A new Scottish film academy to help educate and train movie-making
talent was launched today in the Capital by First Minister Jack
McConnell.
The new screen academy, will be one of just seven in the UK and is a
first for Scotland. It will focus on the core creative and business
skills of the film industry and will be based in Edinburgh, at Napier
University, and at the Edinburgh College of Art.
The First Minister said: "We have some successes within the Scottish
film industry just now, but not enough and one of the reasons I
supported this bid for a screen academy so strongly is that it would
have been a disaster to have all the screen academies down south and
none of them here in Scotland, so it's tremendous that Napier and
Edinburgh College of Art have pulled off this success. They've done it
with a quality reputation. Our objective now has to be that this is one
of, if not the best screen academy."
One of the first to signed up for the Screen Academy is
Lin
Anderson, already a published author she wants to move into
screenwriting and says the school cannot open soon enough.
She said: "I think it's completely vital. I almost whooped for joy when
I got the information through from literature training to say that this
was happening in Edinburgh. It's something we've needed for a long
time. We shouldn't have to go away anywhere else to do that. We have
the talent here, we have the ambition, the stories to tell. We should
be telling them, and learning how to tell them in Scotland."
