Alex Shipman / Company Director
Alex Shipman is an award winning filmmaker, BFI Film Academy and NFTS Craft Skills Residential Alumni. Alex is now a self-shooter/camera operator working in documentaries and EPK. She has worked on documentaries for BBC, Wellcome Trust and The Guardian on subjects of Mental Illness, gun crime in Birmingham and teenage homelessness. She also shoots EPK and BTS on many different scale productions, ranging from shooting BTS on VHS, Super 8 and 16mm for Channel 4 to covering the making of Mickey 17 (2024) and Wonka.
Her ambition has always been to direct, she has made numerous music videos and short films which have screened in festivals around the world. Her last fiction short, “Inside,” won the Straight 8 “Best 8” Cannes Film Festival award and was championed by filmmaker Mark Jenkins. In 2020 she finished an independent feature documentary about her mum who is a boxer and her latest short documentary is about women's experiences in night clubs visualised through a dance routine, it’s currently on the festival circuit. Alex loves working in experimental ways, whether that be in smaller than average teams or different camera formats such as film or even Gamboy camera’s!
Aside from her filmmaking she teaches course to young people and as a mentor outside of the courses. She has taught on the BFI Future Film Academy for the past 5 years as well as short courses for Eastside Education, Princes Trust, Iconic Steps and mentored for Into Film and Screen Skills.
Alison McCloskey / Managing Director
Alison McCloskey began her career in film education in 2002, as the main tutor and coordinator for Youth Animation and Media, running free filmmaking workshops for children and teenagers in South East London.
Under her leadership, YAM produced 200 short films, animated works and award winning community documentaries. She established YAM on Rye in 2006, the first festival in the UK to exclusively showcase films made by young people. As the Director of the Flipside Youth Film Festival, she trained young adults to plan, programme and deliver pop up screenings in schools and youth clubs across London. Alison is currently an active member of the Youth Cinema Network, an organisation connecting youth film festivals and educators worldwide. She has been a member of the international jury for several of these festivals as well as speaking at conferences and symposia on media education. She sits on the Board of Directors at Fresh Film Ireland and is an International Co-Producer for Honning Film in Oslo, Norway.
In her work with young people, Alison encourages a regard for cinema as an art form and as a vehicle for social engagement and personal empowerment. She emphasizes the responsibility of young filmmakers to innovate and reinvent the medium in the context of a dominant, commercially driven industry, resulting in homogeneous output in which their voices are largely underrepresented.