Electric December
Best Film for Helpful Dead
Four of the filmmaking team from Wyke Regis Junior school joined facilitators Sharon Hayden and Alastair Nisbet from ScreenPLAY to receive the award at Bristol's Watershed - and a bag of film goodies from sponsor Aardman Animation.
Project producer Sharon Hayden said it was a wonderful achievement for the ten year old filmmakers.
Best Comedy went to Taking Out Tim by Tiverton High School with My Pockets, and Best documentary to Adrenaline Junky, a moving film about a motorcyclist regaining his action packed lifestyle after an accident.
All the Electric December films are on the website electricdecember.org - including The Big Splash, one of the other Dorchester Arts Olympic films by St John’s Primary School in Weymouth.
The Helpful Dead was based on a real life tragedy and characters were inspired by Victorian works of art in Birmingham and Cambridge. Read about the real people behind the story.
The Helpful Dead was funded by the Lottery's First Light initiative with additional support from b-side, Departure Arts and the school itself.
The Helpful Dead - the real people behind the story
02/12/12 08:37 Filed in: Film
The first draft of the script for the Helpful Dead included skeletons of long dead seamen coming back to life to save an Olympic yachtsmen but it was only in the latter stage of script development with mentor Peter Snelling that he asked the key question: “Why would they ?”. Why let generations of sailors die and then choose to save one in particular ? There had to be a link with the past.
Then in November 1872 he writes “Monday in this week, a very wet day - in the evening an emigrant ship was wrecked on the beach. School open but no roll call as so few were present.” The Royal Adelaide, carrying families to a new life in Australia had foundered on Chesil beach. Most passengers were saved but six, including a young girl drowned.
In The Helpful Dead a Victorian mother sees her boy drown as a ship sinks off the Chesil - and we cut to 2012 to find a Olympic sailor in trouble who looks the image of the Victorian mother. The long-dead boy looks up from his watery grave and thinks she is his mother. He summons the Helpful Dead back to life with the words - “It happened to us, don’t let it happen to them”.
We studied Ford Maddox Brown’s famous painting Last of England in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. A young family are leaving England for a new life on an 1860’s emigrant ship. The mother, holding the hand of a baby under her cloak is strikingly beautiful. The model for the picture was the artist’s wife Emma and our Year Five artists were able to use Maddox Brown’s sketches of her as their inspiration for both Joseph’s mother and our Olympic sailor Serena.
Electric December for Children’s Olympic films
Animated films by children at two Weymouth primary schools have been selected for an international showcase of young filmmaking talent.
The Big Splash and the Helpful Dead, made for the Olympics by pupils at St John’s Primary and Wyke Regis Junior schools will be part of Electric December, a countdown calendar featuring the best of young people’s short films from across Europe.
The films, seen by thousands on big screens during the summer, will now bring Weymouth and Portland - as seen through the eyes of ten year olds - to an international audience.
Over the course of a month in each school the young filmmakers worked with a group of six artists from Dorchester Arts, led by Sharon Hayden of digital arts organisation ScreenPLAY.
She said the children gave both films a strong sense of place and local identity.
“In the Big Splash they wanted to capture the feel of the torch relay on Weymouth seafront and the determination and courage of a group of young people swimming across the bay.
In researching Helpful Dead, the children found a head teacher’s diary from 1872 with descriptions of a shipwreck off the Chesil. This gave them the idea to link a Victorian tragedy with the 2012 Olympics,” she explained.
The films, plus the third in the trilogy the Portland Race, were funded by the lottery through the BFI’s First Light initiative.
The films, seen by thousands on big screens during the summer, will now bring Weymouth and Portland - as seen through the eyes of ten year olds - to an international audience.
Over the course of a month in each school the young filmmakers worked with a group of six artists from Dorchester Arts, led by Sharon Hayden of digital arts organisation ScreenPLAY.
She said the children gave both films a strong sense of place and local identity.
“In the Big Splash they wanted to capture the feel of the torch relay on Weymouth seafront and the determination and courage of a group of young people swimming across the bay.
In researching Helpful Dead, the children found a head teacher’s diary from 1872 with descriptions of a shipwreck off the Chesil. This gave them the idea to link a Victorian tragedy with the 2012 Olympics,” she explained.
The films, plus the third in the trilogy the Portland Race, were funded by the lottery through the BFI’s First Light initiative.