Filmmaking grads premiere 'heartrending but heartwarming’ movie
Monday 02 March 2026
Two Filmmaking & Creative Technologies graduates say they have been overwhelmed by the reaction to their emotional debut film.
The Space Between Notes, the final-year project of Lucie de Lint and Jake Beau Fell, premiered at FACT, Liverpool, in February.
Written and directed by Lucie, with cinematography by Jake, the 40-minute film was produced by their company, Spring Picnic Pictures.
The project brought together students from Acting, Management, Sound Technology, and Theatre & Performance Design, making it a truly collaborative production.
We caught up with Canadian Lucie and Jake, who is from Spain, to talk about the film, its premiere, and the future of their production company.
Lucie: The Space Between Notes is about friendship and redemption, but also grief. Caleb is an 18-year-old musician who is trying to get into music schools, but it’s not happening for him in auditions – he struggles to perform in that environment. His best friend Connor spends time with him, encouraging him, building up his confidence, getting him to come out of his shell. And it works. But as Caleb grows – personally and as an artist - the more Connor fades into the background.
Jake: The film starts as quite a sweet little story, but the tone shifts to become more sombre, and you start to realise that everything isn’t as it seems. It’s heartrending but ultimately heartwarming.
Film poster designed by Filmmaking graduate Alex Quinn
Lucie: I’ve had the basic idea for this film since the first year. Jake and I were in the same project group and he wanted to do something in the same genre. But that wasn’t really the time to start it, I only had the concept, it was during the summer of my second year that it really came together.
Jake: We didn’t really have enough experience as filmmakers either, it was too early in our education. It made more sense to do it in our third year.
Lucie: When we started at LIPA we were told about the opportunities we would have for collaborating with students on other courses and building up a network for when we graduated.
Jake: It’s turned out to be absolutely true. We’ve found this most amazing hub of people at LIPA to work with and we’re still working with them. We were the only two Filmmaking students who worked on our film. It really was a collaboration with other courses.
The support we got from the Filmmaking department for this project has been incredible. Some of the scenes were filmed in the Lake District and they were filmed on industry standard equipment from LIPA. We couldn’t have done that without their help.
Lucie: We were given so much freedom as well. We had to pitch this idea to do it as our film project. We were given notes and suggestions afterwards but ultimately it was down to us. We still got help, guidance and advice – but were able to follow our vision. I don’t know of any other course where you can do that. One of the ways this filmmaking course is so good is that you’re allowed to be creative, to try something out, to experiment, to fail, to learn and then try again. Without that approach we wouldn’t have been ready to start our own company.
Jake: When we had the premiere at FACT the reaction was incredible. To hear people laughing and even crying was amazing.
Lucie: You spend so long working on it, obsessing over every single word that eventually you become desensitised to it, so you don’t know what to expect when you share it. But the reaction from people has been so positive it’s been amazing.
Jake: During in our third year we knew we wanted to create our own company together, Spring Picnic Pictures, and we knew Liverpool was the right city to do it in. Moving to London or even Manchester would mean having to start again from scratch. We’d already built a network of people we can work with both in LIPA and in Liverpool itself. And it’s such an artistic, creative city – it's the perfect place to start and grow a company.
Recently, we’ve been working with Acting graduates Aidan Rivers and Laura Robinson on their new sketch show, Knickerbocker Glory which is hilarious. They’re doing a stage version at the Unity on 28 March. We’re going to be sending our version to TV networks to see if there’s any interest.
Lucie: Looking ahead the aim is to secure funding and produce our own short films and make that a backdoor pilot for the next bigger project.
The Space Between Notes will make its film festival debut over the summer. To find out when and where, follow Spring Picnic Pictures on Instagram.
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