Slight Somewhere hysteria

I must admit to struggling a little with juggling all the stuff we have going on at the moment. We are REALLY trying to finish the editing of our film Jaywick Escapes (with the patient support of our Exec. Marc Isaacs), I have 3 weeks to go before my students show at the RCA, the Floating Cinema website has just gone live and the project itself launches in less than a month AND (by way of relaxation!) it's the Abbey Gardens Open Squares Weekend and Summer Fayre this weekend coming.

Do come if you're free and London based, I'll be there giving (possibly slightly hysterical) garden tours and hopefully consuming my own body weight in tea and cake.

Posted Sunday 5th June, 2011 at 9:41 pm by Nina

Floating Cinema Launches ...

Well at least virtually as the VERY nice new website went live this week. Many thanks to our long term collaborator Dorian Moore for the lovely design and build. My favourite feature is that I can blog to the site straight from my phone and the info not only gets automatically posted but the geo tagged images appear on a map of the canal system too.

We'll soon be launching the actual boat/cinema, if you live in East London put July the 1st in your diary when the project begins with an evening of projections up near Springfield Marina in Stoke Newington - everyone welcome. 

Posted Sunday 5th June, 2011 at 9:33 pm by Nina

The Moog-tastic music of Jaywick

Earlier this week we reunited with Glasgow band Roads to Siam to create and record some incidental music for the score of the film - our composer Tim Olden will weave the tracks into his own magical mix. Both have also worked on our two previous films, a collaboration which has been called 'David Lynch-esque'...

Posted Wednesday 1st June, 2011 at 4:37 pm by Karen

The tunnel that is the floating cinema

Totally exhausted after a day on the floating-cinema-to-be attempting to reshoot the 1920's film 'barging through London' (shot for shot or so I hoped) whilst also taking the boat to dry dock ... We got half way through the journey!

Posted Friday 20th May, 2011 at 6:39 pm by Nina

China on my mind

Thanks to architect Charlie Sutherland, who brought two young architect / planners to Lawson Park (Karen and Grizedale Art's home in the Lake District) to talk about Cheng Du in SW China, a city of 12 million where Charlie is planning and designing many things including the 6000 sq m+ museum. 

We barely caught our breath as they showed us a series of startlingly futuristic animations of cityscapes, all of which will be done and dusted by 2016. One of their major practical and philosophical challenges is the linking of the rural to the urban - we toured them around the Lake District showing them what is called 'the tourist offer' here (shops selling tat, poor food, expensive parking) and highlighting how Grizedale and Somewhere's approaches to working with the indigenous cultures we find differed from this. Cheng Du will soon have all the iconic arts spaces of any world city that has arrived - museums, opera houses etc - but potentially it can also have a cultural masterplan that develops grassroots creativity for all its citizens and connects them with each other as well as China's past glory.

I gave a short presentation about What Will the Harvest Be? and hopefully the Mayor of Cheng Du is enjoying the website as I speak....

Posted Tuesday 17th May, 2011 at 5:18 pm by Karen

Film Europe signs Czech version of Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the Future

Whilst generating interest in our new film, Jaywick Escapes , at 2010's Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival we met the lovely Ivan Hronec of Film Europe.

The happy ending of 6 months negotiation is that Film Europe are now distributing the CZ film version in Eastern Europe, as DVD and for broadcast too!

Posted Tuesday 3rd May, 2011 at 11:41 am by Karen

'unexpected moments of everyday brilliance'

We're making progress on the programming for the Floating Cinema but it's hard not to be completely bogged down by the amount of administration this involves! Meanwhile we have really been trying to carve out time to think about the short film or films we want to make ourselves to show on the boat. The working title for this at the moment is 'unexpected moments of everyday brilliance' and we're thinking of a series of short 'making' moments which we hope to capture using sports filming techniques. 
Imagine icing a flourish on a cake in slow motion or spraying a car in the style of an action replay and you start to get the idea.

We're looking for makers who live or work in and around the Olympic Park - (especially those who actually live on the canals) and we're interested in any 'making activity' - but strictly no 'sports'!

Posted Monday 2nd May, 2011 at 12:12 pm by Nina

Canalway cavalcade!

As you can see Image Processing from my phone to blog is indeed working successfully - many thanks to Dorian for implementing this. We've actually developed it for the up and coming website for the Floating Cinema so we can locate images we take on and around the canals as the cinema moves around ... I can't wait for the site to go live! In the meantime I've been out and about researching all things canal and developing a very nerdy fascination for canal boat painting techniques, I was spoilt for choice at this years Canalway Cavalcade that I visited on Saturday. It's organised by the Inland Waterways Association and is as far as I can tell THE big London boat bash. Due (I suspect only in part to the Royal Wedding) there was enough bunting blowing in the the breeze to sink a smaller barge.

You can see more images I took here. 

Posted Monday 2nd May, 2011 at 10:44 am by Nina

email to blog

just checking image processing is working correctly.

Posted Friday 29th April, 2011 at 10:17 am by Dorian Moore

10 'green' apples

Due to lots of recent meetings about our floating cinema project I find myself spending more time than I might choose in Canary Warf - often lost, or passing through stringent security sign in procedures to access various offices. Once on the 'inside' we are normally transported to super high meeting rooms at the top of one of the many towers. The decor of these 'suites' is strangely gripping and I am often torn between the vertiginous views and the interior decoration! This is one of the strangest sets of objects I have yet encountered they seemed to be in celebration of green or sustainable office practice!

Posted Wednesday 27th April, 2011 at 2:11 pm by Nina