Spotlight on Archive - EAFA and the 'Mashup' competition

This year Into Film is working on three unique and exciting projects surrounding archive film, introducing young people to the appeal of archive film footage and the process of creating new films through it. 

We partnered with the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) to host several archive sessions, and to promote a 'Mash-Up' archive filmmaking competition. We've also delivered numerous workshops across South West England, including three special filmmaking ones funded by Historic England's Heritage Schools Programme, and toured with the KinoVan mobile cinema, in partnership with Film London.

We'll be talking through all of these exciting collaborations, showcasing what a useful, creative and versatile medium archive film can be for teachers. Readers will learn how these sessions, workshops and events have engaged pupils in soundtracks, editing, narrative building and forming a creative response to historical material through original filmmaking. 

First up Rico Lowson - Into Film Programme Delivery Coordinator for South and East England - who below speaks about the EAFA partnership and the 'Mash-Up' archive competition.

We at Into Film have been working with the EAFA to introduce young audiences to creative filmmaking projects using archive film. This year, young filmmakers have the opportunity to enter a unique archive filmmaking competition - ‘Mash-Up' - using 30 exclusive clips released by EAFA. This is a free-to-enter competition, open to anyone under the age of 18, as long as they're UK-based. 

We've been running sessions with partners including the University of East Anglia, Creative Nation and Latitude Festival to host introductory editing workshops using EAFA's unique collections. These were designed to give young people a taste of the possibilities of using archive film as a departure point for creating their own work by "mashing up" the existing content with their own original animated and live-action footage.

The 30 archive clips released by the EAFA have been digitised for a brand new audience. The new batch includes everything from privately donated Super-8 footage, notable community events (street parades, boat races), impressively magnified insects, abstracted meditations on East Anglian countryside and animals operating machinery. The young people to take part so far have been inspired by the medium of archive - it's often something completely new to them and we found that a lot of the negative preconceptions of archive film as "dry", "boring" or "un-engaging" are false.

As many of the clips are silent there is a lot of scope for Foley and sound design, as well as the ability to completely re-frame the tone, texture and mood of the footage with original soundtracking. The creative possibilities are virtually endless.

The theme for the competition is ‘transformation.' The clips can be viewed via the Mash-Up competition page and will be sent as a download link to everyone that submits an entry form. 

The deadline for entries is the 3 September 2018 and there's a £250 prize for the winning film, which will be awarded at a special showcase screening in Norwich this autumn. 

So if you're under 18 and inspired by the project, download the files and get creative with archive film today!