Sound/Image Cinema Lab

The Sound/Image Cinema Lab brings together Falmouth University’s expertise in higher education teaching and research with exceptional industry connections to create a ground-breaking model that delivers world-class education and career opportunities for students, while facilitating original, exciting and award-winning professional filmmaking in Cornwall.    

The Lab works by providing support to independent productions in the form of equipment, facilities, crew from our staff, student, and alumni bodies, and on occasion funding. The Lab was developed to be truly integrated with industry and to directly respond to challenges in the contemporary UK film sector. These challenges include the need for greater access to funding and resources, a need for greater diversity in regional places and voices on screen, as well as greater diversity of backgrounds behind the camera.  

The Lab works with industry through a model that is pioneering, both in that it embeds industry collaboration in its pedagogy and that it responds directly to the local needs of the film sector in Cornwall, as well as wider industry. 

Below you can see the project team that works on the Sound/Image Cinema Lab.

For a range of feature narrative and documentary, and short films the Lab has partnered and collaborated with:

• Baracoa Pictures
• BBC Films
• BFI
• BFI Doc Society
• Bosena
• Creative England
• Early Day Films
• Elation Pictures
• Film4
• iFeatures
• o-region
• Quiddity Films
• Screen Cornwall
• Screenskills
• Unstoppable
• Western Light Pictures

A key cultural and economic result of all this activity for British cinema is that the production of films that would otherwise not get made, or would be made with significant limitations and compromises attached, has been possible and these productions have provided significant learning and career opportunities and experiences for Falmouth University students and staff.

Within the region, the Lab has emerged as central to the professional and cultural development of a continued and growing Cornish film economy and identity.

Feature films produced, co-produced and supported by the Lab include:

• The Severed Sun (2024)
• A Year In A Field (2023)
• Enys Men (2022)
• Long Way Back (2022)
• The Tape (2021)
• Make Up (2019)
• BAIT (2019)
• Songbird (2018)
• Wilderness (2017)
• Brown Willy (2016)
• Bronco's House (2015)

• Providing crucial routes for emerging UK independent filmmakers to make award-winning films that otherwise would not have been green-lit, or to create work to a standard they would otherwise not have been able to.  

• Providing students and graduates with invaluable and inspirational on-set experience, fulfilling roles on and receiving credits on critically acclaimed and cinema-released films.  

• Fostering a hub of filmmaking excellence, supporting Cornwall’s growing reputation as a screen cluster of national significance, and fostering Cornish cultural outputs  rooted in place and identity. 

Over the past decade the Lab has been responsible for the production, and co-production with national partners, of a series of narrative and documentary, short and feature films including Mark Jenkin’s BAFTA-winning Bait (2018) and BIFA-winning Enys Men (2022), Claire Oakley’s Make Up (2018), Martha Tilston’s The Tape (2021), Brett Harvey’s Long Way Back (2022) and A Year in a Field (2023), directed by Christopher Morris. 

We also co-produce and act as partners on short film productions that access greater professional opportunities for graduates and increase the visibility of the regional film industry and culture in Cornwall, all the while supporting the development of British independent filmmaking talent. The Lab is increasing its presence in documentary filmmaking and archival practices through a series of works with vernacular filmmakers inside and outside of the University.  

We have partnered and collaborated with organisations including: BBC Films, the BFI and BFI Doc Society, Creative England, Film4, iFeatures, Screen Cornwall and Screenskills. In the process, the Lab has been successful in helping to shift perception around the film-making abilities of student and graduate talent and building recognition of universities as an important partner in the production process for independent and micro-budget films.