HOTHOUSE at LFS invites nine filmmakers to come together to create an atelier, guided by their own questions, challenges and ambitions, and supported by each other and a wide range of industry professionals.
HOTHOUSE is a new way of developing signature UK films for world-wide audiences. The initiative, aimed at the whole creative community, is built on The London Film School ethos and organisational context. Although one of its key aims is to build a creative community of filmmakers for peer-to-peer support, HOTHOUSE isn’t a course, a development scheme or a writing workshop, but a professional atelier.
Working from idea through structuring and revising, scheduling and budgeting, to packaging options, participants will emerge with workable projects tied to realistic finance plans.
HOTHOUSE provides an opportunity for people who have already had some success in an expressive medium – film, performance, theatre, visual arts, broadcasting, new media, literature, etc – to develop a signature independent film and make it ready for financing and production. Rather than working in isolation, writers, directors and producers are given a calendar of group seminars, individual meetings, deadlines and feedback, case studies and mentoring built on the specific challenges of each proposed film.
Over the 15 months, participants will benefit from interaction with other filmmakers, enabling new modes of collaboration and deepening existing partnerships. The process arises from the creative tension between group deadlines and common experiences on the one hand, and individual prescriptions for a particular film on the other. Without tightly defined parameters and definite deadlines the process would not contain the limits necessary to stimulate individual creativity and the structures to support its public expression. Whilst fixed deadlines are essential, HOTHOUSE fully expects each project to break the mould supplied and establish its own signature.
HOTHOUSE allows space for the continuous development of a filmmaker’s specific process, whilst challenging everyone to find new resources and engage with new ideas and responses, thus prefiguring their cinema audience. Timely questions and notes from development executives allow for the imaginative exploration of the original material and its potential. Strategic interventions from specialists in all aspects of cinematic storytelling are aimed at providing fresh perspectives and new tools.
At each stage participants will investigate their work through another person’s eyes, to see it as if for the first time as collaborator not just as creator. Along the way participants will benefit from the extended LFS teaching community and professional network. At the end of HOTHOUSE the encounter with a mentor will provide the advice necessary for further project and career development.
