I am beginning a piece of work exploring how young people become filmmakers. I will be focusing on young people who are reaching the end of their school careers through periods of other kinds of training and formal study and into the early years of employment and/or work in filmmaking. I am interested in young filmmakers who have accessed organisations and projects, which support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to enter the creative workforce; and I am particularly interested in young people from minority communities, who learning in interest-led communities enter the labour market via non-traditional routes and often without conventional qualifications.

This project is based at the LSE and is part of the second stage of work associated with the Connected Learning Research Network and aims to find out:

• what kind of support and structure needs to be available during these more protracted periods of instability and part-time employment?
• how can young people learn about and take advantage of progressions between and across these different forms of social structure, qualifications infrastructure and institution to be able to develop organised careers in this kind of economic landscape?
• how and in what ways do the generic properties of ‘digital creativity’ create different kinds of opportunity for employment and movement across traditional work roles?
• what notions of learning identity and continuous ‘professional’ development support or hinder entry into work?

I will produce a series of ‘creative biographies’ drawing on interviews I have already conducted with students of the BfI’s Film Academy and comparing the trajectories of young filmmakers with the digital creative I mapped in the Catalysts & Disconnects projects both from last year.