Archives for Education

We are grateful for the support of our project partners:

As cultural heritage organisations digitise their collections and increase public access, moving image portals like the IFI Player, DFA Player, BFI Player and BBC iPlayer provide audiences with virtual screening rooms to view their shared audiovisual history on demand. But the creative reuse of moving image archive material remains problematic, beset by questions of copyright law, rights clearance and "fair dealing" exceptions, and an audiovisual archives sector without a standardised framework to open up access to this material for creative reuse by emerging filmmakers in education and the community. Emerging filmmakers cannot access this material without significant funding from film funds or broadcasters to pay commercial license fees.

The Make Film History project has addressed this problem by developing a new, sustainable model for the creative reuse of archive material for non-commercial use by emerging filmmakers, supported by our project partners, the British Film Institute (BFI), BBC Archive, the Irish Film Institute and Northern Ireland Screen.

Funded by AHRC and the Irish Research Council, the project has created a new research network around the creative reuse of archive material by emerging filmmakers, developing new partnerships between academic researchers and a range of non-academic partners - audiovisual archives and cultural heritage organisations who preserve and license this material; schools and training providers developing new talent in the creative industries; and regional film festivals who bring the local film community together.

The project is led by Dr Shane O’Sullivan (Kingston School of Art) and Dr Ciara Chambers (University College Cork) and supported by researcher Dr Colm McAuliffe (Kingston School of Art). It builds on the success of the innovative Archives for Education project, extending the scope of the creative reuse of archive material beyond higher education to emerging filmmakers across the UK and Ireland.

The project asks: "How can we license moving image archive material for creative reuse by emerging filmmakers for education, training and community use? How can the creative reuse of this material increase community engagement with hidden cultural heritage and strengthen communities through new work created by emerging filmmakers reflecting on the past and developing talent for the future"?

From June to November 2022, to mark the BBC centenary, we offered emerging filmmakers across the UK access to 150 films from BBC Archive for creative reuse on short film projects on themes including the environment, mental health, youth culture and cultural diversity. 50 emerging filmmakers created short films in response to this BBC collection, uncovering the forgotten histories of underrepresented communities. You can view a selection of the films on the BBC website and all the films here.

We also worked with AHRC and the BFI on on the NHS Untold Film Stories scheme, mentoring three exciting new archive-inspired films to mark the 75th anniversary of the NHS. They will be available on BFI Player shortly.

UPDATE: NOVEMBER 2024

With follow-on funding from AHRC, the Make Film History team has spent the last year improving the user experience of our film platform; creating a new online course; and running a series of Make Film History events at Sheffield DocFest, BFI Southbank and the Irish Film Institute to build academic, public and industry engagement with the project.

Please follow us on X or sign up to the mailing list. If you or your organisation would like to participate in the project, please contact Dr Shane O’Sullivan or Dr Ciara Chambers.

For details of past events we’ve been involved in, please go to our Events page.