Ja­nine Charles-Far­ray

Young peo­ple across Trinidad and To­ba­go will soon have a space on TV where they can tune in to talk about mak­ing movies. Film Flix is the soon-to-be launched week­ly TV show on Gayelle the Chan­nel con­cep­tu­alised for the young and the young-at-heart to in­dulge in di­a­logue about T&T films and film pro­duc­tion. Er­rol Fa­bi­en of Gayelle the Chan­nel con­firmed that the sta­tion is ex­pect­ing to re­ceive the TV se­ries, al­though air dates and times are yet to be con­firmed.

Film Flix will show­case short films from stu­dents and emerg­ing film­mak­ers. The se­ries will give the T&T au­di­ence an op­por­tu­ni­ty to learn about young peo­ple from all over Trinidad and To­ba­go and their love for mak­ing movies.

The show will in­clude in-depth in­ter­views with stu­dent film­mak­ers, who will share their jour­ney through the film­mak­ing process from script to screen and the chal­lenges faced dur­ing film pro­duc­tion, as well as give in­sight in­to their film­mak­ing dreams and as­pi­ra­tions. Each film­mak­er will al­so have an op­por­tu­ni­ty to pre­miere his or her film on na­tion­al tele­vi­sion.

The host of Film Flix will be Gar­land Hold­er, who is al­so the show's pro­duc­er and the di­rec­tor of the Dig­i­tal Film In­sti­tute (DFI), a non-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tion that was in­cor­po­rat­ed in 2009 by a group of lo­cal film pro­fes­sion­als with some 50 col­lec­tive years of in­dus­try ex­pe­ri­ence.

Hold­er said the in­sti­tute has trained over 300 peo­ple through­out T&T in the tech­ni­cal and cre­ative as­pects of film­mak­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, act­ing for film and tele­vi­sion, edit­ing, cam­era op­er­a­tion and scriptwrit­ing. Hold­er sees Film Flix as the next step in en­cour­ag­ing young peo­ple to see film as a vi­able ca­reer.

In an in­ter­view, Hold­er said, "Youths are drawn to film be­cause they can ex­press their cre­ativ­i­ty through sev­er­al av­enues such as scriptwrit­ing, cam­era op­er­a­tion, edit­ing, spe­cial ef­fects, sound en­gi­neer­ing (and) act­ing." Hold­er al­so con­firmed that the TV show will in­cor­po­rate a train­ing el­e­ment de­signed to give stu­dents a film­mak­ing ex­pe­ri­ence be­yond the class­room. "Our ex­pe­ri­ence in train­ing youths in film has shown us that film has giv­en at risk youths hope (for) a vi­able ca­reer rather than com­mit­ting crime."

About Film Flix

Film Flix is in­tend­ed to be a plat­form for ex­po­sure not on­ly for DFI's stu­dents but to all emerg­ing film­mak­ers. The pro­gramme is still in search of a main spon­sor.For more in­fo, e-mail dig­i­tal­filmin­sti­tute@ya­hoo.com, find them on Face­book, or call 223-8723.