Youngsters in South West Wales invited to make creative visuals to promote their areas

What do you love about your local area? South West Wales Connected, the Community Rail Partnership for the South West Wales rail network, is inviting young people in the region to get creative to help promote their local areas online. Selected work will be used as part of South West Wales Connected’s Love this Place campaign.

Youngsters living in Neath Port Talbot, Swansea, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire are invited to make short films, storyboards, scripts, songs, raps and poems expressing what they love about the areas they live in. Chosen work will then be used as part of Love this Place on the South West Wales Connected website and social media to promote train travel and spread the word about the towns and villages in the region.

Schools across the region are also being encouraged to take part. Pupils from Glan-y-Mor School in Burry Port, have already got involved – with impressive results. Jennifer Barfoot, Community Rail Officer for South West Wales Connected, said:

“We’ve been delighted with the submissions from pupils at Glan-y-Mor school – they really have been exemplary. We look forward to receiving entries from pupils at other schools across the region. This is a great project that can help pupils develop a range of skills, and will also help to promote their local areas.”

Theatr Gwaun, a community-owned hub for live performing arts, creativity and entertainment in Fishguard, is helping by producing a ‘how to’ video that will provide tips and inspiration for anyone wanting to get involved. The video is being produced as part of Theatr Gwaun’s Young Filmmakers project, which launched in 2019 with funding from Ffilm Cymru and The Bluestone Foundation. It has manged to continue through lockdown with the use of online conferencing and YouTube. The project provides aspiring young filmmakers with free tuition from an experienced professional short filmmaker and a writer.

Not only will the Young Filmmakers project create a video to guide and inspire people making entries for the Love this Place project – it will also support young filmmakers who want to make their own welcome videos.

“Love this Place will provide a great opportunity to extend the activities of young filmmakers, encouraging them to use their newfound skills to create short films featuring the places that mean so much to them,” says Sue Whitbread, director of Theatr Gwaun. “This is a great way to encourage the community to get creative. We plan to host a special gala screening night featuring the films produced by young people, hopefully before the end of the Summer. We are delighted to be part of inspiring a love of place.”

Jennifer Barfoot said:

“South West Wales Connected aims to enhance the communities, businesses and surroundings near the stations on our network and encourage people to visit these places by rail. The purpose of this project is to get local people to share the things that they love about their areas in order to inspire people to visit. We’re looking for personal responses, so you don’t have to recommend the obvious attractions: you might decide to mention your favourite sweet shop or playground, for example. We’re encouraging people to highlight whatever’s special to them. The one rule is not to film at the railway stations themselves, for safety reasons.”