200 years of David Livingstone…. and how, 10 years prior, I resolved the struggle between narrative and spectacle

It is apparently 200 years to the day since the birth of David Livingstone…and on an (only) slightly less auspicious note, 10 years since I worked with the David Livingstone Centre. It  got me thinking to some of the ways that I have tussled with the conundrum of how you make engaging work with people who have had, or indeed are having, a bad experience of education. In the words of Eric Booth, how do you get them to PAY ATTENTION, when their fingers have so often been burned in the exchange of their attention for knowledge or experience.

Like some aspects of being in the education system, the pleasures of making moving images are often more deferred than immediate. Before you get down to being in the moment, there is planning, discussion, ideas to be hatched. Effective storytelling through animation can take this process and draw it out exponentially!

One of the ways that I have resolved this is through making trailers for imaginary films.

If I took away anything from four years of studying film and television its a general impression that mainstream movie storytelling is a bit of a struggle between narrative and spectacle. To put it in terms of musicals, a struggle between the big all singing dancing numbers and the work to make those numbers mean something. And of course it is work, hard work often…anyone left perplexed by Les Miserables will attest to this!

This trailer was made ten years ago with Streetbase Blantyre, an organisation that tries to keep young people from getting into bother with alcohol on the streets of the town. Since then I have made trailers with young people involved with gangs, young people between school, education and work, and girls, described through the euphemism of “being at risk of disengaging with PE”…a risk that I’m sure if you have got this far into my writing would relate to you, dear reader, at some level!

Some feedback for the GFF13 screening…

Some people had used the word “brave” but I hadn’t really questioned the wisdom of screening a Life in Progress as a work in progress, why would I? Some things seemed a little alarming, like the time frame, and being in GFT 1, oh and the Meet the Filmmaker events at the CCA…but…It seemed a great way of moving the project along which could, potentially, end sometime after I do!

That was until the last thirty minutes prior to the actual event itself….”Stuff” had been happening to the film that morning from 4am, prior to the screening at 1.30pm, to get it onto the cinema’s preferred format of blue ray disc. This had not worked. Standing in the projection booth of Glasgow Film Theatre’s main auditorium, surveying the audience from on high and then the hard drive linked to the lap top, linked to the GFT’s setup, through a network of trailing cables, it occured to me that we might have been a tad rash agreeing to get something together for the event with only a couple of months to go (one of the months unhelpfully containing Christmas and New Year). As if to confirm my fears, we even had a little terrifying blip where the film had to be restarted after 2 minutes in. I felt that the mantra “it’s a rough cut, it’s a rough cut” would only work up to a point. That point had already been passed as I clicked on the laptop to restart the film.

Somehow the film played for the full 90minutes, and despite some more surprises (the sound mysteriously fell away to a much lower level for a good 5 minutes, music cues continued long after they were meant to) the experience seemed to please at least some of the people, for most of the film! There were laughs too. In the right places.

The festivals director thought that as a work in progress it was probably not a good plan to get reviewed – even people used to seeing these things struggle with the notion of a cut that isn’t complete. That however didn’t stop me having a peek at what was doing the rounds on twitter. You should also be able to get a flavour of the Q and A too from these too….

We even got a very nice preview in the Skinny! 

and on a final note, John Archer, the producer, got an encouraging email saying….”The litmus test of quality for me was that I remained engaged throughout. Because I’m thick, with a minuscule attention span, making anything that can enthrall me over the course of, say, 2-3 hours, is an extraordinary achievement. I haven’t a clue what the running time was. All I know is that it ended too soon.”

Ah ended too soon….such is life.

Much to my surprise even the Q and A ended too soon….here I am doing what seems to be a characteristic hand gesture next to producer, John Archer, and author Alan Bissett, a great chair of the after screening chat. It was a shame that Alasdair couldn’t make it as he was under doctor’s orders not to leave the house but he his wife Morag was in my eyeline whilst I tried my best to explain why she didn’t want to be in the film! Fingers crossed that the next screening will be of a nicely graded, lovingly dubbed and soundtracked final film.

thank you for being patient and not walking out on us on the first day…

Thank you for being patient and not walking out on us on the first day….

 

Show time!

Here’s some text from the Glasgow Film Fest about the AlasdairGray film….now remember folks it is a work in progress. 

