news from Littlestar HQ

Hey, Colette here, writing up today's news.

Since coming under the spotlights of Hollywood in films such as The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth, climate change has been hot on the radar of filmmakers, documentary journalists and news broadcasters alike. It’s an issue that has caused a state of near-constant red alert in social and political circles, and it’s just as important that young people today get their voices heard in what concerns the vital future of a living planet.

Today I caught up with the ringleaders of MYVP’s new creative project in the realm of short film, to take a sneak peek at what they were doing to promote the power of sharp young minds in today’s society.

I’m at Littlestar, a studio located deep in the heart of Manchester’s Northern Quarter, and over on two black couches, three heads are conferring busily. Meet Connor, Jack, and Steve. They’re running over props, storyboarding, and the tricky prospect of cajoling a shop owner into letting his floor space be overrun by cameras during one part of the film’s shoot, due to start later this week.

It’s still early days for MYVP’s latest film project, which has been running since the 21st July, but already ideas for the film’s direction have been bandied back and forth across the table. In order to focus on such a broad topic, the decision has been to draw the focus on the project's environmental theme in microcosm.
I’m told that the original intention was to keep the short impersonal, but eventually a central character was introduced as a figure that people can identify with. Cue a nameless mother-of-three, brought to life by Justine Adams, who has previously worked on the likes of Coronation Street and Emmerdale.
“We wanted to give it a suburban theme”, Jack tells me, “focusing on just a normal household day.”
The storyboards scattered across the table show a montage of this normal household day, though on closer inspection, it’s one filled with subtle hints and messages about how easy it is to stop wasting resources such as heat, electricity and water.
The short’s protagonist is a recognisable one: a stressed out stay-at-home mother, struggling to connect with her eldest son who has reached the brink of teenagerhood, and two youngsters who won’t get out from under her feet. Isolated from an absentee husband who disappears each morning on the daily grind, she is a forgetful and distracted individual, and pays little attention to the chores she carries out around the house. As a result, she’s wasteful, and completely unaware of the potential damage she’s doing to the world around her. The film will describe an alternative way of going about her daily routine, and highlight just how simple it is to make such changes on a day-to-day basis.

Filming will take place in Levenshulme, and I’ll be back with news from the set in just a few days’ time.