The National Youth Film Academy: Well-Meaning Disaster or Total Scam?
Kidnapping. Hospitalisations. Lies. Pigs. Money. Roughly 80 Pretty Okay Short Films.
In 2019, I went to visit my friend, Corey, who was studying abroad for a year in Vancouver.
It was a film degree, and we’d struggled to find a good time when both of us were free, so I said I’d just join whatever production he was working on as a volunteer.
The result was an intensely jetlagged, largely sleepless 10-day semi-conscious existence split between working on a very charming short film and aimlessly wandering the Jewel of British Columbia, fuelled entirely by energy drinks, poutine and sheer immaculate Canadian vibes.
As a volunteer who wasn’t there to achieve any specific academic goal, I was pretty quickly roped into anything and everything that could use an extra pair of delirious British hands.
I was multiple unimportant background characters, I helped construct several sets, I even spent an afternoon in the car park throwing handfuls of gravel at loads of freshly printed fake posters to rough them up a bit.
If there was an odd job going, I was the guy who wouldn’t say no.
By the end of it, I was physically and mentally exhausted.
My body hurt all over, I hadn’t properly slept in a week and a half, and my concept of time had been entirely shattered beyond repair.
And I loved it.
Despite having actually had very little impact on the film at all, I felt utterly fulfilled in a way that nothing had ever really made me feel before.
When ‘Midnight Screaming’ was finally complete, I was giddy with anticipation, kicking my feet in the air as I waited for the final cut to download onto my laptop that was (unbeknownst to me) about coincidentally about 20% through catastrophically and irreparably dying, which really added to the spooky ambience.
My absolute favourite scene, and the one I replayed several times, was one where there was a clear shot of a simple grey bedroom door.
It was just a door, and it blended unremarkably into the background - but it was my grey bedroom door.
I’d spent days painting it. First blue, then grey when the director decided the blue was too blue.
By this point, that slab of wood was like a son to me. Or at least a younger cousin that I really liked.
Besides my excellent paint job, though, the film was great. It’s a heartwarming story about a boy and his movie-obsessed grandfather who run a largely unsuccessful independent cinema accidentally waking the dead through the medium of a spoOoOoOoOoky old film reel.
It’s a wonderful homage to dumb, pulpy horror, and a visually beautiful piece of film in its own right. I genuinely love it.
And, again, it features a beautifully painted grey door.
I returned home, having well and truly caught the filmmaking bug, but there was a problem.
I’d sort of missed the boat.
This was mid-2019, and I was already in my early 20s. I hadn’t gone to film school, I hadn’t got a degree in film, I didn’t have any industry contacts, and had pretty much zero idea how to get into the art of making movies.
I didn’t want to commit to a university degree that would eat up a few years and then spit me out at 25, only slightly more qualified and just as lacking in a film career.
I wanted in, now.
But how was a 22 year old then-bartender meant to break into the UK film industry with nothing but a deep, entrenched conviction that he reeeeeaaaaally wanted to?
Thankfully, the powers that be (my phone) were clearly listening to my prayers (my conversations with my loved ones), and who should appear on my Instagram feed but Robert J Earnshaw.
Rob was the founder and CEO of the National Youth Film Academy (NYFA), and it seemed to be everything I was looking for.
For a fee, you and a group of other young filmmakers would go on a crash course in movie making, putting together your very own short film step by step, with guidance from big names in everything from camerawork to budgeting.
From the off, Rob is pretty clear - he’s not promising anything.
He can’t promise you’ll become famous. He can’t promise you wealth and success.
But he can promise that you’ll come out of the NYFA with, at the very least, a short film of your own, and a brand new network of connections - both people your own age and position on the proverbial ladder, as well as a few actual bigshot professionals.
To top it off, there was a solid selection of appropriately famous celebrity endorsements, most notably Will from The Inbetweeners, and a few alumni who had already made decent headway in their post-academy careers.
It, frankly, seemed exactly good enough to be true.
Before we start, I should mention that I had already heard of the NYFA.
Because of who I am as a person, a lot of my friends are actors or creative types, and the Academy’s reputation among a lot of them was not good.
‘Scam’ was the word used most commonly, with horror stories about handing over vast sums of money in return for nothing at all.
