Supporting Shorts: the project quietly shaping who gets to make films

“They all have this body of work that proves they’re as entitled as anyone to be involved in the industry”

Towards the end of 2025 the University of Leeds hosted a special screening of two innovative short films: Race to the Start Line, a comedy about a young man scrambling to make it to a mountain bike race, and The Return of Jamie Vincent, a horror set in a mysterious hotel. Screened at the School of Media and Communication, the films are part of a wider project – Supporting Shorts – that arose in an additional learning needs school in North Wales and has snowballed into a national initiative with ambitious plans for 2026.

“We were brought in to deliver a transition-focused programme, looking at widening opportunities for young people who were about to leave Ysgol y Gogarth [Gogarth School],” explains Steve Swindon, co-founder of TAPE, a community arts charity in Colwyn Bay. “It quickly became clear that the creative industries were of real interest to that cohort and the group soon managed to get some funding from the Welsh Government to set up their own company, so that got everyone thinking about what might be possible.”

Students from Gogarth School who took part in the Supporting Shorts project. Photo credit: TAPE

This coincided with wider work by TAPE to address one of the less visible but most persistent barriers in film and television: the complexity of screenwriting itself. So, working with partners including the team behind screenwriting software Final Draft, as well as the charity Carousel, the young people developed the Easy-Write Screenplay Template. The tool is designed to demystify screenwriting and make it accessible, and the group used it to write their first films.

Finding an audience and dreaming big

The next step was finding an audience. “During the process of that work,” Steve says, “one of the young people said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could get the film in a cinema?’ I said, you know, that would be great, knowing that it would be difficult, but my job is to be an advocate, so we approached Vue Cinemas.”

Vue decided not just to screen the films before their feature movies but also, in a rare move, to introduce the young people to their competitors.

“Otto Turton, the Chief Commercial Officer at Vue, had a conversation with some of the young people at the school,” Steve says. “He said, ‘This isn’t something we should be competitive about, so let me introduce you to my counterparts at ODEON and Cineworld,’ and he brought them into the conversation. It was remarkable really. We suddenly had a readymade, nationwide audience for the team’s work.”

The audience builds ahead of the University of Leeds screening of, and Q&A for, Race to the Start Line and the Return of Jamie Vincent. Photo credit: TAPE.

Fast forward to 2026 and the Supporting Shorts team can count among its collaborators not just Final Draft and the nation’s largest cinema chains, but some of the most prestigious and recognisable organisations in the creative industries, from the British Film Institute (BFI) to the BBC.

The project even caught the attention of Hollywood A-listers. Dreaming big, the team contacted Tom Cruise’s PR company, to see if the Mission Impossible star would like to do the voice for an animated squirrel in Race to the Start Line.

“We made a little video asking him if he’d do the voice for the squirrel and we sent it to his PR company,” Steve says. “And we got a reply the next day from the CEO of this company, the biggest in the world, who basically said, ‘this is really interesting’. We had a back and forth and it looked like it was about to happen as Tom Cruise was in the country, just a couple of hours away. Unfortunately, his schedule changed to the point where it was impossible, but it didn’t really matter because that first response of, ‘Yeah, Tom Cruise is thinking of it,’ was so encouraging. It showed them nothing is off the table.”

From Hollywood to Woodhouse

Meanwhile, the team are working with two Professors at the University of Leeds’ School of Media and Communication – Beth Johnson and Katy Parry – who have been examining similar themes and challenges in their own research. In November 2025 Professor Johnson and Professor Parry invited the Supporting Shorts gang to present their work at the University, and the team also filmed interviews for a documentary about the project.

“What struck me immediately about Supporting Shorts was how it rethinks the screen industries from the ground up – from accessible ways of developing scripts to creating real routes into exhibition and broadcast,” Professor Johnson says. “That aligns closely with my academic work on labour, access and inequality. Working with my colleague Katy on the project has been hugely rewarding too, particularly seeing how young people’s creativity is taken seriously and translated into meaningful industry impact.”

The Supporting Shorts team visit the studio at Clothworkers Building North. Photo credit: TAPE

“We felt honoured to visit Ysgol Y Gogarth,” Professor Parry agrees, “and to see how the young people and Steve were using First Draft’s Easy-Write Template to create a film script together. Supporting Shorts is pioneering, inventive, and wickedly funny. As researchers of visual storytelling, we anticipate the project encouraging other traditionally underrepresented people to tell their stories.”

For Steve, the involvement of Professor Johnson and Professor Parry has enabled the project to evolve in new directions.

“Inviting us into the University, talking directly to the young people, taking their ideas seriously and advocating for the project from an academic perspective – it has added a huge amount of value,” he says. “It changes how the project is seen and heard, and we wouldn’t have got this far without that partnership with Beth and Katy. Coming from an additional needs setting, where the route to college doesn’t really exist, let alone the route to university – it’s just so exciting for everyone.”

“The young people are now being seen as experts”

Looking ahead, the Supporting Shorts team will premiere the next two Supporting Shorts films and plans to take the Easy-Write Screenplay Template into ten additional learning needs schools, while continuing to work with industry partners to embed inclusive practice at scale. For instance, they are collaborating with the BBC on ideas to make the iPlayer more inclusive.

“The young people are now being seen as experts,” Steve says. “They all have this body of work that proves they’re as entitled as anyone to be involved in the industry.”

Main image: The Supporting Shorts team outside Clothworkers Building North on the University of Leeds campus. Credit: TAPE.