City Eye, Southampton
w: www.city-eye.co.uk
e: admin@city-eye.co.uk
t: 023 8067 7167
City Eye, Southampton's flourishing local film development agency, is lucky enough to be spearheaded by people whose enthusiasm and humour have made it a thriving hub of local filmmaking.
With an emphasis firmly on community projects and helping Southampton's marginalised, City Eye engages a firm remit to give something back to those who need it. "It was a chance to help give a voice to local people, community groups, arts organisations and the disenfranchised," says City Eye creative director David White, "and to support those who wanted to work in film and video or who simply wanted to share their thoughts, experiences and love of the medium with like-minded souls. Working on the basic principal that film and video are powerful tools for mass communication, the founders of City Eye set up a company that wasn't driven by commercial needs per se but by community ones. In order to do this and help people who had never used the form before, the equipment and resources had to be accessible and cheap for them - definitely not the case in the late eighties and early nineties. City Eye was, and is still, all about trying to make a difference, teach people new skills and give them the tools to make themselves heard."
Set-up in 1987, City Eye has remained true to its original goals of being a co-operative between a group of people who found a lack of low cost or free access to film and video equipment in the Southampton area. Starting in someone's front room, the organisation has grown into bigger premises and is now at Swaythling Neighbourhood Centre in Southampton. It receives funding from Southampton City Council and Screen South, and its principal co-ordinators are David White and Susan Beckett. It can offer a whole range of editing and filmmaking equipment, and the equipment based Open Lens Award allows new filmmakers access to the resources they need to make a short film.
But City Eye hasn't forgotten its front-room foundations. "We're still about those original goals," says David, "we're still about taking video out to the community and working with people to show them what the medium can do, how they can utilise it as a means of creative expression or a tool to communicate their message. Often people will have no previous experience of working in video so we hope to teach them the techniques and give them some insight into how the movies they see on the big screen or the programmes they watch on TV are made."
Projects at City Eye vary enormously, from promotional tools to individual projects produced with groups training to use specialised equipment. They've worked with the NSPCC on domestic violence issues, with local poets to interpret poems on to film, and organised competitions for local videomakers whose films they try to premier at local cinemas. "The great thing about City Eye," says David, "is that we get to work with all sectors of the community. It's hard not to get excited when one week you are working with the over-55s from the Black Heritage Group and the next you are filming Bollywood dance workshops. Not to mention making experimental film with a Pupil Referral Unit - and striving to encourage them to capture something more than aggression on camera!"
Clearly it helps to enjoy what you do and have an enthusiastic local film industry to work with. "The Southampton film scene is comprised of pockets of activity from screening, to study, to production," David continues. "There doesn't seem to be a huge inclination towards pulling all groups and activity together - though historically we've tried and are about to re-launch networking events for anyone that does want to come along and meet other people in the scene. We have a good population of student filmmakers through Southampton Institute and Southampton University and further training provided by Eastleigh based Southern Film Education."
City Eye projects have included a Richard and Robert Hull short Guilty and their local TV programme called Arts 4 Evry1, a rock opera interpretation of Hamlet (with a crew of three who perform all roles themselves) called Hamlet: The Motion Picture Blues by Alex Taylor and Catarina De Castro, Trace an experimental film by Sophie McDonald and The Collector by Lorne Guy. David is careful to state that City Eye has helped these people's projects rather than done it for them, "They have produced the films, done the late nights and worried about the outcomes and they are all fine, fine filmmakers in waiting".
David White has been making films since he was 14, "and had gone down the whole film school root, freelance filmmaker, unemployed filmmaker and filmmaker working in a pharmaceutical factory to pay off debts!" He's been a lecturer, set up a media centre in Guyana where he ran a video unit and had a host of other academic film jobs before succeeding the previous creative director at City Eye. "I do the job because I love films and filmmaking. I like seeing how people react to seeing a moving image. I like the fact that every day of the week I am still allowed to be the 14-year-old who produced a short 8mm horror film back in the eighties. I like being excited by possibilities and that's what City Eye does, it helps create possibilities. Community film and video is one of the most exciting, strange, frustrating and rewarding jobs anyone could possibly have and I wouldn't change it for the world. Plus, you get to put 'Filmmaker' under occupation on your passport!"
City Eye administrator Susan Beckett, has worked for the Solent People's Theatre where she got involved with City Eye on cross-projects, and has worked in a whole host of other areas including video production and marketing. "I have always had a very broad love of the arts and after far too many years of working in the corporate world I decided that for me there had to be more to life! There's no doubt that the trials and tribulations of a day's work in the arts often exceed those experienced in other jobs but I wouldn't want to change it now. I love the excitement of seeing projects grow and come together, the contact with so many different people, the passion that is expressed, the variety of experience that every day offers and just being surrounded by people and work that you believe in. Sadly, I still only get to put 'Administrator' on my passport, but I'm less likely to get hassled by customs!"
For the future, City Eye will continue to work with Southampton City Council, Art Asia and The John Hansard Gallery towards a capital bid to the Arts Council to enable the building of a major new arts complex in the city centre. If successful a purpose-built facility will be City Eye's new home which will include a number of edit suites, a dubbing suite, training and workshop facilities and screening rooms.
But even if the whole thing fell into a black hole tomorrow, David and Susan's belief in City Eye would see it rise again. "I am encouraged that someone would want to stand in fields at midnight shooting a short world war one film about a sniper because he didn't like his day job as a soulless salesman!" says David. "I will support anyone who shows the determination and effort that it takes to get a film off the ground. For me community film and video is not about the product but the process. It is how it is made, why it is made and not necessarily how it comes out."
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