But the fees I was seeing didn’t seem that bad compared to diving into a full university degree or dedicated film school, and there was a free interview session before you had to pay anything.
So I signed up, eager to sink my teeth into my fast-track into the famously stable and career-supporting UK film industry.
And almost immediately, things began to fall apart.
To be fair, this isn’t the NYFA’s fault. It just happened to be the tail end of 2019, and things were about to get very apocalyptic very fast.
So, instead of a few months of meetups and workshops, our rag-tag group of academy hopefuls made do with video calls and dodgy free trials of online collaborative scriptwriting software.
It genuinely wasn’t a bad time.
While the world went mad, I could retreat into a writing hole with my co-writer, Ben, and bang out a script, trying to forget that we weren’t allowed to go outside.
Me and Ben made quite a striking couple.
He’s very long, and tall, and beams the knowledge that he’s a model directly into your brain without having to tell you, just because of the way his face is.
He’s quiet, thoughtful, and when he speaks it’s because he knows he has something to say.
I’m 5 foot something and refuse to let the opportunity for a fart joke pass me by.
What I’m saying is we covered each other’s weak spots.
And together we put together a script that I am genuinely still quite proud of - Last Rites; a Louis Theroux-esque mockumentary where a look at women in unconventional workplaces turns into getting caught up with organised crime in a medium-sized English town.
The finished film is no masterpiece (not that I think any of us were really expecting it to be, coming from a handful of teenagers and twenty-somethings), but the script itself was solid, even after the NYFA changed their minds on how long it could be and we had to suddenly halve it over the course of two days.
It was shot over four brutal days in August 2020, with strict 9-5 schedules outside of which all equipment needed to be locked in a room in Greenwich University, giving us very little time to actually film once you’d factored in set-up and travel.
The NYFA gave us very little support throughout, and we were largely left to fuck up and figure it out on our own.
And we did.
We blew £3000 on hiring ‘acting pigs’ who turned out to just be very normal (and very lovely) pigs who had zero interest in doing what we needed them to do, and ended up barely appearing in the film
We ordered industrial quantities of fake blood which didn’t turn up until the day after filming had wrapped
I was both the in-universe ‘sound guy’ for the fictional documentary, and the real actual sound guy for the real actual film, which led to some ‘authentic’ audio
The owners of one of the filming locations seemed to genuinely despise us, and would repeatedly interrupt scenes to ask when we were leaving
None of this is why I have a problem with the NYFA - they were our mistakes, and it was a deeply accurate introduction to how filmmaking works on the ground.
You can have meticulously planned every detail and carefully prepared for every eventuality. Things WILL still go wrong on the day and you WILL have to throw together a bootleg solution that is pretty likely to involve someone physically standing in for a bit of missing equipment, or a chunk of script having to be re-worked on the fly because the original vision simply isn’t going to work.
And this is a good thing - if you can’t deal with this, you won’t be able to make good films. Or even not good ones.
The conditions for Last Rites weren’t ideal, but they were realistic.
It’s all part of the fun.
And it’s why I’m always hesitant to agree with the (understandable) prevailing consensus that the NYFA is first and foremost a scam.
I got everything I was promised.
I came out of it with a short film, a new network of contemporaries looking to make their way in the film industry, and a basic understanding of how things were meant to work.
Becoming rich and famous and eye-wateringly successful was, unfortunately, still up to me.
No, at this point, I don’t think you could call the NYFA a scam.
But it was a total mess.
My impression of Rob Earnshaw is of a man who is deeply passionate about film, deeply hungry for personal success, and woefully incapable of preparing for anything at all not going exactly to plan.
Considering his entire business model hinged on large groups of teenagers and, worse, actors being given expensive equipment and very little oversight, this seemed naive at best and very dangerous at worst.
Unluckily for Rob, the worst did happen.
Repeatedly.
A student suffered a serious mental health episode that saw them spend a night in hospital - Rob’s response was to tell the rest of us to ‘pretend it wasn’t happening’ instead of getting them help, sending them home1 or really doing anything about it at all.
Another group ended up in a kidnapping situation, when a student’s mum turned up and hijacked the set, locking multiple members of the team in a cupboard when they refused to bow to her tyrannical am-dram regime.
