John Walls and Timmy Stewart from BEAMA (Belfast Electronic Arts & Music Academy) discuss their collaboration with Northern Ireland Screen over the years, and some of their favourite clips from the archive used to inspire people.

Over the last five years we have had the pleasure to work across a wide range of educational and creative projects that have incorporated and taken inspiration from the Digital Film Archive. One of the most memorable elements of the DFA educational programmes we have worked on was the Spence Brothers’ horror and sci-fi clips.

Their home-crafted universes immediately grabbed the attention of both the training team and the young people. There was something infectious about the way those films blended ingenuity with pure storytelling, and that spirit carried straight into the room.

What genuinely excited us was how quickly participants began building their own worlds in response. The Spence Brothers’ DIY approach to genre filmmaking showed young people that they didn’t need big budgets to create impact — just ideas, enthusiasm, and a willingness to experiment. Soon we were seeing alternate-world edits, strange speculative landscapes generated through art tools, creature designs reimagined through animation and recut sci-fi and horror trailers that transformed archive clips into entirely new content.

The programmes demonstrated how moving-image heritage can act as a creative starting point, inspiring young people. For us, that is the power of the DFA: it keeps the past alive not by preserving it, but by letting it spark entirely new visions of the future.

Watch 'Specimens' by The Spence Brothers

Watch more from The Spence Brothers here

Watch more from BEAMA here