Of all the Priory School kids doing a week’s employment experience last week, no-one worked harder than Joe Davies and Oscar Mawby, who put in up to nine hours a day for eight days running, with a pressing deadline to meet. We commissioned Joe and Oscar to make a film for us, entitled ‘Our Lewes’, about teenage life in the town. We started them on Monday 21st May. This Tuesday afternoon, right on deadline, the film went up on My Space. While the other kids knocked off on Friday, Joe and Oscar didn’t feel they’d had a bad deal. “We wouldn’t want that sort of stress every week”, they said, after we’d watched ‘Our Lewes’ together. “But it was really rewarding”.

It’s a great piece of filmmaking. In it they vox-pop locals, and interview influential Lewesians (such as Mayor Jim Daley, former mayor Merlin Milner, MP Norman Baker, and tobacconist Stephen Catlin) about teenagers’ role in Lewes society. They take their cameras to relevant locations, such as Starfish, the Nutty Wizard, the skate park, the Pells Pool and the Grange, asking passers-by (both young and old) about teenage matters. A number of serious issues are raised (particularly by Norman Baker) but there’s a good deal of humour in the film, both in what people say and in the quirky editing style they’ve employed. “That was the hardest thing”, they said afterwards. “We had two and a half hours of footage, which we had to cut down to fifteen minutes film”. The result, which you can see by clicking here, is an informative, witty, and extremely watchable documentary. Well done, lads. AL