HIGH SCHOOL MOVIE MOGULS

Conventional filmmakers said it was madness: Unleash a group of high school students to make a feature film to be screened in a cinema? It can’t be done.

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But in the summer of 2007 some 300 students at Warrington’s Penketh High School, in Cheshire, proved the pundits wrong.

They completed and released 'days' (main photo and left), the world’s first feature film to be shot by a secondary school.

Was this just a Guinness Book of Records kind of spectacle trick or did the final cut have value for both the school and filmgoers?

The latter, apparently, given that the school has just gone into production on a second and even more ambitious film, called Louie, for release in March 2009.

What kind of script would high school filmmakers work on?

Louie is a comedy that will be filmed in France as well as England and tells the story of two exchange students

The eponymous Louis, a sophisticated French boy in provincial England, has to overcome much initial suspicion and resentment, then goes on to change the lives of all those he comes into contact with, in particular, the lives of five disparate and significant pupils.

Meanwhile, the English school’s unruly ASBO bearing nuisance arrives in France in the hope of killing off any future effort at international co-operation in education.

Further details are available from Penketh High School.

Posted June 3, 2008.