Wee Shots:::Big Message

Wee shots is something I'd really like to share with everyone. It's the result of a lot of hard and inspired work. My involvement in it was marginal, but even marginal involvement in this case means I spent a significant amount of time on it.

Wee Shots came about as an idea, in the then YES Project office of Save the Children in Glasgow: making very short little films of what poverty means to children who grow up in deprived areas and using these views of children to explain what Save the Children's UK work is all about.

The idea inspired colleagues across the UK, and eventually got the sign off for a first programme of direct work with children and young people within our newly focussed work on child poverty in the UK. Almost a year after the initial conception of the idea as a local project, you can now view wee shots from across the UK: 4 groups of young people came together for one week each and explored the issue of child poverty in their area, making a one minute film each. These wee shots were pulled together to a national film. Now the national film is admittedly a bit disjointed because the groups of children and young people came up with lots of different ideas and styles and the whole point of the work was that everything was owned by the young people: their ideas, their views, their script, their storyboard, their editing, they approved, they made the films, rather than us creating a script to which to work. So watch the regional wee shots too, because those are the pieces that the young people actually created.

In practice, one film company (urban croft, don't you just love that name?) worked with a group of primary aged children in Glasgow, then went straight to Bradford, Oldham and London for a week each to work with older young people. 4 weeks of full on work, followed by the editorial process and further meetings with the groups. I was only involved with the Glasgow part of the project, an amazing experience with an enthusiastic and fun crowd.

National Film:


Glasgow Film:


And feel free to go to youtube to see the other wee shots from Bradford, Oldham and London.