Martin is founder of Silverbox Multimedia. He is passionate to help children & young people explore filmmaking. In our conversation we spoke about the different skills children pick up in the club. But besides screenwriting, acting, filming, editing, and others, there are so many more competences they come away with – skills that are not only useful for filmmaking but for life. In closing, Martin reflected on his own creative writing. Are we keeping childlike wonder and limitless creativity at play? Or are we doing the adult thing of doubting ideas before we have even given them time to breathe?
KAI:
Hi Martin, great to hear from you today! Could you tell us about the work you do with Silverbox Multimedia and the way you enable children to express themselves creatively with filmmaking? I know you also aim to help them engage with social media in a safe and positive way. How do you do that?
MARTIN:
Yeah, so that’s actually a relatively new thing that we’re moving into. We’ve been working with children for a long time, helping them engage with filmmaking in different ways. The social media element has always been difficult. From a business perspective there is obviously a marketing expectation that everything you do would be plastered all over social media and you shout and scream about everything from the rooftops but obviously there is a sensitivity around social media and young people. For a long time we actually took the position as a company that we weren’t going to post anything on social media in any way, shape or form. The activity was key and engaging the kids was key. One of the things that the lockdown during COVID-19 taught us though was that as soon as the schools closed we had absolutely no presence whatsoever.
When we’re in the schools we were quite loud – kids love us. There are some schools we walk through and it is like being celebrities there. The kids come racing over from the other end the playground. That’s wonderful in those little closed communities, but when it came to actually having to market ourselves further we found what we’d done is shot ourselves massively in the foot by not engaging with social media. So, what we had to do is consult with some solicitors to talk about the best approach for us in that. We obviously had to make sure that our systems were going to be very robust in order to be compliant with everything. But what that’s done is that it led us into a position where we thought the more we engage with students on how to use social media in a positive way, the more there will be an understanding of what we’re doing and hopefully that gets the parents on board as well. At the end of the day it really is the parents that are most concerned about how their children’s data and images are being used and I completely understand.
Generally, when children are involved in the kind of activities we do, there tends to be a bit of an understanding that they are techie anyway. The kids want to get involved in these things but they’re not necessarily old enough to have their own social media account. Perhaps a well-managed social media account being run by third party is the best way for them to engage with it because they know it can be done safely. In the classes we are quite open about how we go about doing things and why we want to do them in the right way. An example is that in the past, when they made a film they would put their name in the credits at the end. Now, because we don’t know at any given time when they make a film how it’s going to be used and what platform it might end up appearing on, they don’t put their names at the end of every film. That just helps to protect the identity of the children a little bit. One of our rules now is ‘if it’s got your face on it, you don’t put your name on it’ and ‘if it’s got your name on it, you don’t put your face on it’. The way we’ve gotten around the credits is that if they are acting in the film, we take a nice portrait of them and put that at the end of it. That’s how they know that they were involved in that film. So yeah, it’s all those kinds of strategies that have sort of come out of lockdown for us, I suppose.
KAI:
More generally speaking, how would you describe your own journey with filmmaking?
MARTIN:
When I first went freelance as a filmmaker, I had just been working with a company that specialized in working with community groups and small businesses. I went out on my own and had to think about what sort of things mattered to me. Having a passion for filmmaking and wanting to become the next Spielberg was great but when I tried to get out there and started working reality sort of set in. There were bills to pay and you know, all these other things… I had to lean into another part of my passion.
What I really enjoyed was being involved with these community groups, especially the working with adults with learning disabilities. We would create animations for them or work with low income families to create activities that they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. That was a really nice way to spend my time and it was really rewarding. When I set up Silverbox films, the original goal was to try and be a bit of everything and have an educational slant to it. I got lucky with one film council fund that paid me to go into a school to work with children on a short film. While I was working with that school I did a lot of consultation with one of the teachers and we came to the conclusion that there was a demand for an after school club type activity. We ran one as a test bed and found another school and another and another… pre-lockdown we had grown to about 10 different schools on any given week with additional schools running holiday projects and others doing curriculum-based projects. It became multifaceted in that way. Silverbox itself is still working with small businesses and everything we learn on those shoots we bring into the clubs that we do. Just before Christmas I was just working on a BFI short film. I learned an awful lot from that shoot and have already started applying that in our workshops.
KAI:
How do you do that? How do you take experience from one to the other?
MARTIN:
I’m sure this is probably an experience that you’ve had, that you go to university and you are taught that there is a certain way of doing things, but then when you actually go and do the job you find that it’s not quite as cut and dry as that. In the real world, whether it’s through necessity or possibly even laziness, people don’t do things the way that they say they do it on paper. So, when you actually get in the field and start experiencing those little quirks it allows you to show the practical reality of what filmmaking is like. We try to apply that rather than the other.
