THE TEENS' SPEECH BLOG

This is the day

After 4 months of activity, featuring hundreds of interviews with teenagers from across the United Kingdom and a truly ground-breaking campaign of engagement with young people online, The Teens' Speech is finally ready.

Brooding, atmospheric and powerful, The Teens’ Speech is a documentary film that seeks give a voice to the most vulnerable members of society while providing the rest of us a glimpse of our country's future through their eyes.

It also features a unique collaboration with acclaimed spoken word artist, Kate Tempest, who has contributed a passionate, lyrical poem based on the interview transcripts of every young person involved in the making of the film.

The Teens' Speech will be broadcast today, at 3.15pm on the home page of MySpace and then later on YouTube, as part of an unprecedented partnership with both social networks. It's the culmination of The Teens' Speech project and hopefully the beginning of something else.

The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes

In 1992, at the age of 12, Severn Suzuki raised money with members of ECO, to attend the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Along with fellow ECO group members Michelle Quigg, Vanessa Suttie, and Morgan Geisler, Suzuki presented environmental issues from a youth perspective at the summit, where she delivered an impassioned and articulate speech to delegates. The video of the speech has 1,924,973 views on YouTube and is popularly known as "The Girl Who Silenced the World for 5 Minutes".

I'd never seen the video before - clearly coming to it rather late. It was sent to me by someone who put 'Good Teens' Speech' in the subject header. Perhaps she thought that the Teens' Speech film would be shot along similar lines. It's not, you know. It's something else entirely - it's a visual poem, documentary in style, but artistic at its heart. It's also quite serious, but maybe it's time we took young people seriously.

Anyway, on Christmas Day, head over to MySpace at 3.10pm, toggle fullscreen, settle back and enjoy a little bit of history.

Introducing Kate Tempest

As part of the Teens' Speech film which is premièring on MySpace On Christmas Day, we'll be collaborating with the young and gifted slam-poet, Kate Tempest.

This is what fellow spoken-word artist, Scroobius Pip, had to say about her:

“I had [Kate] Tempest in several times on my BBC radio one spoken word show and she has been the highlight of my listening this year. She has no right whatsoever to be as good as she is. It astounds me. Her writing is epic, her delivery piercing, and with the addition of her band Sound of Rum her potential is realised. Inspirational.”

Kate will be working with documentary director, Virginia Quinn, to create unique sequences of poetry in the film, using transcripts from interviews and webcam contributions as her source material.

Interviews with teenagers and audio montages of webcam contributions will be interspersed with Tempest's raw, honest and inspirational poetry.

We hope the end product will be something very special for everyone who has taken part in The Teens' Speech as well as being a unique document of teenagers' opinions, hopes and aspirations - both for themselves and for the U.K.