Our week with Project CREATE

Two A-Level students from Rochdale Sixth Form College, Manchester, recently completed a week’s internship with Project CREATE at the University of Leeds. They created a short film about the project’s goals and impact, exploring how art and science can come together to understand young people’s mental health. And they share their experience in this blog post.

My name is Aidan Cooke and my friend Edward Green and I have recently had the opportunity to complete work experience with project CREATE at the University of Leeds. We spent a few days creating a short film about the project which was an incredible learning experience, both practically with cameras and it gave us an insight into the project itself.

Getting to know Project CREATE

We started by learning more about what Project CREATE is. It’s a research project that brings together young people, artists and scientists to look at mental health, especially things like loneliness in teenagers. They are aiming to quantify and provide evidence for the use of arts-based practices in mental health research. Instead of using quantitative data like graphs and surveys they use arts like poetry and music.

“Asking open-ended questions during interviews helped us capture different perspectives.”

Our main job was to capture the project on camera. We conducted several interviews with various team members and asked them about project CREATE. This gave use different viewpoints, so we could combine answers and bring out what we thought project CREATE was really about.

Behind the camera: the art of interviewing

We learnt how to create good, open-ended questions and really listen to the answers. The interviews were quite intimidating at first but after doing five of them we got the hang of it. We also shot B-roll footage (extra shots of the team and surroundings to support the interviews) of team members in the office and surrounding areas in Leeds to tie the interviews together.

One of the most important things we learnt during the work experience is that art and science don’t have to be separate. Often there seems to be this separation between the two where arts use feelings and qualitive data whereas science focuses on more concrete facts and figures. However, project CREATE brings these two together to get a better understanding of something so complex like mental health.

Bringing it all together

We then spent two days on postproduction editing the interviews down and adding cutaways, etc. We both learnt a lot in this process using Adobe Premiere Pro, a professional video editing software, providing us with valuable skills. This took a while with a lot of trial and error, but we ended up with something we are proud of.

Project CREATE, at its core, provides support for young people struggling with loneliness

By the end of the week, we created a short 6-minute film as a series of interviews to really try and project the message on what CREATE is wanting to achieve. Project CREATE, at its core, provides support for young people struggling with loneliness.

Thank you to the CREATE team for giving us this opportunity it has been very insightful and made us look at filmmaking in a completely different way!

Watch the short film about Project CREATE, produced by our two interns