To give you an example of that, one of the things we encountered on the BFI shoot was the radio calls that were being done by the team. They were using fairly generic radio calls, but what struck me was that I’d never seen them done in such a formal way before and a few of them I had maybe heard previously but never known what they were. For instance, I kept hearing this one particular one coming through and I eventually asked what it was. It turned out that it was the radio call they were doing every time the lead actor needed to go to the toilet. That’s one of the things that we’ve brought into the club. Frequently, you know working with children, they’ll put their hand up and ask, “Can I go to the toilet?” but now, instead of that we have a radio call that’s kind of like “Oh, Sir 10-1”. We know what they’re talking about, they know what they’re talking about and it’s immersing them in that language.
KAI:
And it creates a sense of community as well, doesn’t it?
MARTIN:
Exactly! And that is ultimately it with the kids. One of the things that makes them come back time and time again are the in-jokes and the silliness that comes with the activities that we do.
KAI:
That’s great. Why do you think is it important to help young people engage with technology and filmmaking?
MARTIN:
I think it’s more important than it’s ever been because the world that they’re going to grow up in is the world of technology. It’s already here but it’s only going to get bigger, bolder, and more immersive. The first sort of really good example I had from my own life about the importance of technology was when I was living with a bricklayer. I went to school with him. He left school and went straight into bricklaying. One day he came home and just said to me, “You know what Martin, I’m going to go out on my own. I’m going to leave this company that I’m working for and do it myself.” Then literally in the next breath he said, “Ah, but if I do that I’m going to need a website… and a business card… and I need some photos of the work that I’ve done…” He started listing all these things and they were all multimedia based. The big takeaway for him was that he hadn’t touched a computer in nearly 10 years. He suddenly realized he’d been left behind completely and technology, even for a bricklayer, was suddenly one of the most important skills he needed. So for me, if even bricklayers are getting to the point where they can’t make a future for themselves as successfully without the technology, what hope do the rest of us have?
KAI:
I see what you are saying. I got involved with cameras and filmmaking when I was very young. You pick up skills without realizing it and then figure your way through.
MARTIN:
This is it. It’s certain passive skills as well. Say for instance the family of a child has a home computer and it is a PC. When they come to the club they encounter a Mac for the first time. The first thing that we have to do is teach them how to use it because they have never used one. Almost immediately they are more employable because they’ve got that multi-use thing going for them. I know adults that are completely stumped when they walk in the room. They get our laptop for the first time and if they’ve worked on PC their whole lives they won’t touch it initially. I do courses for adults on occasions as well.
KAI:
Is that more difficult?
MARTIN:
Well, I tend to have to tell the adults to sit down less because they tend to be sat down most of the time. With kids, they’re running around like mad things, but when it comes to them, if I put a Mac in front of them that they have never touched before and show them Adobe Premiere for the first time… I can teach a group of eight-year-olds how to do basic editing in less than an hour. They will then have that skill for the rest of their lives. If I do the same workshop with a group of adults, it will take me an entire weekend to teach them the same amount of skills. It’s been true for the last 10 years. The kids are growing up around technology. They’re not afraid to throw themselves at it and get involved. That’s why you need to capture that at this age, because as soon as that fear sets in they’re going to get left behind.
KAI:
It’s life skills, as you just said, isn’t it? Whether it’s filming, editing, or things like, “I’m going to have a go” or “I’m going to try and see how it works” – those are also kind of skills and they will have for life.
MARTIN:
On top of that we stress that filmmaking is a team making exercise. One of the early things that we always encounter with the kids is their inability to work in a team. You may have some children who are only children or you may have some that are just generally not very good at sharing. But in filmmaking that’s impossible. You want that kind of leading voice, but if you’re too controlling it all falls apart; yet if you’re not controlling enough it also falls apart. So there is some level of compromise they have to figure out amongst themselves, finding a working dynamic that works for them. That’s also really important.
KAI:
What age group are we talking about here specifically? You mentioned 8-year-olds.
MARTIN:
Yes, so generally we tend to be with ages 8 to 16. More typically it would be ages 8 to around 12 and we found that, given the sort of activities that we do and the age group we have, parents are more inclined towards the childcare aspect at that younger age. If you’re getting them at an older age it’s much nicer because they’re definitely passionate about it and they want to be there, but because they’re that much older they’re just starting to discover their own freedom a little bit. They don’t necessarily want to go and hang out in a hall and be told what to do, they want to go hang out on a street corner and figure it out for themselves. It’s not that there is a demand for it it’s just there’s less of a demand for it. In the light of that we decided to concentrate our efforts. Some of our students are growing up now and they’re getting a bit older. The YouTube club that we run on a Saturday, for example, is starting to become more and more populated by those older students that we’ve worked with in the past.
