‘The timescale for the Film Club website was horribly tight but Cimex fully embraced it and went the extra…light year! It’s a fantastic result and an example of how clients and designers should work together,’ Mark Higham, Director: Film Club
Cimex and Film Club enrich children’s lives through film
20 March 2007
Cimex has partnered with Film Club to produce a rich new after-school cinema club resource for children in schools. The www.filmclub.org website is an engaging introduction for children into the vast and imaginative world of film.
At the heart of Film Club is a belief that film broadens minds in extraordinary and unexpected ways. In association with the UK Film Council, LOVEFiLM, the Guardian, Film Education, the BFI and Film Bank, Film Club is working with both teachers and pupils in setting up after-school film clubs where children can access films of all genres – past and present - and be enriched by this engaging medium.
‘I told the Creative Director at Cimex that I wanted to empower the team to be as creative as possible, to produce something that they would look back at and think ‘this is great work’. We also wanted something that communicated directly to young people. Cimex used this to inform the design and functionality and we have had great feedback from Film Club students as a result. The timescale for the Film Club website was horribly tight but Cimex fully embraced it and went the extra…light year! It’s a fantastic result and an example of how clients and designers should work together,’ Mark Higham, Director: Film Club.
The project, awarded to Cimex after a competitive tender in late 2006, encourages interested schools to register online and gain access to over 62,000 titles as the project rolls out. Films can be searched for and ordered online using an A-Z list, with browse functions by theme, age or season.
Once an order is placed, the selected film is posted to the relevant school by partners, LOVEFiLM. The school sets up the viewing and returns the film thereafter. All films are offered to schools for free.
The site includes user generated content (UGC) allowing pupils to rate, write and share reviews with other schools.
Film Club has lined up actors, directors, writers and other leading film industry figures to visit schools giving personal talks about their experiences. These will be covered on the website and through the visits users will get a glimpse behind the curtain at the art of movie-making and all that it encompasses. The first celebrities to be involved include novelist Nick Hornby, Chancellor Gordon Brown and actress Thandie Newtown.
‘What a fantastic project to work on,’ commented Nikki Barton, Creative Director: Cimex. ‘We are a creative company and naturally passionate about the imaginative and explorative qualities of motion pictures. Film Club is an exciting way of getting young people to think differently and we’re pleased to be associated with that.’
Cimex was responsible for the research, user testing, design and build of the site.