The captees were eventually freed when the NYFA sent a couple of the previous year’s alumni over in a frantic dash down the motorway, but the film itself was largely cut loose and left to go off the rails.
It quickly became clear that what Rob said on any given day was more to do with that morning’s vibe than any real relationship with the truth.
Students paid vastly different sums in fees seemingly based on nothing but how much he wanted at the time, continued membership in the Academy post-course went from free to paid and back to free again on a whim, and a promised spot at the Raindance Film Festival rapidly devolved into our films being listed on a reclusive page buried deep in the depths of their website for a bit - allegedly because of a massive falling out and subsequent renegotiation between Rob and Raindance founder, Elliott Grove.
Nothing was ever enough to constitute a broken promise, but there was definitely some serious bending going on.
Crisis after crisis, the NYFA’s position was always to deflect, downplay, and sweep under the rug.
And, credit where it’s due, it worked.
Every year, the Academy seemed on the brink of collapse with a rotating cast of senior leadership who vanished as quickly as they’d appeared, constant rumours of finances teetering on the edge of bankruptcy kept afloat by selling off the office furniture, and a growing online swell of disgruntled graduates - every class of young filmmakers looked sure to be the last.
But it just…
Kept…
Going...
The complaints didn’t matter. The disappointments didn’t matter. The yearly tweaking of the official name of the company that totally wasn’t for some sort of dodgy tax thing didn’t matter.
Big Rob wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t. And was, as they say, addicted to this shindig.
He was on a mission to make the UK film industry more accessible to young people, and he was going to make it happen even if it meant consistently fucking over a lot of those same young people in the process.
Duty of care? Sounds like something for losers who can’t take the heat.
You kind of have to respect the hustle.
Not a lot. But a bit.
So, I made my concerns known, Rob brushed them off claiming that the NYFA hadn’t broken any legal obligations (which was probably technically true), and things kept trucking.
For the moment, nothing would stick to the guy.
I did another short with the NYFA, and another few with the people I’d met through it, each better and more professional than the last. But the scandals continued to rumble.
Never enough to actually topple the tower but, like a game of late-stage Jenga on top of an over-enthusiastic washing machine, things were only going to get wobblier.
Here’s the thing - the NYFA was technically doing what it was meant to.
I didn’t think Rob was a very reliable pair of hands, but he clearly believed in his goals, and was genuinely passionate about film.
When the Academy announced that Edgar Wright would be joining the judging panel for the very first National Youth Film Awards (gotta keep that acronym2) in 2021, he was every bit as schoolboy-giddy as the rest of us.
When David Bradley appeared to recieve a Lifetime Achievement Award or when multiple Bond Girls guested on the short-lived NYFA podcast, he genuinely looked as though he was having to actively put effort into staying on the ground.
And people were coming out the other end of the NYFA3 with their toes firmly smashed in the door of the film industry - I owe what little I have of a career in film almost entirely to the NYFA and the people I met there.
It was a system built completely out of temporary quick fixes with no intention to ever finish the job. But it worked. And if it wasn’t broke, Rob wasn’t going to fix it.
And it was juuuuuust about not broke.
By mid-2024 roughly 804 short films had been produced through the NYFA, each one representing a shaky opportunity to kickstart a real career - some made it work, plenty didn’t. But I can’t stress enough that, for a lot of young creative hopefuls, Rob Earnshaw’s wild ride presented a real, if needlessly stressful, gateway into the UK film industry without needing to have a family fortune or an uncle in the BBC.
Joe Archer and Cathy Wippell founded Silicon Gothic, producing excellent short films tackling the man-made problems we now collectively face
Rob Loud5 has established himself as a prolific editing wizard who seems to be able to do anything you could possibly need like it’s no big deal, all while being one of the nicest guys you’ve ever met
Sky Cheema launched GBS Studios, creating incredible modular sets and championing the midlands as a new centre of UK filmmaking
Chris Mulvin is a fantastic actor who is constantly just popping up in stuff like it’s no big deal and I then have to immediately tell my wife who he is (she knows who he is)
Amber Doig-Thorne has racked up credits in more than 80 titles in the last five years6, including starring in that one where Winnie The Pooh murders a bunch of people
Safia Oakley-Green has won a FUCKING BAFTA
And I have a Substack that has earned me a grand total of £07
I will leave you to judge who the real winner here is.
