HotHouse Theatre Film Clubs.

Brickyard Film Club


For 10 years we have been running a project working with young people from the Brickyard Estate creating films and video reports. As a consequence, we have built up a unique relationship with many of the young people, many of whom have now become young adults.

These sessions were focused on engaging disadvantaged young people in the project, developing their self-confidence, self-esteem and increasing their aspiration.

The aim was to progress them on to other voluntary projects, to become involved in positive activity within their community, and to develop an improved attitude to their personal future and their ability to make a difference.

The project had to change as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it went online and became an audio project, involving the young people in the creation of podcasts, audio sketches and short plays and virtual trips including various themed trips around the world.

It is from this development that the idea for the Radio Youth project was born.

Projects in the last 12 months include:
• Monthly ‘What’s On’ podcast looking at things of interest coming up in the area
• Halloween fake news broadcast
• Retiring Santa – a Christmas story for 2020
• Around the world in 180 minutes
• A Very Pandemical Conspiracy – a short audio play looking at conspiracy theories around the pandemic
• Lockdown podcasts – a chat show style piece looking at life for young people in lockdown
• Village of the Scammed – a short audio play exploring issues around safety on the internet

The finished items appeared on the Oh My Nottz website.

Brickyard 15+

Thanks to Children in Need funding in 2017 we began a series of activities aimed at older young people on the Brickyard Estate. Some of these young people had started hanging around on the estate, were at 'a difficult age' and were getting a lot of negative feedback from the community. They had also started to put up barriers against their community and had started displaying antisocial behaviour. Some of these are past members of the Film Club, which gave us an excellent route in to engaging them in positive activity.

These sessions had been initially geared towards the specific interests of young people concerned, which involved a great deal of outreach work to get to know them better. This paid off.

We ran 1 session per month specifically aimed at this group. These initial sessions were adventurous, including paintball, go karting, rock climbing. Later sessions were aimed at directing them toward progression and personal development, including running careers advice sessions with Futures, the local careers advice project.

We are looking for funding to allow us to bring this project into the Radio Youth project in the near future.

Lenton Film Club

This one-off project had 10 young people involved in creating a film from scratch using their ideas and some very inventive editing by Dan.

The young people were recruited through a combination of outreach work, visiting local schools and work with the Lenton Centre.

The finished film got it's World Premier at our AGM and went down extremely well. It formed part of the 'Christmas Stocking Bonus Edition 2020' of Oh My Nottz.