Signature, Job Centre, UnLtd team on shorts trainee scheme

Employment minister Esther McVey will be among the guests at the ICA on Monday for the premiere of a new short film produced by Signature Pictures, the Job Centre and social enterprise UnLtd.

London-set short film Belle, a psychological drama about a complicated mother-daughter relationship, is the first film produced by Signature Pictures as part of Future Film, a scheme to give unemployed youth experience of working in film.

The scheme sees young adults selected from job centres to shadow heads of department on a production budgeted around £10,000.

Backed by social enterprise outfit UnLtd, the initiative is the brainchild of Signature’s Jon Max Spatz, writer, producer and director of Belle.

Signature aims to produce a further four shorts using the same structure this year and will next head to other parts of the UK with high youth unemployment. Trainees are unpaid but have travel, expenses and accommodation covered.

Heads of department have varying levels of experience. Belle’s production designer Rebecca Milton most recently worked on Morten Tyldum’s thriller The Imitation Game, starring Keira Knightley and Benedict Cumberbatch, while experienced gaffer Ray Cooke was an electrician on Ken Branagh’s studio production Cinderella.

While Spatz has not heard back from all 13 participants, there has been very positive feedback from some.

Trainee director Guy Larsen said: “The shoot days went brilliantly. Having an entire ‘trainee crew’ on set meant developing links with people at the same stage as myself. The contacts I made on the shoot of Belle were so useful that you could shoot a totally separate film with the ‘work experience’ people.”

“I am no longer on Jobseeker’s Allowance,” he continued. “I have been offered a contract at Google making films for one of their largest YouTube channels. The experiences I gained assisting in the direction of Belle I took away and utilised when directing my own film that was funded by Camden Roundhouse. The writer of the film, Mark Grist, was so impressed by the product and my experience that he is currently in talks with a company who want to make more films with me, with a budget ten times the size.”

“This is something of a passion project that I believe can do some good,” Spatz told Screen.

“There’s a certain stigma attached to being in the job queue - I have been in it myself,” he continued. “This was an opportunity for young people to get experience in an industry that is normally pretty closed off to them. It was key for them to feel like they weren’t just tea boys. They were there to do a job. It didn’t take up a lot of time and participants were very happy to be involved.”

Spatz was previously a video assist assistant on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and now works at the ICO in an administrative role.

The 28 year-old writer-director-producer plans to submit Belle to a number of festivals, including Cannes, and is also working on feature scripts for music label Mighty Village and one for agency UTA.