Rob Earnshaw was notorious for dismissing critics of the NYFA as (I’m paraphrasing here) disgruntled losers who’d squandered the chance he’d given them, and were blaming him purely to avoid blaming themselves.
And, while I don’t love the attitude, Robert, I get where he was coming from.
He was a man doing his best.
His best was often chaotic and bordering on negligent, but it was his best, and it genuinely seemed to hurt him when students attacked him for his skin-of-his-teeth approach to running a business/school/cult/drama student recovery camp.
From his point of view, a good chunk of NYFAers were going on to bigger and better things - even if the majority of graduates never got any further, surely that was still an improvement on the status quo for young talent?
No, despite its near endless shortcomings and downfallings and upfuckings, the NYFA couldn’t really be called a scam.
There were plenty of very valid complaints to make, and you could definitely argue about how much you’d actually got for your money, but I don’t think you could seriously claim that you didn’t get what had been promised.
Final verdict. Article complete. The NYFA is NOT a scam.
Right, Rob?
…Rob?
In late 2023, I got one of the regular NYFA emails running down the upcoming courses and opportunities.
I’d been largely ignoring them for about a year, instead focusing on generally getting my shit together, but just when I thought I was out…
As a full member of the Academy, I didn’t have to pay anything to sign on to 2024’s production cycle. Plus, it would be another chance to build up some connections, and another credit on the IMDb never hurts.
So I rattled off a reply, filled out the form, and mostly forgot about it.
The NYFA is famously a bit rubbish at correspondence (probably because whoever is in charge of it never stays in the job very long), so I wasn’t expecting a swift reply.
The application deadline came and went.
The estimated reply date came and went.
Christmas came and went.
The projected start date for pre-production began to get uncomfortably close.
Nothing.
No biggie. I figured I just hadn’t been picked and they hadn’t bothered to send out the ‘not this time’ emails.
A bit rude, but hardly the worst thing the NYFA has ever done.
Just to be sure, I fired off another email to check. It wouldn’t be the first time pretty vital information had never made it out.
…
Nothing.
I reached out to a few people to see if they knew anything, and they knew plenty of things because all my friends are very clever and talented — but, in terms of what the hell was going on with the NYFA?
Nothing.
It was almost as if the company had vanished off the face of the Earth.
And there was a very good reason for that impression.
Some time in early 2024, after staff had reportedly not been paid for months, the National Youth Film Academy finally officially collapsed, Rob Earnshaw scarpering with any remaining funds, including the thousands of pounds in already paid fees from that year’s freshly swindled young filmmaking hopefuls.
The website shut down, the networking platform it had hosted was pulled, and scores of now ex-NYFA students were left to piece together what had just happened in a handful of hastily thrown together WhatsApp groups.
(I’ll save you the detective work - they had just helped to fund Rob’s new sandwich shop in Hexham, which itself seems to have also now crashed and burned after some scathing reviews from the Food Standards Agency, who are probably among the worst people to be scathed by)
For a lot of us, this came out of nowhere.
Okay, not out of nowhere, the NYFA had been on its last legs for as long as any of us could remember — but it hadn’t seemed any worse than usual. Peering into the abyss was where the academy thrived. Nobody believed it was actually about to finally topple over the edge.
Nobody, it seems, except Robert James Earnshaw.
The writing had been pretty firmly on the wall, in hindsight, but it had been obscured by the fact that there were so many layers of writing on that wall that nobody knew what colour that wall originally was.
The NYFA’s notorious unprofessionalism had been Rob’s biggest asset — it obscured what should have been glaring red flags in a sea of duds and false alarms.
Staff had been paid late before, probably more times than they hadn’t, and budget shenanigans were rampant. It wasn’t unusual for students to have to pay for things out of pocket to keep production moving while you waited for the Academy to actually release your funds, which could take weeks or even months.
If you were on the NYFA database, you were going to forever get emails that weren’t meant for you, and you just had to learn how to sift the relevant from the automated.
The trick was that it always did work out in the end.
The NYFA was disorganised and messy, but it would get things sorted eventually if you were patient and persistent.
It’s a good cover — because it gives you a nice long window to pull the plug.
By late 2023, things had stopped getting sorted.
