Spectacle is back on the Silwood Estate with an exciting new project: the Silwood Community Video Archive Project. We’re inviting Silwood residents, past or present, to take part in a series of free, hands-on video archive workshops. Whether you’re interested in learning smartphone filmmaking, editing, or simply want to share your memories of life on the estate, this is your chance to get involved.
Explore newly digitised footage from the Silwood archive, add your voice, and help shape short films that reflect the community’s real history.
Built in the 1950s on a bombed-out patch of South East London, it became home to a tight-knit, multicultural community of dockworkers, newcomers, and families. Despite being split between Lewisham and Southwark in the 1980s, and being labelled a “bad neighbourhood,” residents built a vibrant community, creating youth clubs, nurseries, and resident-led projects.
When regeneration hit, things changed. Lewisham chose demolition, Southwark renovation. New buildings replaced green space. Long-time neighbours were relocated. The heart of the estate was fractured.
Since 2000, Spectacle has been working with Silwood residents to document this transformation capturing over 350 hours of footage in the process. Now, we’re inviting Silwood residents to help shape what happens next.
Together, we’ll…
Learn how to film, edit, and catalogue using simple digital tools
Learn smartphone filmmaking techniques
Co-create archive – based short films that preserve the community’s legacy
Share personal stories, memories, and perspectives
Revisit and reflect on Silwood’s history through never-before-seen archive footage
If this sounds exciting – please register your interest down below:
Silwood Community Video Archive Project
If interested, please fill in this expression of interest form. Please feel free to pass this form on to anyone else who could be interested. Thank you.
Spectacle has been for 30+ years at the forefront of Participatory Video, supporting local communities, activists and grassroot organisations to produce their own videos. Over the last year we have helped the FAO – Food and Agriculture Agency of the United Nations collecting stories of unsung heroes facing the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and multiple forms of malnutrition in their communities. Our Participatory Video expertise helped local activists from all over the world produce short videos telling their stories and sharing their ideas and efforts for sustainable nutrition and climate change mitigation in their communities.
The project ‘Stories from local heroes fighting climate change, biodiversity, and malnutrition crises’ has allowed young people from Nepal, Nigeria, Kenya, Ecuador and Venezuela to be trained in using their phones as cameras, learning how to document their life and tell their stories of activism. Through a series of initial online training sessions, Spectacle helped participants develop their skills and storytelling techniques.
In tune with our ethos and practice, all participants have learned videomaking techniques and have been allowed to direct the way the stories were developed and presented, engaging them with all phases of the video production, from filming to editing.
Climate change, biodiversity and nutrition – Helping local heroes tell their stories
Spectacle facilitated a series of workshops that allowed Apollo from Kenya, Evelin from Venezuela, Dennis from Ecuador, and Dominic from Nigeria , develop, shoot their film and direct the editing of their stories. Their 4 videos will help FAO bring to the wider public the voices of those who have direct experience of the impact of climate change and inspire other local actors with ideas on how to contribute to a better and more sustainable world.
We are proud to share here the 4 videos that were the final result of the Participatory Video process.
Apollo: Helping family farmers save food in Kenya
Dennis: Going organic in Ecuador
Dominic: Regenerative agriculture and food security in Nigeria
Evelyn: Sowing satisfaction – Dorka’s family garden
We welcome any opportunity to explore collaborations with research groups, NGOs and local communities to facilitate Participatory Video projects and develop participant-led video production.
Read more about our participatory model and past projects.
For 40 years, Spectacle has pioneered community led video projects and collaborative filmmaking, aiming to give groups and communities the tools and the skills to document what matters through collaborative video projects. Spectacle has led, co-led, and facilitated participatory film groups and workshops of all shapes and sizes.
We have delivered our affordable and enjoyable courses in participatory filmmaking to hundreds of researchers, journalists, and community groups.
Over the last year Spectacle has successfully developed ways to facilitate participatory video workshops remotely, working with researchers from UCL, Oxford, and LSE, and community groups ranging from Colombia to London to Malawi.
This remote Participatory Video project, called Reinventada, was based in Medellin, Colombia. The research project was funded by the London School of Economics (LSE) Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fund (KEI). Through weekly workshops, displaced and migrant women learned the skills of filming and editing and documented their lives as mothers and heads of household, living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Medellin, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The film that came from this research premiered in October 2021 at The International Documentary Film Festival of Bogotá.
OVERDUE – University College London, UCL
Photo by: Sulaiman Kamara, 2020 Image from https://overdue-justsanitation.net/
Spectacle is running a series of training workshops for researchers at UCL working on the OVERDUE project, which is tackling sanitation inequality in three fast-growing African cities: Beira (Mozambique), Freetown (Sierra Leone), and Mwanza (Tanzania).
Our training in participatory video method offers an excellent resource for disrupting dominant narratives and cliches, or for understanding the impact of a project such as OVERDUE, by asking the beneficiaries to document the impact in their daily lives.
GemDev – University College London, UCL
Lima, Image from GEMDev.net
Tracing the story of where we get our energy is one very important way to understand a society. For researchers from UCL’s Grounded Energy Modelling for equitable urban development in the global South (GEMDev) project – tracing community’s energy use using oral histories and visual storytelling is key to understanding what energy means in impromptu communities.
