Wellcome to our Window

We have a new large-scale photographic work and video on show in the Euston Road window of the Wellcome Trust's HQ in London. It stems for our ongoing R & D on pedigree cat breeding, working title 'Cat Fancy Club'. The work is part of a long running project there curated by designers Dunne and Raby, we worked on the image with photographer Marc Henrie.

Viewable all night and day from the pavement! Warning - it may make you want to get a pedigree cat.....

Wellcome Trust
Gibbs Building
215 Euston Road
London NW1 2BE, UK
T:+44 (0)20 7611 8888

Posted Tuesday 2nd November, 2010 at 12:28 pm by Karen

Wish us luck

With 53 hours of logged footage under our collaborative belt, if Doug (our editor) arrives back in the UK this weekend, we begin our 8 week edit for the Jaywick film at AIR on Monday - I can't wait.

Posted Sunday 24th October, 2010 at 12:50 pm by Nina

Nina with legend

Browsing through an old picture archive I recently found this nice pic of Nina at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2005 where we were with our first film Bata-ville: We are Not Afraid of the Future.

One of the perks of being selected for this festival was a dinner with the festival director and this photo was taken at ours, at which legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff (1915 - 2009) also attended. Being first-time directors and very green, we didn't quite realise that this was the legendary man responsible for pushing colour cinema in its early days, with credits such as Black Narcissus, The African Queen and Death on the Nile to his name.

If the two met now I'm sure a lively conversation about using the new Canon 5d on our new film would ensue - we'll never know!

Posted Wednesday 13th October, 2010 at 12:47 pm by Karen

Sailor Girls

Due to the largely self-shooting nature of our current film in production in Jaywick, documentation of Somewhere on location is rare as hen's teeth. Here, Nina has momentarily put down her smoking Canon 5D and I my Tascam audio recorder - tired and happy in the Sailor Boy cafe.

Posted Wednesday 29th September, 2010 at 1:52 pm by Karen

Our grant's gone Somewhere else

Recent bad news on the funding front, with the announcement that Screen East, one of our current film's funders, has abruptly gone into administration taking (probably) our grant with them....
However, we're undeterred and with some budget slashing (there always is some, with films, anyhow) we can make it to the finish line with our shoot finishing in the next month or so. The loss of this particular funder also dramatically affects one of our project partners, the East Anglia Film Archive, so we're having to rethink the archive-based elements of the film as a result. Let's hope necessity may be the mother of invention.

Posted Thursday 23rd September, 2010 at 11:46 pm by Karen

Harvest Festival at Abbey Gardens

The Friends of Abbey Gardens are hosting a Harvest Festival on Saturday the 11th of September to celebrate this years produce - anyone who came last year can tell you what a great day out it was! Free and all welcome ... more details and directions all here.

11am Bring your competition entries:
* Bake a garden-themed cake or traybake (to be served at 3pm, after judgingPlease mark your container with your name, name of cake and ingredients
* Build a plant portrait: a head or face made from fruit and vegetables. Label your plant portrait with your name and age
* Make a flower arrangement on the theme of 'What will the harvest be?' in own container (not exceeding 75cm h x 50cm w x 50cm d)

12 noon Harvest Festival opens
Garden tours, tea and cake throughout the afternoon

12-3pm Activities

1.30pm Cookery and tastings

2pm Live flower arranging (entries can be submitted to the competition)

3pm Competition judging

4pm Harvest Festival closes

Posted Tuesday 31st August, 2010 at 10:21 pm by Nina

Towering Heights

In contrast to the succeeding few days, the Outdoor Film Screening at Jaywick Martello Tower went without a technical hitch. Unless you count a very slow sunset as a hitch. We counted about 90 in the audience, despite the blustery weather - all enjoying a drink and nibble before we screened the East Anglia Film Archive material followed by some snippets of new footage. Some of the local stars were there, including young Mac, who was touchingly pleased to see himself blown up to such an epic scale!

May thanks to all who worked at the event and all who attended in support of what is surely one of the Tower's most successful enterprises - bring on a regular drive-in cinema at the Tower I say....

