Blaze!

We were commissioned by arts organisation Blaze to make a film with a group of young people, about the charity and their work over the past 10 years.

After applying for the opportunity to be involved, the group of 5 were selected and met together for the first time in the Easter holidays downstairs in Burnley library. We spent our first session learning about Blaze, practising interviewing each other, and getting to grips with the different parts of responding to a brief. Non of the group had met before, or been involved in Blaze projects - so it was a lot of information to learn and process.

After learning some basics , it was time to plan for our filming days! We had a lot of people booked in to come for interviews, and we used the brief Blaze had given us to decide together which questions it would be important to ask people.

We spent the first part of our second day setting up to film with a green screen. The group learned about setting up cameras and lights, and how to position them for filming in this setup.

The green screen was something they were all really excited about, and so we scheduled time for them to all be able to try using it, and seeing how that looked after it was captured onto the Mac.

For the rest of this day (and the following one) they took it in turns to interview people, asking the questions they had written. Our interviewees were a mix of Blaze participants (current and past) as well as other people who had been involved in Blaze projects in a variety of ways.

All of the group did a fantastic job during our 3 days, asking insightful questions, offering their thoughts and ideas, and I think by the end of it, new friendships had been made in the group too, which is always good to see. They were keen to find out more about Blaze projects, and hopefully their experience will kickstart new creativity for them all. We've got a final session with them in a couple of weeks, to review the footage and make editing decisions together before the final film is unveiled!