was sick in the kitchen sink.

When Katy and her friends volunteered to act as guinea pigs for a MovieParty, in laid-back teenager fashion they did so without much idea what they were signing up for. In the event they had a great time – and they came away with a lasting record of the fun they’d had. True, most of them died – but only on film. The MovieParty concept – planning, shooting, editing and screening a film in a day – sounds implausibly ambitious but here’s how it works. The two-man team behind this enterprise – Ed Boase and James Walker, who run their own small production company, Magma Pictures – arrived at our house at around 9am, lugging their filming and editing equipment and a vast bag of props. By 10am the guests had assembled (Katy had the foresight to invite notoriously hard-to-haul-out-of-bed Lara to stay the preceding night).

The morning began with a session in which the kids decided on their characters and worked out the plot, having chosen their theme (a murder mystery, but it could have been ‘James Bond’, ‘Charlie’s Angels’ or ‘Lord of the Rings’) in advance. They spent a couple of hours filming before lunch and continued afterwards, with the kids who weren’t acting in the current scene taking it in turns to be responsible for sound and filming the ‘Making of’ documentary. Around mid-afternoon Boase and Walker started editing (as requested we’d allocated a room where they could work in relative peace), Boase appearing periodically to grab individual kids to film additional material and reaction shots. Katy and her friends were happy to be left to their own devices at this point; for children who need entertaining, providing a couple of videos would probably be the easiest solution. Around 6pm (parents’ pick up time if you’re dealing with younger children) we broke out the popcorn and the kids settled down for the premiere of their own movie.

The formula for MovieParties has been tested at workshops Boase and Walker run during school holidays at festivals such as Edinburgh and last year’s inaugural London Children’s Film Festival, and for charities that work with young people who, as Walker puts it ‘have fallen off every rung of the ladder’. Its success boils down to a combination of talent and teamwork. Boase has an exceptional ability to get young people to work with him and each other. He’s endlessly encouraging and infectiously positive. He treats the kids like professionals and they respond.

Walker, whose day job is editing news for the BBC, works very, very fast. ‘Deadline’, the murder mystery Katy and her friends made, in which an author frantic to finish her manuscript on time is interrupted by a succession of unwanted visitors, each of whom comes to an imaginatively violent end (I look at our sink plunger in a new light, now), is an astonishing 12 minutes long – two or three minutes a day would be considered good going for a drama filmed on location. The speeches are all very short and Boase is skilled at keeping the creative process on track but it’s very much the kids’ film. It’s quite dark and wacky, with a sophisticated twist at the end. As 14-year-old Anthony said during a break in the filming ‘At school in drama classes we have an idea of what we’re going to do and then we work it out as we go along. I thought it would be different because it’s filming but we’re doing the same – and it works.’

Boase and Walker, who made their first film together at school, are passionate about inspiring the next generation of filmmakers. ‘We see ourselves as a bit of a one-stop shop for filmmaking for kids of eight to 15,’ says Boase. Although the party format can’t cover the same ground as their courses, they introduce the language and grammar of film on the hoof. ‘We talk about Dogma films all the time,’ explains Boase, referring to the collective of film directors founded in Copenhagen in 1995, whose goal has been the democratisation of cinema. ‘Everyone has access to a £250 video camera. Anyone can make a movie.’

Emerging to tell the cast he’d got everything he needed, Boase asked whether they knew what you said when a film was finished. ‘Thank you’ chorused this polite bunch of villains. On this occasion, anxiety about unruly partying teenagers was clearly redundant.

A MovieParty costs £1200, including 12 DVDs of the finished film and ‘Making of’ documentary. For bookings and details of filmmaking courses visit www.youngfilmacademy.co.uk or ring 020 7631 0014.