"We have built a digital platform where educators can use cinema as a pedagogical tool"

 

Miquel Cerdà (Pollença, 1984) is Project Manager at FILMCLUB, one of the eight start-ups presented by the UOC at 4YFN. He studied civil engineering and has a master's degree in Production and Audiovisual Business Management. For him cinema has been a passion from a young age and with FILMCLUB he has realized his desire to lead a project to develop the skills he has acquired, enjoy it and make it economically sustainable.

 

 

Miquel Cerdà (Pollença, 1984) is Project Manager at FILMCLUB, one of the eight start-ups presented by the UOC at 4YFN. He studied civil engineering and has a master's degree in Production and Audiovisual Business Management. For him cinema has been a passion from a young age and with FILMCLUB he has realized his desire to lead a project to develop the skills he has acquired, enjoy it and make it economically sustainable.

 

FILMCLUB is a digital platform that provides schools with legal access to the screening of films and a pedagogical resource bank based on film excerpts. We have built a unique space where educators can find resources, materials and ideas linked to cinema as a pedagogical tool. We offer both resources produced by our teaching team and proposals from other organizations that, like us, believe in cinema as a pedagogical tool.

By chance I was given the opportunity to make some shorts with schools for a programme on the Balearic TV channel IB3 and I discovered that the combination of cinema and education was very interesting. That was 10 years ago and, meanwhile, I have worked on different edutainment projects.

After the experience at IB3, I worked for the publishers Cruïlla and saw that they made audiovisual pieces for their digital books. I thought that a platform could be created to reuse existing audiovisual material to create educational content. Three years have passed since that idea and it has developed into a start-up and so we are at 4YFN thanks to the UOC.

4YFN is a great opportunity to make lots of contacts in a short time. Above all, we hope to set up meetings with investors. We also believe the media coverage can be very positive.

FILMCLUB meets a need of teachers and education centres. First and foremost because we reduce the time and effort spent by educators in searching for and creating pedagogical activities based on audiovisual content.

In a world based on images, children and young people are hungry for audiovisual content. Many spend much of their leisure time using mobile phones, tablets and computers to follow their favourite YouTubers and bloggers. If we engage with them on their own ground, we can help them to discover attractive and interesting learning experiences. Films enhance critical analysis of other realities, as well as awareness of your own surroundings.

We have used the British model and, after three years of implementation of the project in Catalonia, the result has been very positive, both in terms of participation and the reception by the educational ecosystem. The improvement in students is incredible: 87% have increased awareness and understanding of culture, 90% have an improved ability to express and debate ideas, and in 54% of cases there has been an improvement in oral and written skills.

We are currently in the beta phase. In other words, we have a product-service that is still in a phase of ongoing improvement and around 40 centres are signed up to the project and we pay a lower fee. With the centres, we learn the best fit for the needs of the ecosystem and we adapt. In parallel, we are preparing for launch on the open market, our business plan and the feasibility study. It is a project that is economically feasible in the medium term but we need to endure two financial years of losses and investment in content and improvement of the digital platform.

After the pilot phase in which we replicated an existing model, participating in EduTECH has helped us focus the project: to make it scalable, adapt it to the local situation and ensure its economic sustainability. Both in terms of training and support, the programme has laid out a path of improvement for us. You could say it's like trying to do yoga at home or going to classes. It makes us go that extra distance and improve the project. The programme has shone a spotlight on us and encouraged us to go on. Entrepreneurship is a long-distance race.

We bring together in one place complete films, film excerpts, educational materials and workshops where teachers can legally, quickly and easily find everything necessary to educate using audiovisual material. The online platform has the Filmoteca (legal catalogue of complete films for educational use), the Filmpèdia (bank of film excerpts and pedagogical materials) and the Filmlab (catalogue of workshops and on-site and online training).

We develop the materials ourselves. It's not easy to find specialists in education that are cinema freaks! Luckily, we have professionals in the team from the field of psychology, pedagogy and audiovisual content. When we consider subjects, there is a lot of internal dialogue between the cinema freaks who suggest films and the education freaks who work on the didactic materials. Moreover, we look for similar organizations to establish synergies. For example, we are talking to the BCN Sports Film Festival and the Sports Museum to create materials about cinema, sports and values.

Yes, our objective is for the community to create many of the materials and we carry out an editorial task of supervision. We are thinking about offering rewards to the most proactive teachers in the form of tickets for events or training.

The funding we have received from the EU, the Government of Catalonia, Barcelona Provincial Council and the City Council has been essential for testing the pilot phase but it isn't enough. Now we are assessing the option of asking schools to contribute to the cost of the service, but if we want it to reach state schools we need the involvement of both the Ministries of Education and Culture. The public administration pays for school water, electricity and internet. Why should consumption of films be different? We offer a formula so that the public administration and the schools can pay reasonable costs.

The British project is funded by the British Film Institute, which allocates eight million pounds sterling per year. Our situation is different. We know we still need several years to create awareness of our usefulness both to the public administration and to schools. So our main challenge at the moment is to achieve private funding for the next two years. Right now, we have envisaged the project as a start-up and the UOC with its EduTECH programme and BCN Activa with the social entrepreneurship programme are supporting us to attract social investment funding. Moreover, there has also been extensive personal investment.