The Media School

Lights, camera, action for Academy Pictures

9 February 2010

A new initiative unveiled by the Bournemouth Skillset Screen and Media Academy will help BU media production students and alumni fulfill their ambitions of seeing their work reach the silver screen.

Academy Pictures, launched in co-production with Ealing Films, will enable Bournemouth’s finest cinematic talent to develop, produce and release feature films.

The project will harness the industry-recognised excellence of the talent and teaching in film and media at both BU and the Arts University College in Bournemouth who partner the Skillset Academy.

Academy Pictures will invest in the ideas and talent of Bournemouth students with a view to producing a feature film with a £100,000 cash budget. It will be supervised by the Academy and Ealing Films, external industry professionals, and academic leaders at BU and the AUCB.

Current students and alumni from both BU and the AUCB have until 8 March to submit a short treatment of an original idea for potential production as a film. From the initial submissions, 10 will be shortlisted and presented to a panel of judges including:

Gary Kurtz – Academy Award-nominated producer of Star Wars, American Graffiti, and many other movies in a 40-year career to date;
Peter Urie – Managing Director of Metrodome Distribution, who recently released the BAFTA-nominated micro-budget feature film hit Shifty;
Ann Phillips – Acquisitions Manager at West End Films, which came on board to handle British independent film The Disappearance of Alice Creed along with Stephen Frears’ latest film Tamara Drewe.

After a process of sifting through all the initial pitches, the panel will choose the best three treatments to be fully developed to feature film screenplay stage. Out of these, it is hoped that one will make the grade and be good enough to be ‘greenlit’ into production later in 2010.

The Bournemouth Academy is one of Britain’s very few dual status Screen and Media Academies, as designated by Skillset, the UK Government’s Sector Skills Agency for creative media. The Academy reflects the outstanding pedigree of the two neighbouring university institutions at Bournemouth in producing excellent practitioners in film and media.