Screen WM is the lead agency for film, television and digital media in the West Midlands; a region that is driving innovation and excellence in content creation and cross-media collaboration. Our remit is to develop the economic, social and cultural wealth of the region through supporting the screen media industries. 

The scheme digishorts offers you the chance to develop and produce a short film with support from Screen WM and the UK Film Council, and with a budget of up to £10,000.  Screen WM has managed the digishorts programme since 2002, producing BAFTA nominees and worldwide festival successes.

The Gigbeth Festival and Conference is now entering its third year. In 2008 the Festival is Birmingham's biggest music festival and includes a day long industry conference, 2 days of gigs in approximately 10 venues in Digbeth plus a large scale event at Millennium Point after the Birmingham City Council Christmas Lights Switch on. In 2007 Gigbeth was listed in the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Pick of UK Festivals’ and is growing a reputation for putting international acts alongside local and up and coming acts. Gigbeth is also developing a strand of all year round work that supports and develops the West Midlands music industry. This work will begin in earnest during 2009 through some funding from Advantage West Midlands.

Fazeley Studios is a Custard Factory project. A spectacular collection of renovated Victorian and 20th century buildings, it offers 45 brand new stylish studio offices for the creative industries. Behind its Fazeley Street doors is a meticulously restored Victorian Gothic reception leading onto a leafy courtyard and winter garden. These are surrounded by slick, airy work spaces flooded with natural daylight. The Ikon Gallery is already on site and coming soon is a fantastic brasserie that will provide fresh, seasonal food and a mouthwatering selection of wine. We have studio offices from 200 – 10,000 sq ft which come equipped with top end phone and datasystems, superfast internet, high end security and parking. Although we’re just minutes from the city centre, we don’t charge city centre prices and our vast range of hang out spaces mean that clients and staff will never want to go home.

Lee Kern

Lee Kern

FROM BEDROOM TO BROADCAST
How to break into TV and the battle to retain your film-making integrity thereafter

Lee introduced himself, saying that, positioned at a lectern as he was; he felt like Al Gore in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ but hoped he wouldn’t be as crushingly boring! He then warned us all against being shy, saying that there was nothing to be gained by being so and that nobody would actually care if we spent our lives hiding our light under a bushel. Lee’s proposition was that, sooner or later, we would all have to sell a percentage of our soul in order to make a buck, whether we like it or not, the battle to retain our integrity is something we will have to face.

Fortunately for us, the evening in store was far from boring and we were thoroughly engaged and persuaded by Lee’s wit and wisdom, we were entertained with clips of his films and stories of his experiences in the media industry.

Lee described how he had managed to create his own niche and a demand for his work, above all he had ensured that he was self sufficient in all things technical so that he didn’t have to rely on anyone else, cameramen or editors, in order to realise his own imaginative ideas for content.

With a degree in English and literally working from his bedroom, he approached film-making predominately with literary references, concentrating on language to evoke the very precise style of poetry written by someone like Ezra Pound, or the long flowing narrative structure of a Walt Whitman. Lee was eventually summoned to meet with someone in the industry after sending some captioned drawings around to those he thought might be interested in his work. He maintains that the commissioning process is worse than the cliché of ‘the business being tough to get into’ – according to Lee it’s a soul destroying nightmare of rejection.

The first job, for very little money, was to make a film about a local tramp in Edgware, London, where Lee had lived all his life. Whilst there were many stories about this character and theories as to how he came to live such a life, Lee thought it was a sufficiently intriguing subject to explore in a film. He felt it turned out well, it was broadcast on Channel 4 and, although this was at a time in the early hours when very few people are watching TV, it was subsequently favourably reviewed by Time Out magazine.
 
This led to making some of the programmes that Channel 4 commissions for the series ‘4 Minute Wonders’. These were entry level opportunities for Lee but he felt that they provided his best chance of making his mark. He then showed us one of these films from his early career, describing how it demonstrated a more accomplished and controlled feel than more recent work which might appear ‘glossier’.

‘My Back Garden’ featured Mungo, one of Lee’s dogs, unearthing little treasures, old toys, model soldiers etc. from the garden of the house where he lived and was brought up. This was literally post produced in Lee’s bedroom – reinforcing his maxim that you can create using very little budget if you can perform all the necessary processes yourself. He also set up his own Production Company so that he wasn’t simply creating revenue for someone else. The film was captivating and demonstrated Lee’s confident lyrical style, his story and voice-over were central to the film’s charm.

Our audience had been invited by Lee to interrupt with questions which they did at every opportunity. Asked how he dealt with having to pitch an idea and if he had ever had a lucky break, Lee told us how the next job wasn’t so good because there were so many contributors to the programme that it became incoherent, it nevertheless provided him with the chance to compile some of his clips, recycling them for other purposes and sending out a Show reel that resulted in voice-over work for ‘Modern Toss’. He also made some more ‘4 Minute Wonders’

To make more films for the series ‘4 Minute Wonders’ Lee travelled to the Shetlands to investigate some of its local legends. On the basis that it’s too much to expect programme commissioners to make a leap of imagination with you, Lee followed his instincts about how the films should be made, he advised us to do the same and ‘just do it’. Instead of interviewing the local storyteller he filmed the landscape to give a context to the story, the visual imagery of the stark landscape gave a better connection to the mood and sense of place. The film about the mythical creature ‘The Nyuggle’ was a story brilliantly told and received our enthusiastic applause. It was, by turns, dark, funny and compelling – it certainly captured the quirkiness of a place where, it can be 1am but brilliant sunshine, there are no trees and where horses are very small and have extremely short legs.

Lee considers these short films to have been financially well worth making, they’ve been broadcast twice and he still has ownership so that he can exploit them further. There were more questions about the difficulty of retaining one’s integrity – Lee maintained that since so much of what is broadcast follows exactly the same format, the idiosyncratic approach can flourish and provides an individual with the freedom to express themselves.

His message, like many of our recent speakers, was that we should ‘make stuff’ come what may. The choice is whether one wants simply to work in TV – and there’s nothing wrong with that – or create your own content in order to make your stylistic mark?

We saw more clips from Lee’s output including ‘Lee Kern’s A – Z of Love’ where he appeared for the first time in front of camera interviewing residents of Lovers Lane and Singleton Street etc. He also told us about the spoof company/spoof format ‘Monkey Tennis’ pitch to executives of the Edinburgh Film Festival which was reported in the Guardian. Another of Lee’s hilarious format ideas was ‘Rolf Harris Draws the News’ – he asked us to imagine Rolf drawing an escaped convict and asking “can you tell who it is yet?”

The ideas and stories could have flowed all night and we could have stayed listening spellbound but all good things must come to an end sooner or later, though Lee did join us for more networking and general chat over in the Woodman pub so we did our best to prolong the entertainment as late as we could.

We’ve had so much positive feedback from attendees that we have to say a special thank you to Lee for an enthralling evening; we wish him well and look forward to seeing more of his special talent on the airwaves soon. A great guest, he will always be more than welcome to visit us again at any time.