In June 2021, Spectacle had the opportunity to work with Dr. Michelle Nicholson-Sanz and provide video training for the participants in her innovative Young Ecovisions project.
The Silwood Video Archive Project marries participatory methods with video archive material in a series of narrative building workshops supported by The Audience Agency’s Digitally Democratising Archivesproject thanks to funding from DCMS and the National Lottery, as part of The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Digital Skills for Heritageinitiative.
In June, Spectacle began an online participatory video workshop series for a group of residents and community leaders in Greenwich. This programme of 8 half day workshops was designed to build the skills and capacity of the diverse Greenwich communities to co-produce media.
In January, Spectacle ran a bespoke training course for The Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS). Spectacle’s training will give these researchers the skills to film with a more professional production quality and edit with an eye for narrative flow. Going forward, this will enable them to make short videos to effectively communicate their research to a larger audience.
Book your Training Workshop
Spectacle offers bespoke training either one-on-one or to groups. These can be arranged to fulfil your specific needs. Bespoke training can be built around your project so you can book sessions at your convenience and get the advice you need.
Spectacle Media bespoke training courses
We work in any time zone globally. Browse our courses, or email training@spectacle.co.uk for information on bespoke workshops.
In June, Spectacle began an online participatory video workshop series for a group of residents and community leaders in Greenwich.
This programme of 8 half day workshops was designed to build the skills and capacity of the diverse Greenwich communities to co-produce media. Through this training in smartphone video making, these individuals aim to produce content for and about their community of interest.
Over eight half day sessions this course is equipping the participants with core video production and editing skills. They are learning about cameras, framing, talking head interviews, filming locations, shooting action sequences, shooting to edit and editing.
Through practical exercises participants develop their technical skills and visual storytelling between sessions. The freedom of these exercises encourages participants to begin filming places and people for their projects. Topics of interest range from fashion to noise pollution to exercise and wellbeing. Some in the group are entrepreneurs running their own start ups and are excited to create content to showcase their enterprises.
Spectacle’s skill development workshops give participants a foundation in the skills required to produce engaging, good-quality video content. After only four sessions, feedback has been tremendously positive. One participant called the sessions, “eye opening.” Another spoke of how the practical exercises gave her the push and confidence to overcome her nervousness about filming.
Though the participants live locally within the same area, many do not know each other. These online sessions are also designed to encourage community cohesion and cooperation between diverse groups. Spectacle encourages resource sharing especially of equipment and skills and opens up opportunities to brainstorm about collaborations and future projects.
Spectacle’s participatory workshops are delivered live and are fully responsive to participants’ needs. These workshops assume no prior video knowledge and can be adapted to the available equipment of any group.
Participatory Workshops at Spectacle
Spectacle specialises in facilitating Participatory Video (PV) workshops aiming to give participants the tools to speak for and among themselves through video. You can read about our method here.
We approach filmmaking collaboratively and use workshops to share skills, responsibility, and authorship. Spectacle’s PV process is based on workshops in which group members build technical competence, gain confidence in their creative inputs, control the editorial process, and share ownership of the final film.
For over 40 years we have collaborated on participatory video projects with community groups, educational institutions including schools and universities, academics, researchers, NGOs, local councils, cultural institutions, and museums.
Our participatory video workshops can adapt to the nature and duration of any project. From research to outreach, from documenting to pure filmmaking strategy, working with existing groups or creating new ones, we can lead, facilitate, or just assist with your project.
If you are interested in learning more about Participatory Video consider our two week intensive course covering all aspects of our method and advice for planning your own workshops.
Being in a Reality TV programme can be psychologically damaging. To make sure you can financially benefit from your exploitation it is a good idea to have a public relations agent. He will look over product endorsement contracts for you and make sure when your private life is exposed in the press it is on the front page.
In this picture the contestant is trying hard to win and keep his dignity. He is thinking about the fame and fortune that will follow. How the woman at the check out is going to say something like “‘Ere weren’t you on telly last night?”
The nice people at the Television company invite their friends and family to be in the studio audience. Being in a TV audience is very easy but these days you need to know how to Whoop! like an American, which some English people find hard to do. You can practice this at home before you go “on set”.
People in the early twenty first century thought nothing of watching the insane for entertainment. It was seen as quite normal. People used to joke that it was often hard to decide who was the madder, the actors, the crew or the viewers. There are stories of the celebs leaving the asylum and the wrong people being kept inside.
Have a look at this “behind the scenes” image of a reality TV studio shoot and if you have any idea for a caption add it below.
Through the series of workshops, the participants shot interviews with Charlton Ladies players and coaches, with footage of them in action at their training sessions.
This has now been edited into a short film, profiling the Ladies Team, their current successes and future aspirations of both the team and individuals involved.
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Have a look at this “behind the scenes” image of a reality TV studio shoot and if you have any idea for a caption add it below.
The 10 Minute film produced through video workshops, in association with Kickz and Charlton Athletic Community Trust is now available to watch online.