Mum’s Birthday
Ashley Shephard/Chris Robertson (Image courtesy of Pilton Video/City of Edinburgh Council.)
Mum’s Birthday is a poignant film drama about a newly single father who must overcome despair to save his relationship with his son on his wife’s birthday. The film has been produced as part of Pilton Video’s Scottish Screen funded Creative Identities.
The plan for making Mum’s Birthday at the outset was clear; bring together a group of Edinburgh’s most hard to reach and excluded young people who were willing to devise a story and perform in a half hour drama based on their lives.
The journey to make the work began in May 2009 when producer Sarah Drummond made contact with every residential care home and social work team in the city of Edinburgh, alongside several high schools within each housing scheme to gauge potential interest in the project.
Over the next three months Writer/Director Graham Fitzpatrick and Actor/Drama Worker Elek Kish ran story devising and acting workshops with 80 keen young people. It was vital to Graham and his team that the young people were from similar backgrounds to themselves with stories to tell beyond the norm for their age, had heartfelt emotions to portray and talents that had never before been given an opportunity to shine.
30 of the young people were keen to carry on to the second more intense stage of workshops and from August to October they met on a regular basis enabling a greater trust to be built up between everyone with the young people’s skills further developing. After much sharing of hopes, personal feelings and stories between everyone the group settled on a main story drawn from the most common shared experience - family breakdown.
By November now and into the final stages of the process there was a core group of 15 young people still eager and still on board to see the project through to the end. An outline script had now been developed and an up and coming freelance crew with professional actors were brought on board to perform alongside and mentor the young people throughout the experience.
A five week rehearsal period followed with further devising based on the real life experiences of those acting bringing great depth and truth to the characters.
It was at this stage in November that i got involved with the project. I went in to audition for Graham and i knew pretty immediately that i wanted to get involved with his film just by the way we worked in the audition. The audition was a very organic/improvised process that took time and had a lovely feeling of very honest creativity matched with an atmosphere that put me comfortably in the situation there and then to begin to help create the character that i have gone on to play in the film – Jen.
I then read Graham’s very moving and very powerful script, he offered me the part and that was it – i was in!