Taylor made

CHRIS TAYLOR became aware of the power of film as a 15-year-old schoolboy in Gateshead, when his new English teacher showed the class the courtroom drama, 12 Angry Men. At first, pupils didn’t see the point of watching an old black and white movie. Fifteen minutes later, he recalls, they were enthralled.

“It’s one of my favourite films. At the end, the teacher said ‘Imagine you’re the defence lawyer – what would your closing speech be?’.

Everyone got inspired by that,” he says, surrounded by movie-making equipment in the Newcastle offices of his company, Superkrush.

“Then a couple of weeks later, he put on Boyz In The Hood and we had to transfer those young people’s experiences into our neighbourhood.

The school I went to in Gateshead was a really poor school – it’s closed now – and in a really tough area. I got really excited by film and used to talk to him about it.”

He also showed Stanley Kubrick’s controversial Clockwork Orange. “I remember reading the book and not understanding it, but the way Kubrick visualised it made sense. I was hooked at that point,” he says.

Becoming a film-maker wasn’t an option on leaving school. His dad, a plumber, said he had two choices – electrician or plumber. Chris opted for the former, working in the shipyards in the summer holidays to pay his way through college.

He went to London, “made a load of money” and returned to the North-East to invest it in Superkrush, now an award-winning film and commercial production company, making everything from feature films to music videos and TV commercials.

He’s never forgotten the influence film had on him as a young man. He also runs Engage Media that makes community films with young disaffected people who explore their problems through film-making. The mix of the commercial and community work is unusual, but one in which Taylor believes passionately.

“Superkrush always made community films and then we set up Engage Media in 2007 to work, specifically with people affected by disability and especially the learning disabled, with whom we’re doing more and more work,” he explains.

“Engage works exclusively with young people – the disadvantaged and hard to reach. Both Superkrush and Engage have completely the same ethos, the same way of working.

“It was good to separate the two. Superkrush does all the commercial stuff and Engage is non-profit-making. Superkrush has become the devil and Engage is our golden child.”

Engage’s work is funded on a project-by-project basis. Recent films have looked at bullying, knife crime, teenagers who drink while pregnant and a series of short films made by LD learners at Gateshead College.

Shank, a film made by young offenders in Sunderland, won a Royal Television Society award and was shown at film festivals all over the world.

A project with the Percy Hedley Foundation found young people imagining what they’d like to do if they were prime minister; the policies they’d put in place and what they’d do for disabled people. “That was made by a heavily disabled group with some extreme disabilities, but what’s really interesting is that the product is good,” he says.

“We hand pick the people we work with – the facilitators – and they’re really good at connecting and interacting. It’s about the process and the young people, but it’s also about the product. If you do a great process and then make a film that looks s**t, it’s such an anticlimax for the young people.

“But if you make something that looks like cinema, which is something we all aspire to, it doubles the satisfaction. So when people look at what’s on screen, they go ‘wow’.”

He doesn’t see it as social work. “People say it must be tough working with people with social problems, but you walk in with a camera and you have a captive audience,” says Taylor.

“It’s not only giving because they come up with the ideas and we’re interested in what they have to say.”

He tells of working with a young offender who’d just completed a sentence in prison and who said he loved the song Eye Of The Tiger, featured in the film Rocky. “He said it was about coming out of jail. So we shot some footage of him and put that music over the top.

Next week we showed it to him and he had to turn away it affected him so much. It’s quite powerful in that sense.”

Community film is a stretched and underfunded market, but delivers a valuable service, he believes. Video and art is often seen as a luxury, but he’s positive it is empowering.

‘WORKING with the young people we have, we’ve seen the difference it can make to their lives – and that’s what we’re all about. Giving them confidence and self-esteem, giving their career a focus. There’s load of success stories of people who went on to do drama or into further education because their eyes had been opened.

“There’s also the communication factor. A lot of young people fall out of the school system because of problems with concentration and attention span. The great thing with drama and creative art is that it really does engage them. Creativity has been leeched out of the school system in favour of numeracy, literacy and all those targets.

“Often, it’s not seen as a priority, but it’s a valuable service and we’re trying to develop it. When it comes to an end, young people suffer a little bit with withdrawal. What we’re trying to do is incorporate qualifications, give them careers and life coaching as part of it.

“It’s a tricky one, but great to see when the light goes on in people’s minds and they see all the stuff they’ve learnt is useful. They’ve made a film and it’s a great escape, then they relate it back to real life and how they’ve developed and what they’ve achieved.

“That’s a great moment for us. Often it happens when we put on a premiere at the Tyneside cinema or Cineworld. They bring their parents, who sometimes aren’t the most supportive people, and you see these kids thinking, ‘I did this. You gave up on me and this is what I’ve produced’.”