The next few days were spent filming around Jaywick, with Nina and I taking up our self-shooting roles rather than working with our regular crew. This baptism by fire included some very trying lens and sound level issues, but it was thrilling nevertheless.

Posted Saturday 21st August, 2010 at 2:15 pm by Karen

Al Fresco Films & Food in Jaywick

Join us for a free event in our beloved Jaywick!
Wednesday 18th August 7.00pm - 10.00pm @ Jaywick Martello Tower
The Promenade, Belsize Avenue, Jaywick, Essex CO15 2LF 01255 822783 info@jaywickmartellotower.org

Working with East Anglia Film Archive (again!) we've put together some lovely short archive films to project onto the outside of the Tower, and we'e even showing some brand new footage shot for our current Jaywick doc.

Free, no booking neccessary.

Posted Thursday 12th August, 2010 at 12:26 pm by Karen

Everything you need to know about genetics you can learn from your cat ...

So says Dr Leslie Lyons (School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California) and a few months ago we were chatting about how you might try and show this visually. One idea we both really liked was to show a series of cats all with the gene for Blue colouring (ie. the same gene in all the cats) but with wildly different body types. So this Saturday with the expert help of Marc and Fiona Henrie (who are known to most of the 'cat world' as THE leading animal photographers) this is what we tried to do!

Many thanks to Audrey Newsome and Chris Wood for allowing us to set up and do this (in the judges room!) at the Eastern Counties Cat show - to get this many Blue cats together outside of a show would have been really tricky. I didn't know exactly which Blue cats to expect - I felt pretty sure we would get British and Russian Blues of course but on the day the range exceeded my expectations. I was very surprised to find a Blue Sphynx (hairless cat for the non feline-o-philes) who made a wonderful comparison to a pale Blue persian and the dark Orientals.

In the end we photographed the following lovely cats, I'm really grateful to all their patient owners for working with us:

Tricia Palmer lent us 'Alfie' (Tishkabar Avalon) her British Blue,
Janet Hirst lent us 'Eli' (Toghar Once in A Blue Moon) a very cute Oriental kitten,
Fran Armitage lent us her wonerful adult Oriental 'Spockie' (GR CH Chapelrose Ohmeohmy),
June Davey lent us 'Polly' (Palchinno Pineapple Poll) her pretty Persian,
Claire Bandy lent us Phoebe (CH Troika La Bayadere) the Russian Blue,
and Yvette & Steven Wilson lent us their amazing Blue Sphynx 'Kuzma' (Kuzma Katzakiora Grand Sphynx IMP)! 

Of course we photographed each cat separately - now the job is to join them all together ... the image is going to be shown in the window of the Wellcome Trust later in the year as part of an ongoing exhibition called What If curated by Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Fiona came along to help on Saturday - it was her first cat show so she was in at the deep end! It was also part of our on-going research for a new documentary focussing on the world of cat breeding.

Posted Monday 9th August, 2010 at 9:05 am by Nina

Jaywick Begins

While Karen was watching her weather tollerant NGS visitors wander round a wet Lawson Park garden at the weekend :-(  I was getting sunburn with the crew in Jaywick, filming the summer fair and finally beginning what felt like making the film rather than research ...

I'm not sure quite what made the shift for me (could have been the pumped feeling caused by lack of sleep and mountains of technical last minute preparation that I now have come to only associate with making films!) but I'd like to think it was being back with our crew from the last two films - Production Manager Lisa - James, DOP - John Podpadec, Sound - Paul Baker, and (of course) Tim Olden. This weekend we even had an extra pair of hands with a runner (luxury indeed) James Gilpin one of my recent graduates from the Royal College of Art.

The chaos of the summer fair kept us all on our toes ... and we even managed to try out some nice shots either side of the main event on our new DSLR (largely the cause of my pre-production lack of sleep!).

It feels good to be making another film and we even have a new webpage & Blog to celebrate. The picture is John and I - the clapper board is sadly not just for effect, in the world of the DSLR synch sound is a distant memory.

Posted Thursday 22nd July, 2010 at 12:42 pm by Nina