There is a little bit of a shortage of physics teachers in the UK which leads to a lack of physics graduates, and completing the vicious circle a greater lack of physics teachers in schools. To combat this problem the government, the awesome Gatsby foundation and the brain boxes at the IOP have been developing courses which allow clever clog teachers without physics specialisms to be retrained so they can confidently teach physics. These films show the two routes teachers can take – PEP – Physics Enhancement Programme, which allows teachers to learn a little more physics before they go to teacher training college, and SASP – Science Additional Specialism Programme, which takes lovely biologist and mathematicians and gives them physics lessons so they too can enjoy teaching lovely physics! I know its a lot of acronyms but once you’ve got your head around them, by watching our films, you’ll agree this is a great solution to the dirth of physics teachers in our schools! And we need physicists to work on lovely renewable energy solutions, design cool little gizmos that make our Ipads work, and on occasion reveal the mystery of the universe to us. Hope you like the films.
Posts Tagged ‘7D’
Sy looking for meat
We were fairly busy the first weekend in April, having taken the challenge to complete a Sci-Fi film in just 48 hours. The basic rules were get a small team together, in our case 2 – Dave and me! Collect the elements for your film (a prop, a line of dialogue and a title) from the Apollo Cinema, Piccadilly and make a film. We had asked 3 wonderful actors to work with us James Alper, Liz Boag and Michael Quartey, and when we opened the title ‘All that Remains’ we knew we were going to make an end of the world story.
Lots of films are made about the world ending, but Dave and I are really interested in what would happen next, we have avidly watched series like Jericho, Survivors and a great doc. series called ‘Life after People’ (thanks History channel you are awesome!) and we have talked and talked about what would happen… and we reckon in the initial instance for any people left the world would be very quiet and very dangerous.. just think about all the things you don’t know and can’t do once the electricity has failed. Could you find clean water, warmth, would you fail to survive? In our film, the reason for the apocalypse is a virus spread by words/speech. Our survivors have survived because they have stopped talking after their daughter went missing. By mourning their missing child they severed links with society and sat in stony silence together and were spared by the virus. Our villain, Sy’s story is left to your imagination.
So, after the world ended what would remain? What are people like after the fall of civilisation? All that remains in our story is the chance to keep your humanity, watch it and let us know what you think?
It has been our pleasure to watch, and film the creation of a new business on our high street. See the film here –
For those of you who don’t know Brentford – we are just up the river from Chiswick, and across the water from Kew Gardens. In the Heathrow flight path, we are blessed with two beautiful stately homes, Syon Park and Osterley House, we’re on the Thames and have the River Brent and the Grand Union Canal. A little run-down, loads of lovely pubs, struggling in the shadow of the M4 but full of unexpected charms – I’ll show you around if you are interested!
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Clapperboard Carnage
It’s been a busy February as we’ve finally got some time to produce our own comedy drama, Lucy and James. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while and we hope to write and produce an episode every month to 6 weeks (schedules permitting). My interest in comedy goes way back to 2004 when I made my first comedy short – Murder Game. It was made in 24 hours for the 24 hour film challenge and was the first drama I’d ever shot. It was a bit of a mess but extremely fun to make and to be honest I’ve not made enough films of my own since then, being a full-time editor and then running Picnic Films had left me with no time or energy to write anything. But fortunately all that changed last November.
I worked with Lucy and James on Sami’s comedy Sayings That Are Wrong.
It was shot one Sunday afternoon in November last year, and I really enjoyed the experience, shooting drama is a dream on the 7D especially in “no lighting” way that I prefer to work. I’m really chuffed with how it came out but moreover I loved the chemistry that Lucy and James had, it’s rare that you see that with actors that you can actually believe they are a couple. They also both extremely funny and fun to be with people and that’s what lead to Lucy and James.
We filmed the first episode last week over one day and one late evening, just the four of us and some shots of vodka (for every scene we finished!) and it was really fun. Hard work to shoot 26 pages of script in 2 days but we got everything covered and it’s cutting together nicely.
We’re currently editing a 3 minute version for the reed short film competition and I’ll post the link for it here soon. But even more excitingly we’ve shot a 20 minute version, the first of a series that we intend to make. I’m being really ambitious with this one because it’s great to have something to throw yourself into completely. Short films aren’t really my strength because they are really short poems, lyrical and light on story and character, which is really not me! I’m all about character, people you can believe exist in the real world and say real things and that isn’t what short films are about.
We’re cutting the first episode entitled Bloody Mondays at the moment and it’ll be up here as soon as it’s done, along with some behind the scenes and some deleted bits (which you’ll see why they were deleted) and then we’ll start thinking about the next episode.
Lucy and James is about a couple, it’s filmed in real locations based on real situations and some absurd things that we get up to in our late 20′s. I think there’s a real gap in the market for this sort of comedy, about a real middle class couple (not rich and not poor really!) but struggling to get by, to get the washing done, and to figure out what they should be doing with their lives.
I’ll keep updating the site with links to the episodes and write ups, got some more stills to add later on too, so keep your eyes peeled.
Lucy and James investigating an iceberg