Creating Our Film

Creating a film

As a group we were told to come up with an idea of a film that we could pitch to African-American men, first we struggled but then remembered about the film ‘Freedom Writers’ that most of us had seen, and thought if we made it British then maybe another type of audience would watch as it would be very different to an American film. We decided to set our film in Ruislip College and locations nearby the college as people in the UK would recognise it from the Channel 4 show, ‘The Inbetweeners’; we also decided to hold the open auditions at the college, so students auditioning get a feel for the set.

This was our brief pitch:

There are 5 stereotype groups in a college, these cause gang violence and because of this, the college gets shut down. One of the teachers of the college takes a member from each gang and brings them together to form a separate group for a youth project, everyone feels equal as the groups all join as one. The college is under inspection and they protest to get it re-opened, but the night before it re-opens, one gang member steps up and shows that he disagrees…

We chose to use the same director (Richard LaGravenese) as ‘Freedom Writers’ had used, the editor and script writer of ‘Remember Me’ as after reading reviews on the film, the script was described as moving, however from my own experience of watching it I feel the film editing was just as moving as the script itself.

We were given a maximum funding of £5m so we had to restrict our cast; this gave us the idea to hold open auditions to save money. However our funding has been given to us by a Tax Schemes company, meaning we won’t have to pay any excess tax which lowers the risk of us lowering our funding budget, so that also helped us out.

Director – Richard LaGravenese, £2m overall

Editor – Andrew Mondshein, £10,000 a week [10 weeks]

Location – Ruislip College, £100,000

Cinematographer – Barry Ackroyd, £50,000

Cast – Open Auditions, £50,000 overall
- Venue: Main hall at Ruislip College [place of filming]

Script Writer – Will Fetters, £50,000

Plus the below the line costs, amounting to a maximum of £100,000