This film was produced by Barmmy Boy and young people from Wilberforce College during enrichment week activities in June 2007.

Freestyle at Wilberforce College – Hull

A video diary of my stay in the UK.

Barmmy Boy singing ‘The Children’ with students at Wilberforce College – Hull.

Barmmy Boy has travelled from Freetown – Sierra Leone to Hull to undertake a two month media training residency with Cafesociety.org.

Stay tuned to see how the project progresses.

A short film made about the floods that hit Hull in June 2007 produced by Barmmy Boy from Freetown :: Sierra Leone during his stay in Hull.

This film has been produced by year 4 students at The International School – Seychelles during Cafesociety.org photography and film making workshops.

Our main reason for coming to Seychelles this time was to work with a group of 6th formers at the International School to produce an awareness raising film to the dangers of heroin.

Over the past 2/3 years heroin has really taken a hold here on the islands and is affecting the lives of many young people. The major concern is the additives the drug dealers are mixing with the heroin which can prove deadly in some cases.

The film will be screened on national TV and also distributed to all secondary schools here in Seychelles.

A timelapse sunset filmed from the Coral Strand Hotel – Beau Vallon – Mahe – Seychelles.

Sunrise at Anse Royale – on the east coast of Mahe – Seychelles.

This week has been a very busy week. Firstly working in Lincolnshire with students from Brigg 6th Form College on Monday & Tuesday to produce a horror film trailer, then on Wednesday with excluded kids at Wintringham Secondary School in Grimsby to produce a short docu about their experiences of participating in DJ workshops and finally today, Thursday i’ve been working with a small group of hearing impaired kids at Tilbury Primary School in Hull to produce a very short animation about recycling.

I hope you enjoy the film :

We have just finished documenting a project that took place at Oldfleet Primary School in Hull.

Spin Off Theatre Company ran a series of whole school workshops with a focus on William Wilbeforce, the famous Hull MP with the outcome being a whole school production of a play named ‘What Price Freedom’.

We are currently talking with The Refugee All Stars about the possability of a concert in the city of Hull, UK; the twin town of the All Stars. We are hoping the band will play in Hull early December. The visit will also include workshops with local school children.

Here is a short trailer for the documentary film SIERRA LEONE’S REFUGEE ALL STARS.

The film tells the remarkable story of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, a group of musicians who form a band while living in a West African refugee camp.

They were forced from their homes by a brutal civil war that took the lives of many of their loved ones and left them with physical and emotional scars that may never heal. But it could never take away their music.

Through music they find a place of refuge, a sense of purpose and a source of power. This film follows the band over the course of three years as they make the difficult decision to return to their war-torn country and realize their dream of recording an album of their original music.

The story of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars celebrates the best of the human spirit – the incredible ability of individuals to sustain hope and find forgiveness even in a climate of rage and loss.

Take a taxi ride through the streets of Freetown, Sierra Leone – from Queen Victoria Square in Hull.

An exciting new film by two local film-makers will bring the sights and sounds of life in Hull’s west African twin city to a cargo container in Hull city centre this week.

‘Taxi’, by Jon Robson and Murray Clark, has been commissioned by Hull Short Film Festival. The 20 minute film – presented in a split-screen format – has been produced from hours of footage shot through the windows of slow moving taxis.

Jon and Murray’s aim was to capture the vibrancy and life of the streets of Freetown, whilst at the same time showing the poverty and hardship of life in a city which is still recovering from the recent decade-long civil war.

Jon Robson explained how the film has developed: “A team of us visited Sierra Leone last May to develop a media-in-education project involving young people in Freetown and Hull – this film has grown out of that project. The two cities have been twinned for 25 years but we felt that few people in Hull had any real idea of what life is like in Freetown.

“People who visit the container in Victoria Square will experience Freetown almost exactly as we experienced it. It really is an amazing place, full of colour, action and incredible sights, as well as the sounds of people trading, hawking goods through the taxi window, shouting and chatting in the street – and all the time in the background the bouncing sounds of Sierra Leonean radio stations.”

Taxi is just one strand of the work that Jon’s organisation Cafesociety.org is developing in Freetown.

A year-long programme of work in Hull schools, supported by Creative Partnerships Hull, will develop young people’s media skills and strengthen relationships between the two cities.

A further documentary project is in development for broadcast on national TV and Cafesociety.org is also working with the British Council, the British Library and Hull Museums on projects relating to Freetown and the abolition of the slave trade.

See what the Yorkshire Post had to say about Taxi :-

This song was written and performed by the Positive Music Project group at iEARN :: Sierra Leone. It is a message for the people of Hull. Please click through to our Freetown movies at YouTube.com to leave comments.

