Nine-year-old Remi Robitaille says she likes the film studio more than any of the other after school activities at the Nelson and District Youth Centre.
"I am very into tech," she says. "I would rather film something than watch something."
Remi enjoys fixing things learning new technologies and skills – how to use the studio's video camera, how to change the colour of the lights. She says she wants to be making her own films by the time she gets to high school.
"I really like doing camera stuff because it is fun to make something that I can watch after."
Afternoons at the youth centre, after they are out of school, Remi is one of about 10 kids ages eight and up in Colin Burwell's film making group. He's got them operating the camera, holding boom mics, adjusting lights, monitoring sound and being interviewed onscreen.
There is an ebb and flow in the room – kids leaving and arriving, some more interested than others – but that doesn't bother Burwell, who remains both task-oriented and enthusiastically flexible.
As Burwell interviews two kids about ghosts, nine-year-old Arlo Kent records them on camera. He pans carefully back and forth between the two interviewees even though they are sitting close beside each other.
"I decided it would be a cool effect if the camera followed the people who were speaking," Arlo says, "so that you would have a clearer vision of who was speaking."
Arlo explained that he has an app that he uses to make stop-motion animation at home, and that the film room is where he wants to be when he is at the youth centre.
"I'll be coming here every day I can," he says.
Burwell matches the youthful energy and curiosity in the room, perhaps because he started young himself.
"I picked up a camera when I was 11 and never put it down," he says. "I was very lucky. I found my thing very early in life,"
In high school, he filmed himself break dancing. That turned into a portfolio, then college, then a career. He's been making films and teaching film at the college level, mostly in Ontario, for 19 years.
His interaction with the kids at the youth centre is both respectful and a little silly.
"This is a great opportunity to be silly with kids," Burwell says, "because video is silly, and it should be silly when you are first starting out. If they have good memories associated with filming your friends and then watching yourself, it doesn't matter what the final product looks like."
If they love doing it, he says, they will pick up a camera later and perhaps do more serious things with it. Meanwhile, he's playing a trick on them.
"I am tricking kids into learning," he says. "This room is disguised with flashing lights and buttons and headphones and tv screens, which is how kids grow up experiencing the media world. But they have no idea that I am slowly injecting them with knowledge."
Burwell's film making space is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays after school lets out.
