Schools and colleges · Free resources
Everything here is free, opens without a sign-up, and is meant to be used in schools we will never visit.
Most of what a school needs from this organisation is not a visit. It is material a teacher can print on a Friday and use on a Monday, written by people who do the work, and correct enough that a student who follows it will not be embarrassed on a real set.
Nine resources are described below in enough detail that you can decide whether you want them before you download anything. Each description says what is in the file, how long it takes, what the room needs, and what it evidences for your careers programme.
The terms
No gate, no licence to read, no attribution required.
There is no sign-up
A form in front of a free resource turns help into lead generation. Everything here opens on a click, and we would rather have the material in a hundred classrooms than have a hundred email addresses.
You may edit it and put your name on it
Reorder the slides, cut the sections that do not suit your group, drop our logo. If it works better with your school’s branding on it, use your school’s branding. We would rather it were taught than credited.
Everything is printable in black and white
Because a colour print budget is a real constraint and a resource that only works in colour does not get used. Every sheet is designed to survive a mono photocopier.
Tell us where it is wrong
These are written by working crew, which makes them accurate and also makes them partial. If something reads badly to a class or is out of date, say so and we will fix the file rather than defend it.
Lesson outlines
Five one-hour lessons, each with the physics, the activity and the answers.
Written to be taught by a subject teacher with no film background. Each outline is four sides: a page of subject content, a page for the activity with the equipment list, a page of worked answers, and a page linking the topic to the jobs that use it and what they pay.
| Lesson | Subject | What the class does | What the room needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| The physics of a shot | Physics, Year 10 to 13 | Predicts depth of field for three lens and aperture combinations, then photographs the scene and measures the error | A metre rule, three objects, one phone camera with manual controls |
| Rigging and loads | Physics or design technology, Year 10 to 13 | Calculates the counterweight for a camera crane, builds a model jib and loads it until the prediction fails | A metre rule, a pivot, slotted masses, a clamp stand |
| Power for a lighting rig | Physics, Year 11 to 13 | Designs a distribution for a stated set of lamps across three phases without exceeding the supply | Printed room plan and lamp list, supplied in the pack |
| Losing nothing: data on a film set | Computing, Year 9 to 13 | Offloads a folder, computes checksums, changes one byte and works out what a real production would do next | One computer per pair, no software purchase |
| Drawing so somebody else can build it | Design technology, Year 9 to 13 | Produces a working drawing of an object that another group builds without speaking to them | Paper, rules, and the objects supplied in the outline |
Every outline names the specification topics it sits inside, the Gatsby benchmarks it evidences — usually 4, linking curriculum learning to careers — and the eight to twelve job titles the topic leads to, with pay bands.
Ask and we will email you the current version of all five.
Role cards
Twenty-four crew roles, one card each, printed double-sided.
The single most used thing we make. A pack of twenty-four A6 cards, one per crew role, designed for a carousel activity in which a class works out who does what and who talks to whom.
The front of the card
The job title in plain English, the alias it is called by on the day, the department, and one sentence saying what the person is responsible for. Front side only, so it works face-up on a desk.
The back of the card
Who they work next to, what they are carrying, three phrases they would say out loud on a set, the pay band, and the usual route in. The adjacency line is the part that makes the activity work.
The activity in the pack
Deal the cards, have the class assemble themselves into departments, then into a chain of command, then work out who has to talk to whom to get a single shot made. Twenty minutes, no preparation, and it does more than a slide deck.
The twenty-four roles
Camera has five, lighting and grip four, sound three, art and props four, production and assistant directing five, and post and visual effects three. Chosen so that every card has somebody it must talk to.
Ask and we will email you the current version.
The call sheet exercise
A real call sheet, with the mistakes left in, and a class that has to find them.
A call sheet is the document a film day runs on: who is called, at what time, where, for what, with what, and what happens if it rains. Nobody outside the industry has ever seen one, and reading one is the single fastest way to understand how a production works.
What is in the pack
A complete anonymised single-unit call sheet for a day of a short drama, at full size and readable when printed on A4; a second copy with eleven deliberate errors introduced; a teacher copy with the errors marked and explained.
How the exercise runs
The class reads the correct sheet with the annotated guide, then works in pairs through the faulty one. The errors run from the obvious — an actor called after the scene they are in — to the ones that would cost a real day, such as a location with no parking and a unit base ten miles away.
How long it takes
Thirty-five to fifty minutes. It works as a cover lesson, it works as a starter across two lessons, and it works with a mixed-ability group because the errors are graded.
What it evidences
Benchmark 4 for media and business studies, and Benchmark 2, because the sheet carries real call times, real turnaround rules and a real crew list, which is labour market information in its most concrete form.
The sheet is anonymised: no real production, no real names, no real addresses. Everything else about it — the layout, the language, the order of the sections — is exactly as it would be issued.
Ask and we will email you the current version.
Set etiquette
One side of A4 on how to behave on a set, which is what gets people asked back.
Technical skill is not what ends most early careers. Not knowing when to speak, standing in the wrong place, touching equipment that is not yours, or going home without telling anybody is what does it. None of it is written down anywhere a student would find it.
What is on the sheet
Turning up, radio discipline, who you report to and who you never interrupt, the language used to stop a take safely, what you may and may not touch, eating and breaks, phones, photography and social media, and how to leave at the end of a day.
The part that matters most
How to say you do not know something, and how to say that something is unsafe. Both are stated as things a professional does routinely, because a student who believes admitting either is failure will one day stay quiet when they should not.
How schools use it
Given out before a work experience placement, before a college shoot, or before any visit to a working environment. It reads in four minutes and it transfers to almost any workplace, not only a film set.
The tone
Written as what the industry expects rather than as a set of rules we are imposing, and it names the expectations that are unreasonable as well as the ones that are not.
Ask and we will email you the printable version.
The careers poster
An A2 set plan showing who stands where, and why they stand there.
A drawn plan of a stage on a shooting day, with every position marked, labelled with the role, the alias, the department colour and the pay band. It is the printable version of the interactive set plan the site is being built around, from the same source records, so the two can never disagree.
What is on it
The camera and its department, the lighting and grip positions, sound, the assistant directors, script supervision, art and props, the video village and the route back to unit base. Around thirty-five marked positions.
How it is labelled
Every position carries the plain-English title, the name it is called by, and the pay band. A student can stand in front of it and find a job that fits what they are good at without asking anybody.
The sizes it comes in
A2 for a corridor or a careers display, A3 for a classroom wall, and A4 as a handout that stays readable in mono. All four print from the same file without redrawing.
What it replaces
Nothing, which is the point. There is no interactive who-is-who on a set anywhere in the United Kingdom, and no free printable version of one either. That absence is why we are making it.
Ask and we will email you the current version.
Honesty
What these resources are not.
Free classroom material from an organisation that also sells sessions to schools should be read with a little suspicion. Here is what to check for, and what you will not find.
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Next
Ask for the pack and we will send whatever is finished today.
Say which resources you want, what you teach and what year group. Anything written but not yet posted goes out by email the same day, and you go on a short list to be told when the rest is up. That list is used for that and nothing else.