The NYFA pulled a Batgirl, with 2023’s films never releasing, and some students allegedly being told they weren’t even allowed to release them independently even if they were finished.
Staff and partners stopped getting paid full stop, and getting an answer from the NYFA that wasn’t a canned generic email on anything was borderline impossible.
There were rumours that the ‘office’ was now being staffed by a single graduate, Brooke Ward, who herself was rumoured to have very little contact with Rob or anyone actually in charge of anything.
But, if you looked at the website or social media pages, the Academy still very much existed and was more than happy to let you enroll for the next year’s courses.
It all seemed, relatively speaking, like business as usual - yet another rough patch for a company that wouldn’t know what a smooth patch was if it glided8 seamlessly beneath them like an immaculate frozen Finnish lake.
It would all be fine, probably.
In reality, the end had already begun, and Rob Earnshaw was apparently frantically shoving every last penny he could into a big comedy sack before he jumped ship, cackling, presumably hoping that there would be zero consequences for his actions and that he could happily establish himself as the Sandwich King of Northumberland.
But, alas, people don’t love handing over large sums of money for nothing in return, and have spent the last year filing claims with banks and courts to get refunded by any means necessary, most of which have been very successful from what I’ve seen.
Which is a shame.
Not a shame that people are getting their money back, obviously.
But I can’t help but feel for Rob a little bit, even if he is getting a comeuppance that is probably about a decade overdue.
His mission to help young people break into a notoriously difficult industry was an important and needed one, and something I still don’t doubt he wholeheartedly believed in.
Yes, he took a highly irresponsible Del Boy approach to it that meant the NYFA was a constantly balancing act, but even that I found pretty charming.
I, too, often have no idea what I’m doing.
In the course of being a menace to everything he touched, Rob had managed to build something fantastic — a real community of young filmmakers. Practically a generation of talent that I have no doubt will be big names in the next decade came from, through, or collaborated with the NYFA in some way.
It purported itself to be a gap in the fence that kept so many out of the industry, and that much was always true, even as the industry itself became more and more hostile.
The NYFA would give you the tools you needed to succeed, and would stand by you even after you’d completed your course and paid your fees, when so many competitors would tell you to kick rocks.
There was real value in being part of this dysfunctional and unreliable clusterfuck.
Rob Earnshaw was a maverick with unconventional (and potentially legally dubious) methods, but my god did he get results - despite his best efforts.
The NYFA’s downfall leaves the UK film industry that bit weaker and more starved, and I hate that the downfall was entirely self-inflicted.
Rob, doubtless, wouldn’t see it that way. I’m sure he’d found someone to blame long before anyone else even realised it was all about to come crashing down.
But you only had to be around the man to know he was on borrowed time unless he pulled his finger out and got his act together.
To now finally confirm that he never did is a real disappointment in the purest sense of the word.
A lot of people are understandably angry at Robert Earnshaw, particularly those whose money he ran off with, or whose films he killed off right before release.
Not me.
I’m not angry. I’m just very, very disappointed.
Because it wasn’t a scam. Not initially, at least.
But it was helmed by a man who clearly saw turning it into one as a valid last resort if things ever went more tits up than he could handle, even when it was he himself who was upping the tits in the first place.
And that sucks gigantic major balls.
That’s an industry term, by the way.
In the end, one of our producers (himself a teenager) escorted them home halfway across the country on the train, before returning to London to catch his train home to ABER-FUCKING-DEEN.
Seemingly because it meant you could siphon a bit of legitimacy from the New York Film Academy, who were aware of this and were not happy about it.
Now pronounced ‘knifer’ - yes, everyone thought it was stupid.
IMDb lists about 70 with the NYFA as a production company, but it’s likely there are a handful more not on there for reasons that will become clear.
Possibly unwise to introduce yet another Rob at this point but, alas, he is a good one
Which is insane, just to be clear
…unless?
Glode? Gleed?
Yeah but no. Loved the article, nice writing style but waaay too generous in terms of your assessment of Rob Earnshaw's intentions for the NYFA.
He looked for some starstruck and vulnerable kids (innocent, ignorant of the ways of the industry) and he squeezed every penny he could out of them, using smarm, "charm" and guile. Then he ran away with the cash.
Conman. Through and through.