Make Film, Make History

From mockumentary to live action drama, from animation with archive material to vox pop interviews and an interactive website, the five projects realised as part of Make Film Make History show what 30 young Europeans between 18 – 24 years from Denmark, Germany, and the UK can do, when they put their minds, skills and enthusiasm to the task.

They first met in the Belgian town of Ypres in April 2015, where they took part in a 3-day workshop. Inspired by the 1916 British film The Battle of the Somme (1916) as well as Ypres’s very specific history as a crucial WW1 battleground, they discussed the legacy of the First World War and explored what it means to be European one hundred years later. Various film exercises got them working together and thinking about how ideas can be visualised. At the end of the three days they decided which topic and what kind of film they would like to work on over the next year. Five working groups and five working titles were born.

It was the starting point for a long journey, marked by various milestones such as finishing the script, getting a shot list ready, finding actors and props, and developing communication plans. The special challenge was to do all this online via facebook or in skype meetings and google hang-outs with each other or their film mentors from London’s Chocolate Films, while carrying on with studies and jobs and life in general. It made April 2016 and the second three-day workshop come along very fast.
 

This time everyone met in London, where the Imperial War Museum (IWM) became the base for transposing their ideas into images and sound. The IWM galleries and gardens turned into shooting locations, a teaching room became an animation studio, another saw some serious code writing for the interactive website. Interviews with members of the public were filmed on the banks of the Thames and in the shadow of the London Eye. Experts were caught on camera giving their opinions on subjects such as the future of the EU, the relevance of history for our decisions about the future, or the current refugee crisis. Days were long, busy, and intense. Time was tight. The date for a first presentation of the four films and the interactive website at the Goethe-Institut at the end of day three was set. This was when everything had to be ready. When the five teams, their film mentors, and the staff from the project partner organisations had gathered in the Goethe-Institut cinema, the air was thick with nervous anticipation. They all had worked hard but what would appear on the cinema screen?

Well, what did appear on the cinema screen? If you would like to find out, watch the Make Film, Make History films here. A link to the fifth project, the interactive website will follow soon.

Read about the project from the participants’ perspective on the Make Film, Make History project blog.