Thursday 9 July marked the beginning of the latest big project for Routes into Languages East. Fourteen teachers from schools in the region attended a film-training day at Anglia Ruskin, led by Sarah Gibson Yates from the Department of English Communication, Film and Media. The project comprises four training days, culminating in a film competition, which is open to all Key Stage 3 (KS3) pupils in the region.

The project grew out of discussions between Comberton Village College teachers, Rachel Hawkes and Jane Driver, and the Routes East team, Tony Morgan (Director) and Sarah Schechter (Project Manager), and marks the beginning of a partnership between Routes East at Anglia Ruskin university, Comberton Village College and the Cambridgeshire Film Consortium. It is one of many ways that Routes is working to encourage young people to study languages. This project uses film to motivate the youngsters. The course gave the teachers an overall view of the phases of film making and the techniques involved, so that they can now teach their KS3 pupils as well as disseminate the knowledge back to colleagues. The course and competition are supported by a teaching pack, produced by Jane Driver, and the day included a session on using Microsoft Movie Maker, delivered by Leigh McClelland, the third of the Comberton trio.

Feedback from the teachers was extremely positive, with comments such as "I think the day was inspirational to most of us... I came away feeling really excited about the project. It will be really useful to share all the info with my department and, in the future, I intend to share details of the project with other schools in the area network... I am really looking forward to working on this and am sure the students will love it!"

The content of the course will be available to all teachers in the region through a podcast, which will be created from the filming of the day by two of our Media student, Alexandros Papathanosiou and Anthony Smith, as well as a wiki with all materials produced.

As well as the initial overview and introduction to the project, there are further training days before each phase of the competition, covering pre-production, production and post-production. The pupils will then disseminate to their peers, as part of student leadership, and manage the film-making projects themselves. They will submit five-minute films in a foreign language of their choice, to be screened at a special premiere in partnership with the Cambridgeshire Film Consortium, represented by Trish Sheil of the Arts Picturehouse.

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