BRANCHING OUT 

Alchemy Film & Arts has been collaborating with Branching Out Youth Group since 2020, when we partnered on a series of socially distanced outdoor film workshops in Wooplaw Community Woodland in Galashiels. A project of Borders Additional Needs Group, Branching Out is a Scottish Borders service for independent young people aged 14 – 21 with additional support needs.

In 2021 we livestreamed Wooplash to audiences worldwide during Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2021, and in 2022 we screened Touch at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2022 – having made both through collaborative methods of outdoor exploratory filmmaking.

We have worked closely with the group to develop My Superpower and Me, in which Branching Out members share from their lived experiences of Autism. 

Branching Out also made an ambitious leap into multi-channel installation at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2022 with their sensory popup exhibition, Start Making Sense. 

Through various interventions, the group generated an interactive space in which audiences were given an opportunity to explore their own sense of calm, comfort and happiness in an environment over which they have a certain amount of control. 

The making of this installation was facilitated by Alchemy’s Film Town Coordinator Tom Swift and under the guidance of artist and educator Lydia Beilby, participants learned about direct animation – applying paint and colour directly onto old 8mm filmstrips – and how to operate an analogue camera. 

Our partnership with Branching Out is part of Film Town, Alchemy Film & Arts’s community-engaged creative learning programme.