Film is for everyone and we want to encourage as wide an audience as possible to get involved with, learn about, and use film to capture stories around them. Our educational media projects involve young people and local communities in film production using film and video to deliver a creative active and lifelong learning experience.

All our projects, which we run in partnership with a range of organisations, promote a sense of place and identity and increase skills and confidence in the people who take part. Our focus is on engaging people from ethnic minorities, people on lower incomes, young people, and people with disabilities.

Our Media Education projects enhance the educational opportunities available to individuals and groups through media activities in a framework which complements everyday experiences. We offer informal Media Education opportunities addressing the personal and social development of both communities and individuals. It presents an ideal vehicle to develop themes of lifelong learning, social inclusion and active citizenship.

Through innovative projects, we work with communities helping people capture and tell contemporary stories. We seek to engage people as they enjoy developing transferable skills and use their new media knowledge to produce or support a range of productions.

All our projects meet particular needs but they all have some features in common:

Grass-roots engagement - all projects are developed collaboratively with communities to meet their needs, creating projects which will inspire and motivate audiences.

Partnership with local bodies - projects are embedded locally by working with partner organisations, from local councils to youth organisations, to develop high quality relevant projects and to maximise resources.

Editorial - we ensure that all our projects are led by the people involved providing a high quality active learning experience.

Sustainability - sustainability is built in from the outset, for example providing skills that can be used after the project has ended and ensuring that a video project has a vigorous distribution plan providing on-going access to a wide audience.

Evaluation - each project is evaluated to assess the impact that these new projects have on the communities with whom we work. We use a combination of video diaries, forums and written evaluation to measure the successfulness of our projects.