Alasdair Gray – A Life in ProgressN/C 12+

Dates Showing:

Thursday 21 February

Show Times:

13:30 

Kevin Cameron’s feature-length portrait of Alasdair Gray is as entertaining and multi-faceted as the man himself. It offers a colourful mosaic of fresh interviews, vintage archive footage and opportunities to view Gray at work as he creates massive murals and sculpts tightly formed essays. It even allows Gray to assume the role of a dapper, smooth-cheeked, smart-suited inquisitor to interview himself. Who better? What emerges is affectionate and playful with a good deal of attention focused on the long road to Lanark, as well as perceptive comments from Gray’s sister Mora Rolley and Liz Lochhead on how Gray changed how Glasgow thinks of itself. This is an irresistible world premiere of a work in progress.

Alasdair Gray – A Life in Progress: Meet the Filmmakers, a free informal discussion, will take place between production company Hopscotch Films and director Kevin Cameron on Wednesday 20 February (17.30) at our Festival Club.

HMD Animation workshops

In January I undertook animation workshops in four primary schools in South Ayrshire with the aim of exploring some of the themes raised by Holocaust Memorial Day, that falls at the end of the month.

The resulting exhibition features some fantastic sculpture, glass, drawing, textiles as well as the films and is currently running in Ayr, partly in some old, and rather creepy, cells beneath the Town Hall.

Here’s some interpretive text that accompanied the films (the films were rather tangential!)….I’ll post some of the films soon.

“Its not easy taking on big issues in twenty seconds of animation. I hope you will agree with me that the films screening here are as charming as they are surprising in the ways in which they have interpreted the brief.

In the project I ran, pupils in four schools worked in mini production companies to make their own animated films. We used materials from the HMD site to explore links between Germany under the Nazis, and the atrocities that took place in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. Through discussion we tried to imagine what it must have been, and be, like – particularly for children and especially when communities start to fragment and former friends turn to enemies, tormentors and jailers. The young people developed ideas and artwork to film under a rostrum camera using animation software. Their films shot, they then worked with me to edit their films and add sounds and graphics.

Some of the children were familiar with the idea of the holocaust and genocide from studying World War 2, for others it was a new concept. One of the key components for me was that they were able to go beyond the idea of the Holocaust as a one off event from a distant past; and reflect on victimising people as a process that dehumanises everybody. Most of the children had no problem grasping this and some had their own insights into how this connects with their own experiences. Others struggled to get beyond a tale of  ”goodies” and “baddies”. Whatever understanding the young people take away of historical events, creating their own films will give them a meaningful and positive connection to Holocaust Memorial Day.”

Negative Capability or how I came to love a project’s midlife crisis

In December 1817 John Keats wrote to his brothers. In this letter he made passing comment on Negative Capability: “that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”

It’s a letter that, if I had been paying attention, I suspect I should have known about, having been forced to study Keats “Intimations of Mortality” at High School and “Ode to an Urn” at University. Heck I’d even rather enjoyed Jane Campion’s biopic “Bright Star”. If I did know about Negative Capability I had forgot. (re?)Discovering this twenty years later,  fiddling with my phone in a taxi back from a rare night out with a group of artists who do work in participative settings, the message was relayed through a tweet inviting me to visit Maria Popova’s excellent Brain Pickings website.

Popova’s description of Negative Capability immediately chimed with my own experience of modern day reductionism that can beset creative work in institutional settings….anxiety around what it is that we are engaged upon that can overtake a creative project in its mid-point. How does this anxiety present itself?…more often than not in a irritable reaching after fact and reason! The most extreme example of this that I have experienced is being around a table by 15 members of staff anxious that a project dovetails with training needs and intense discomfort at the notion that to be genuinely creative we really do have to be capable of being in uncertainty.

Its this phase of creative work where the interesting stuff happens, where participants and artists alike take risks. Its something that institutions dislike because it can’t be measured, can’t be formatted and can’t be replicated.

Speaking of things that cannot be reduced to their parts…the Alasdair Gray doc is being pummelled into something that is starting to feel like it works…and here’s me, er, playing a part

News from the front….Artworks Scotland – Constructing the Larger Narrative

Documentation of November’s Artworks Scotland Conference with interviews with key note speakers.