We worked alongside Barmmy Boy at iEARN to help the girls compose and produce a music track for Wilberforce 2007. It took them just 2 days to write the music and lyrics.

We have been so impressed with the musical abilities of the kids out here.

We filmed and recorded the accapella song outside the gates of the national stadium.

This guy is rumoured to be the best dancer in Freetown.

We tend to agree with the rumours.

We arrived back in Freetown very late monday evening and have been catching up with friends we met on our last project visit.

So far we have visited Good News, Andrew @ iEARN, Sidibay, Franklyn, The Studio D posse, Barmmy Boy and not forgetting
our very good friends Lambless..

Franklyn Koroma is a good friend of ours that we met in Freetown a few months ago.

He is the Youth representative at iEARN :: Sierra Leone.
We decided to pay for his travel to the UK to enable him to come and train with us in film and photography.

This is Franklyn’s first film and definately not his last.

[video width="320" height="240"]http://www.deptimage.com/movies/sez/Airtel%20Showreel_medium.wmv[/video]

Click play button to start the movie

This is the final showreel in the collection of short films produced at the International School :: Seychelles for the mobile phone company Airtel.
The brief was to include local landscapes and local people.

We worked with a team of sixth formers who developed the ideas to show the different elements of what 3G could be.

To view the rest of the movies click here

The end results are fantastic.

It’s there on all the signs when you enter Hull: “Twinned with Freetown, Sierra Leone” but what does it actually mean to anyone who lives in either of those cities?

Film-maker Jon Robson took a crew from this remote city in eastern England to learn more about life in west Africa. This is the story of their experiences….

William Wilberforce is the name that unites Hull and Freetown, and in case you’ve missed the hype, next year – 2007 – will be the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, an inspiring event which came about largely due to the efforts of Billy Wilberforce. Good lad, well done.

Before being given its current name, the port at Freetown was one of the centres of the slave trade in Africa. In the 1780’s or 90’s, thanks to emancipators like Wilberforce, it was renamed and established as a base for the repatriation of freed slaves. A whole area of the city is named Wilberforce, you see his name on streets, buildings and shop signs all over the place.

Ask anyone in Freetown who Wilberforce was and they’ll tell you. Whether we could say the same thing, here, in the man’s home town is a another thing.

So the three of us – myself, film-maker/photographer Murray Clark, and writer Matt Stephenson – were funded by Creative Partnerships Hull to visit Freetown and produce work (films and writing) with young people out there, bring it back, and then do similar work with pupils in five Hull schools.

The idea is to use visual images and the written word to help young people express something about their lives, to talk about what matters to them, to try to develop a greater understanding of other cultures, and to at least start to see themselves as being part of a global community.

The way we do that, is to give the kids we’re working with, control over the production and direction of the work we do with them. They decide what the film is about, where they want to take us, who they want to talk to.
Putting yourself in their hands makes for an amazing experience – you get to see life as they see it. And in Sierra Leone that can be a very emotional experience.

The country was engulfed in a brutal civil war for 10 years until 2002, and the wounds, emotional and physical, are far from healed.
Imagine if child soldiers, coke-crazed teens with AK47s, were rampaging down Holderness Road, opening fire at random, slicing off limbs and setting people alight. That’s what life was like in Sierra Leone.

Nearly everyone you speak to has first-hand experience of loss or terror.
Then pile some poverty on top of that. The people of Sierra Leone have the lowest average income in the world, earning less than a dollar a day. Life expectancy is 38 years for men, 42 for women. One in four kids don’t make it to their fifth birthday.

There’s no free education, no electricity, no free healthcare.
Life is incredibly difficult, yet so many of the people we met have the most amazing, inspirational hope and faith and the kids we worked with have produced some amazing films.

We filmed street football and interviewed the players about their hope that the sport can unite their country and lift them out of poverty.
We interviewed street kids – orphans who work all day for a living and sleep rough.
We helped to make a drama about AIDS and the value of education, films about the hardships of the city’s market traders, about the history of Freetown.
One 14 year old boy, Sidibay, told us the story of how his family were killed and he was conscripted by the rebels to become a child soldier.
It was an amazing, moving visit and we were very privileged to be looked after by some wonderful people.

So what happens next? First thing is that we’ll be working in Hull schools, showing the films, talking about our experiences, and then asking pupils in Hull to write and produce films, photography, journalism and creative writing that can be shown to audiences in Freetown.

Click above to start the movie playing.

But more than that, we want to play a part in helping people in Hull to understand what life is like in their Twin City, to find a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood with the descendants of the slaves that Wilberforce helped free.

We want people here to experience Freetown and to help the people of Sierra Leone to build a better life.

Jon/Matt/Murray