Film and film-making workshops 

For the people with an interest in films and filmmaking, I’ve recently been making my way through Mark Cousins’ ‘40 Day Film School’. Mark Cousins is a well-known film historian, critic and filmmaker and in this extended lecture/video essay, he passionately surveys various aspects of global film. Some of the topics he covers are colour, voice and many other themes and topics surrounding film. The video is split into ‘days’, so you’re free to skip to parts that you’re interested in and can be found here on Vimeo: 

I’ve also just started a FREE short screenwriting course provided by the University of East Anglia on Future Learn that explores the key concepts of screenwriting. The course is suitable for people who are new to scriptwriting to professionals and explores how to write screenplays and the basics of the language used to discuss the form. 

3D art workshops

For those of you interested in the oft-overlooked 3D art world and are looking for an introductory course, the Blender Guru has recently been putting out a lot of incredibly cool and accessible beginner tutorials for the free application Blender. Blender is an incredibly powerful piece of software but is a little impenetrable and infamously user-unfriendly (although they are at least making some attempt to remedy this in the most recent update) but Andrew Price walks you through how to navigate the software and within a few hours of having installed Blender you can be greeted to a convincingly photorealistic 3D model. In some of his more advanced videos, he also helps explain some of the more overarching theories behind concepts that affect many different art mediums (lighting, composition, fresnel) so even if you’re not a 3D modeller, there is something that everyone can learn here. I would recommend his video Advice for Beginner Artists Today for everyone:

Photography workshops

In addition, any photographers out there will be excited to hear that Nikon, Canon, Adobe, and others are offering free courses during lockdown. Subject matter might be difficult to come by but sometimes restriction is a good spark for creativity. I’m usually a wildlife photographer, and the good weather recently has brought a small aviary’s worth of birds to our garden so I’ve found myself watching the feeders through a lens a lot the last few days. The courses cover photography, image processing, and compositing. You can find a list of some of the popular courses here.

Writing workshops  

For women and non-binary writers check out For Books' Sake online creative writing workshops in poetry and more. Or check out these 'pay what you want' workshops from writer Alex Davis. 

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Sadhana, Chris and Nici contributed to this article