DARTMOOR National Park has recently been the inspiration and backdrop for two groups of young people to make short films inspired by their local and haunting heritage.

Young people from Princetown Primary School and the Moretonhampstead area had the opportunity of working with a professional film-making team from MED Theatre.

The Dartmoor community theatre company mentored the groups of rurally isolated young people to realise their creative visions for a film through the project Moorland Haunts, which has been supported by the Lottery through the BFI's First Light initiative.

Eight to eleven year olds from Princetown Primary came up with the idea for their film Obsession, the story of a young girl who becomes haunted by the suggestion that a character from local myth — Kitty Jay — may have been a vampire. Her friends at school come up with a plan to snap her out of it, but will it work or will her obsession go too far?

MED Theatre also works closely with young people out of school, training them in a variety of creative skills on a weekly basis.

This group of young artists collaborated to create their film Future Past, in which a group of children come across an old newspaper when they are rummaging in their grandmother's attic and find themselves travelling back in time to the 1940s. When they innocently help Maria Romana to hide from soldiers who are threatening to deport her to Canada as an internee and potential spy, they are unaware of the consequences for their own lives.

A spokesperson for Med Theatre said: 'This opportunity involved more than the children simply seeing their film ideas come to fruition — they led on every aspect of the project from start to finish, with support from professionals — they chaired their own debates on plots, drew storyboards, wrote scripts, shooting scripts and music, acted, directed, operated the camera, sound, and lighting, created the costumes and make-up and props, as well as designing display and publicity materials for the launch event of each film.

'This all-round experience is an invaluable way of learning, as one of the young participants summed it up: "I much prefer to learn by doing, I remember it more that way" .'

To view the films visit MED Theatre's research website http://www.dartmoorresource.co.uk">www.dartmoorresource.co.uk