KAI:
Can you talk a bit about the kind of projects you do?
MARTIN:
The after-school clubs are typically more of a drop-in type of situation. We’ve got two hours once a week for 13 weeks to make something of significance. What we tend to do there is push skills. We’ll look at a little bit of script writing, a little bit of acting for camera and at how post-production works. We then make a series of 60 second short films. Part of the reason for that is because then they can kind of try something and decide if they like it or not. If not, they can move on to the next thing. It’s quite fast paced and there is a lot of energy in the room. What they’ll end up with is just a series of 60 second mad little experiments. They don’t tend to go anywhere. They tend to be more just for their own personal use, to reflect on and take those skills wherever they want to take them.
Then we do our holiday schools. Those are our opportunity to try and do something a little more ambitious. We will typically make 5 to 10 minute short films with them. We work with them over five days 9 o’clock in the morning to 3 o’clock in the afternoon, so we’ve got a lot more contact time and a lot more ability to really stretch things out. We will write a film on Monday, shoot it Tuesday, Wednesday and some of Thursday and do post- production along the way as well. By the time they’re done they’ve got a real kind of robust Hollywood style short film that tends to, I’d like to say, exceed the expectations of what parents think they’re going to produce in that time.
The YouTube club is something new where we’re starting to try and engage more directly with social media. We’re looking at YouTube videos and try to replicate the more popular formats. It might be something like a list video. We get the kids to come up with 10 things about a subject and they will talk about it and create the video for it. We also do tutorials, that’s the thing we’ve done predominantly so far. We’re starting to teach the kids a film skill of some sort, let’s say ‘How to turn an actor into a ghost so that they see through’. We teach that for a couple of weeks and then get them to make a short film with that effect in mind; then we have them make a YouTube style tutorial, explaining to other kids how to do the same thing. It’s that old thing of, ‘The best way to learn something is to teach it’. They learn it and then teach it back so that it’s really stuck in their heads.
KAI:
Have you thought of working together with other after school clubs such as theatre or similar?
MARTIN:
We’re hoping to expand our own offering in some ways. We are liaising with a comic book artist at the moment as well as a drama and an art teacher. We’re hoping that some of these new offerings would take the Silverbox ethos in terms of the way that we teach and in the way that we do things and move into those other areas. The other obvious advantage is that they kind of complement each other as well. For example, when we do a holiday club it might be that we can have those activities happening simultaneously and kind of bleed into one another. But that’s a little bit of a dream for us at the moment. We’re so well known for our filmmaking and that is really what takes up the majority of our time. But yeah, we’ll see.
KAI:
That sounds great. Where can you see Silverbox Multimedia going?
MARTIN:
We would like to get to the point where we’ve got a package that really works and that is franchiseable. What I would like to do is to take what we’re doing and spread it across the whole country. There are already instances of organizations doing this. I’m aware of the Pauline Quirke Academy, for example. They already do a lot of theatre and filmmaking and they have rolled that out across a lot of the country. I think what we produce is different to what they do. I think we’ve got something to offer that would be interesting to people all over the country. I’ve done some research into that though and before you can make that kind of push, they say, it’s good to try and make everything as process lead as possible so that anyone can come in and pick up almost immediately. Just shortly before lockdown that’s the process we had started going through.
KAI:
Very interesting. More generally speaking, how important do you think it is to empower young people to be creative?
MARTIN:
I think it’s really important. I’ve done a lot of work in close contact with schools and I think if you interview any reasonably minded primary school teacher at the moment they will tell you that creativity has been stripped out of the curriculum almost completely. Unless you’ve got a teacher who’s by default passionate about creativity there’s going to be less and less opportunities for children to express their creativity. I’ve actually had some head teachers approach me about running my courses in their school because it literally ticks a creativity box that they need to fulfil, and they don’t have the resources to do it within their own class times. I mean in terms of importance, I don’t know if I need to justify the importance of creativity itself, but I think what we should be most concerned about is the fact that creativity is not being given the space that it really should have in primary education. As we’ve already said, there are so many reasons why that’s going to be to the detriment of young people’s careers in the future. I feel that needs to be addressed and I think that’s something Silverbox is doing quite a good job of.
KAI:
We briefly talked about this earlier, but what kind of skills do you think the children pick up that are not only useful for film making but for life?
