How the BFI is inspiring filmmaking in cricket

I’m a film educator at the BFI and I’ve been teaching film to children, students and professionals for the last 10 years. In 2021, we teamed up with the ECB (English Cricket Board) to run a pilot filmmaking course. Using that as a foundation, we’re currently running a programme of free training for people from the cricket network — reaching employees in clubs and foundations, volunteers in the recreational game, as well as players and coaches from all levels — to bring a range of voices forward.

The courses are full of people who have a cricketing story to tell, whether that’s driving the game forward on or off the pitch, bringing more diversity to cricket or encouraging more women and girls to play. We help them do that by equipping them with the skills needed to tell those stories in a contemporary way through film.

With social media, it’s becoming more and more important to have good, impactful, storytelling content to promote your club or organisation to its target audience. The course I’m currently teaching is a 10-week more advanced course for those who already have some involvement in storytelling in the game. We are also running a sister course for 100 grassroots volunteers at a beginner level.

Our course has two sides: the theoretical material about the visual language of film, and the practical, nuts-and-bolts filming and editing techniques on both smartphones and DSLRs. The overall result is that students can go away and be confident in producing their own films that will promote their clubs or organisations effectively.

Film is everywhere, so most of us are subconsciously already familiar with the visual language that’s used for storytelling within film – but just like with any other language, in order to use it fluently to tell a story, we need to understand the grammar and vocabulary of this cinematic language. One of the first sessions we do is to break down how a film is made up of different shots. Then, every week as the course progresses, the participants are given a different exercise to complete. One of the briefs I give early in the course is for students to create a film with 10 shots to tell the story of a batter facing the last ball of a match. The creative constraints I give is for the film to not have any dialogue or text, and for the participants to build tension and suspense purely through shot sizes and camera angles. It’s a great way to understand that film is a visual medium, and you don’t necessarily need text or dialogue to convey a story.

Our participants have different experience levels. Some participants are very experienced with filmmaking and editing as this is part of their day-to-day jobs, while others create videos occasionally and want to do this more often. Their goals are different, too, and we try to accommodate that in our teaching. Some participants are looking to produce professional interview videos, so we’ve looked at how to set up a camera to shoot an interview. Others want to do shorter TikTok-style videos, so we’ve done a session on vertical smartphone filmmaking, learning about how to frame things and create something eye-catching.

Last week we had a location day, which was very exciting. Everyone on the course headed to Trent Bridge Cricket Ground and it was the first time we’ve met in person. We shot some content about The Blaze women’s team, as well as a behind-the-scenes video about how the participants have found the course and what they’ve learned from it.

As the UK’s leading organisation for film and the moving image, and a cultural charity, we have a great education department and lots of expertise in everything to do with film. We are always open to exploring new partnerships and working with different organisations like the ECB to help them communicate stories more effectively.

Doing this course, I’ve learned so much about cricket. It’s so good to see how a sport that can be seen as traditional can be opened to different audiences and people from different backgrounds through the power of storytelling. My belief is that film education and visual literacy can help to give opportunities to different people who don’t always necessarily get the chance to tell their stories, so putting on this course with the ECB has been an incredible experience.

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