Idle Hands

Teaching young people can be tricky, just ask any teacher! They’re discovering who they are, trying to forge an identity and prove what they know. Getting through can be a tough and thankless task but it's important to try. With experience comes wisdom and if we can impart just a little we help them get ahead quicker.

This is why we jumped at the chance to team up with Ambitious Academy to deliver a series of workshops at Whittington Park community centre. Shawdon Smith, founder of the Academy, worked with another Islington youth group to produce the highly successful short ‘Drawn Out’ and wanted to replicate the process with another youth club.

Drawn Out film

To start we ran workshops covering narrative structure and what makes a good story, followed by mining the young people’s own experiences to discern themes important to them. We took this information away and drafted a script for approval and editing into their own authentic language. Next came directing and producing workshops delivering insight into the filmmaking process.

Finally we held acting workshops run by professional actors. All the roles in the film, except the adults who volunteered their time, were played by the young people themselves and they all rose to the challenge. Some of the shyest participants were challenging themselves to new heights and went on to really excel in their roles.

Acting workshop day two

Once everyone had their lines down we put a call out to our network of crew for assistance and equipment, receiving an overwhelming response. It was important as many of the crew looked and sounded like the young people we were working with as we wanted to demonstrate a career in media is something they can aspire to. Fortunately we have a great network of ethnic minority and working class film professionals who were keen to get involved.

On Set

Filming took place over three weekends so as not to interfere with school time. Everyone had a role whether in front of or behind the camera. Filming was tough but everyone involved had a great and memorable experience. Once filming was complete we set about post production, regularly consulting the young people for their insight and approval.

Now we are done and are looking for a channel to broadcast the film and a venue to host the premiere so if you know of anywhere please drop simon@kash.london a line.

Idle Hands Trailer

This was a challenge, especially during Covid, but highly rewarding and we’d recommend it to anyone. We can’t wait to replicate the process and bring everything we learnt to bear. We want to see more young inner city people from disadvantaged backgrounds getting into the media and sharing their unique perspectives with the wider culture; we are all richer for it.

The History of CGI

We now expect impeccable CGI in feature films, but that hasn’t always been the case. It’s taken decades of experimentation to get to this point. We’ve scoured the history of CGI and selected a few of our favourite innovations for you to feast your eyes on:

Westworld (1973)

The original Westworld would be very familiar to anyone who’s seen the HBO remake. Essentially, amusement park androids go bad and start killing the guests who’ve come to have a wild west experience. This is where the first digital animation in film comes in, to represent the pixelated POV of one of the gunslinging robots.

Tron (1982)

If you’re looking for CGI firsts, Tron is full of them. To name just one, it was the first film to have extensive (almost 20 minutes) fully CGI animation, which included a “light cycle” race. Impressive, considering the team behind Tron had to use a computer with only 2MB of memory.

Toy Story (1995)

Without Toy Story, who knows if we’d have other fully CGI classics like The Incredibles and Monsters, Inc.? With a team of 27 animators and a tiny budget, Pixar managed to create the first completely CGI feature film.

Avatar (2009)

True, Avatar might be remembered for its 3D aspect, but it made great strides in CGI, too. It was the first film to use facial motion capture to effectively reproduce the actors’ emotional performances in CGI, bringing an end to the “dead eye syndrome” that plagued previous CGI created from human performances.

What’s next for CGI? We’ve already seen CGI replace late actors, such as Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: Rogue One, but as yet it seems that we haven’t found a way to make these replications fully believable; there’s an element of the uncanny valley to them. Perhaps in the future, CGI animators will find a way to make photorealistic human copies, which could render actors obsolete.