MARTIN:
I would say one of the biggest ones that always really stands out to me is visualization. It’s not one that immediately jumps to people’s minds when you talk about creative skills. You think of creating some sort of art, writing, or similar… but the process of imagining something and then making it real, that’s what I mean. A lot of times I’m having a conversation with some of our younger students, saying, “We could do this” or “We could do that” or “You could write this or that” … and I’m looking at them thinking, “You can’t actually imagine this, can you? You don’t have that faculty at the moment, it still needs to be developed.” What you then watch is, typically after the first time they make a film, they put pen to paper and write it out, then they shoot and edit it and see the final result. Suddenly a little switch goes off in their brain and when you have the same conversation with them on the second film they suddenly get it! They can now imagine the steps that need to be taken. That is an interesting process to watch unfold, because if you can’t imagine a process or the steps you need to take to get somewhere, I don’t know how you can get anywhere. I’m talking about my business and franchising it, making it quote on quote as ‘idiot proof as possible’. Part of the reason that’s important from a business perspective is that you want to put people in an environment where they’re going to succeed. You want to take away as many variables as possible, but that is essentially taking away the need for imagination. You can do that to a point, but there is a point at which the human element of that kind of job role is going to take over and you’re need them to make informed and imaginative decisions. That’s really what’s going to set someone apart. If they follow the process, great. If they can make that process their own, that’s where they’re going to excel.
KAI:
Very interesting. I suppose you still want to uphold certain standards. Making it ‘idiot proof’, as you say, so that it works, but also having quality and excellence.
MARTIN:
This is it. It’s being able to communicate what those standards are effectively. One of our main guiding rules we have in our clubs is, “You leave everything better than you found it”. There is this real thing with kids that goes like, “We will clean up our own mess, but anything that isn’t our own mess we will leave alone.” What ends up happening is that you get these moments where a child has been eating popcorn or something similar. They’ve spilled some and they’ve been sharing it with their friends and their friends have spilled some as well. When it is time to clean up, the only person that gets rallied into the job is the one who brought the popcorn even though they all made the mess. So we say that not only is it the group’s mess, but we’re all required to tidy up. Not only do we tidy up our own mess, but we also tidy up the mess that was left before us. If everyone did that there’d be nothing to tidy up, right? We try to take that mentality into everything we do. It has to be left better than it was, and the world just has to be a much nicer and happier place. That’s how we want to leave everything that we do.
KAI:
That’s great to hear. Obviously, I’m passionate about filmmaking, but it’s great to hear about all these values that you share with the children too!
One last question. We have been talking about adults and children how you are approaching them differently in terms of teaching them. Do you think there is anything you can learn from the children?
MARTIN:
They teach me all the time. I think that’s one of the things that keeps me wanting to go back and do it time and time again. It’s the obvious stuff. Working with kids in that way keeps you young. I know all the new social media platforms, I know what all the new YouTube videos are, I know who the new YouTube creators are because they tell me. And if I don’t know, I’m a loser, so… I have to stay up to date! But on top of that, what I will say, particularly from a writing perspective, is that one of the things professional writers spend their entire careers trying to make sure they don’t do is lose the childlike wonder and a child’s completely unclosed minds.
I get the 8 or 9-year-olds and we do some writing for a film. If I ask what it could be about, they say something like, “Ah, it’s going to be about a man and a rocket ship! And then this happens and then that…!” They have absolutely no worries about the fact that a) we can’t shoot any of that and b) none of it makes any sense. They’re all just ideas that don’t really meet in the middle. If you only go a few years on, working with maybe some of the teenagers, and I ask what we should do a film about, I spend the next hour trying to draw something from them. You have to try to make them think about a character, or a list of jobs that they could have. I’m often simply met with a wall of blank faces.
From my perspective, when I do my own personal writing, I try to keep that sort of childlike essence at play. I try not to do that adult thing of doubting the idea before I’ve even started to write it because I think that’s what happens an awful lot. You often don’t even give the idea time to breathe because you can see all the reasons why it won’t work, but you can’t see the reasons why it will. Kid’s don’t care about that. They just think, “It’s cool, I just want it in there. We can do it, people are going to love it!” I think that’s a really important lesson to take away.
KAI:
I want to see that film about the rocket ship now. I’m quite excited!
MARTIN:
We actually do have one music video of a rocket that I might be able to send you a link to. I’ll see what I can dig out.
KAI:
Thank you, Martin! I am grateful for your time, it was interesting to hear from you about your work with the children & young people. All the best!
To find out more about Silverbox Multimedia and to get in contact, visit the website.
Kai Vollprecht Media 