MetFilm School graduates celebrate BAFTA and Oscar success

A London film school is taking centre stage with 20 graduates having worked on eight of this year’s BAFTA nominated films, and seven graduates having worked on three of this year’s Oscar nominated films.

MetFilm School is a leading film, television, and online media school offering undergraduate, postgraduate, and short courses – with campuses in London, Berlin and Leeds.

Its London campus is based within the famous Ealing Studios, which in recent years have supported productions such as The Imitation Game, Black Mirror and Downton Abbey.

This year, the specialist institutions worked on films including: No Time To Die, House of Gucci, The French Dispatch, After Love, The Matrix Resurrection and Last night In Soho.

Martin Sandahl – 28 originally from Sweden but lived in Ealing for five years, is an MA Directing graduate who now works for creative studio, Framestore – is absolutely delighted. Martin worked as the main VFX editor for the studio’s contributions to The Matrix Resurrections.

Martin said: “When you’re working at a big VFX company like Framestore, a Matrix movie is the kind of dream project you were hoping you could be involved with.

“When it started, several of the editors, and lots of other VFX artists were all very interested in working on it. So, I was very lucky that I got to be the main VFX editor on that project for six months.

“I’m a big fan of the whole Matrix franchise, so it was one of my dreams coming true!”

MA graduate, Aileen Flanagan, 32 from Cheltenham works for The Bureau, the producers of After Love, a four-time BAFTA nominated film.

She said: “I work in-house at the production company, so rather than being within the production team on-set, means I mainly focused on post production and delivery. I had first read the script back 2016 when I joined the company as a Producer’s Assistant.

“It was amazing to see the development process of writer and director Aleem Khan and producer Matthieu de Braconier as they went through the script, to then see what the final shooting script became, all the way through to the decisions they made in the edit and to the final film itself.

“We shot After Love in 2019, and finished post-production during lockdown of 2020, which seems like such a long time ago now!”

Another former student celebrating is 24-year-old Guy Trevellyan from Surrey who worked in post-production on the three times BAFTA nominated Wes Anderson Film The French Dispatch.

Guy said: “I started working for Wes as his UK Assistant during the final stages of post-production for The French Dispatch. Getting work in the film industry often comes via recommendation, if you do a good job on one project, you get recommended to work on other projects.

“I was quickly welcomed into Wes’ film family, and I have been addicted to their way of filming ever since. Wes has a very close group of people around him and working now as the 3rd Assistant Director I can learn first-hand and challenge myself every day.”

“It wasn’t really until I started working on Wes’ new film Asteroid City that I was truly exposed to the full process of what it takes to make a large budget independent film.”

Jonny Persey, Director at MetFilm school said: “Our learning philosophy is to minimise the difference between being a student and being in industry. It’s about make, make, make – feature films, short films, web series, documentaries etc. And, doing so under the guidance of professional filmmakers in an organisation that also makes films professionally.”