We are grateful for the support of our project partners:

MAKE FILM HISTORY

As cultural heritage organisations digitise their collections and increase public access, moving image portals like the IFI Player, DFA Player, BFI Player and BBC iPlayer provide audiences with virtual screening rooms to view their shared audiovisual history on demand. But the creative reuse of moving image archive material remains problematic, beset by questions of copyright law, rights clearance and "fair dealing" exceptions, and an audiovisual archives sector without a standardised framework to open up access to this material for creative reuse by young filmmakers in education and the community. Young filmmakers cannot access this material without significant funding from film funds or broadcasters to pay commercial license fees.

The Make Film History project addresses this problem by developing a new, sustainable model for the creative reuse of archive material for non-commercial use by young filmmakers, supported by our project partners, the British Film Institute (BFI), BBC Archive, the Irish Film Institute and Northern Ireland Screen.

Funded by AHRC and the Irish Research Council, the project has created a new research network around the creative reuse of archive material by young filmmakers, developing new partnerships between academic researchers and a range of non-academic partners - audiovisual archives and cultural heritage organisations who preserve and license this material; schools and training providers developing new talent in the creative industries; and regional film festivals who bring the local film community together.

The project is led by Dr Shane O’Sullivan (Kingston School of Art) and Dr Ciara Chambers (University College Cork) and supported by research assistant Colm McAuliffe, a doctoral candidate at Birkbeck (University of London). It builds on the success of the innovative Archives for Education project, extending the scope of the creative reuse of archive material beyond higher education to young filmmakers across the UK and Ireland.

The project asks: "How can we license moving image archive material for creative reuse by young filmmakers for education, training and community use? How can the creative reuse of this material increase community engagement with hidden cultural heritage and strengthen communities through new work created by emerging filmmakers reflecting on the past and developing talent for the future"?

Events

We are running a series of events between September 2020 and November 2021, primarily at regional film festivals with strong industry programmes, where industry experts gather to exchange ideas and knowledge and meet new talent.

Our events will take three forms: a series of industry panels and workshops, exploring the key themes and research questions of the network; creative workshops where young filmmakers can engage with archive material and regional archives and training organisations can pilot creative reuse in a festival setting; and follow-on events where some of the work produced through the project can be screened for the local community and the findings of the project can be disseminated.

Please follow us on Twitter or sign up to the mailing list. If you or your organisation would like to participate in the project, please contact Dr Shane O’Sullivan or Dr Ciara Chambers.