Boat Life - it's intense

I practically never leave the floating cinema at the moment as the programme is very intense. Despite a few hitches with a lot of floor mopping and sporadic downpours, we are generally having a fantastic time. I highly recommend our screening tomorrow night of the work from Fugitive Images - especially if you are local to Hackney.

I think the highlight so far for me has been A Smaller Sound, A Bigger Crowd by Ian Giles which took folk song and a fictional tale deep into the heart of Docklands. During the first performance we scooted past the biggest boat ever to moor in the dock and came into Middle Dock via a raised bridge in the road. I listened to the sound of Sam Lee's ballad and thought how beautiful it was to focus just on his voice and the story of the Docklands Bell, below the city workers looking down from the bar terrace above. On the other side of the dock we were serenaded by a small group of hand bell ringers - their modest sound managing to pierce and interrupt the dominant culture and noise of the literally towering surroundings.

You can see more images of Ian's work here.  

Posted Tuesday 19th July, 2011 at 11:27 am by Nina

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

Exmoor National Dress on the catwalk in Newcastle

I'm pleased to see that my film, costume and portraits are going on show as part of 'Triparks'
at
ACAdovetail, Amy House, 61 Blandford Square (in front of the Discovery Museum),
Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 4HZ

Exhibition runs from 4/11/09 - end of March 2010

Opening hours: Mon-Fri 9-5pm (occasionally closed for lunch) / Entry is free

For more information: contact: Helen Ratcliffe, (01434) 685040, helenheads@aol.com

A project initiated by Aune Heads Arts

Posted Wednesday 2nd December, 2009 at 10:50 am by Karen

Exmoor National Dress on the catwalk again

My photo portraits and short film are on show down in Somerset until Oct 10th:
Brewhouse Theatre & Arts Centre
Coal Orchard
Taunton
Somerset
TA1 1JL

More detail on venue and times on
the website here

Posted Monday 7th September, 2009 at 6:22 pm by Karen

Anthony, Siouxsie & the 'La Perms'

As some of you might know (!) cats are close to the 'Somewhere' shared heart and for some months we have been trying to work on a new film looking into cat breeders and their in depth knowledge of feline genetics. We have done some shooting at different cat shows but this week it's crunch time with the deadline for the terrifyingly titled Sheffield 'Meet Market' looming.

So I will be forever grateful to Anthony Nichols (and his La Perm cats) for spending his Sunday letting me grill him on film about all the ins and outs of cat breeding and busting some commonly held cat genetics myths ...

All ginger cats are toms - not, it turns out, true
All white cats are deaf - not, it turns out, true

Only white cats can have blue eyes ... almost true.

Rather conveniently one of Anthony's cats has different coloured eyes, a good find when you're trying to show something about genetics in a visual way!

Posted Monday 24th August, 2009 at 9:12 pm by Nina

East Tilbury Interview

I enjoyed one of my regular visits back to East Tilbury this week, catching up with Bata-ville friends at the Bata Resource and Reminiscence Centre. These are always busy events and this Wednesday they had 300 visitors! One of these was Michael Casey who has bravely set out to start a new kind of news site for the area focussed on local views. It's called YourThurrock and links to all of the clips he makes on YouTube ... you can see the quick interview he did with me about the film here.

I've also added some new images to our Bata group on Flickr, it's now got some good shots from Bata communities all over the world.

Posted Friday 24th October, 2008 at 11:10 am by Nina

Heavy Load

I'm just back tired and emotional from BritDoc 2008 & I can definitely report that the festival is much more fun when your film is not playing! This year I was able to see more stuff, concentrate on what was being said/shown and enjoy responding to the question of 'what are you working on next' with 'a film about cat breeding' ... which caused most 'networking' pressures to evaporate ...

My absolute top recommendation would be a co-SXSW film from this year 'Heavy Load - A film about happiness', which I was excited and nervous to see. It didn't disappoint, I loved the film & you can't help but love a band who cover Kylie & the clash & wrote a song in tribute to George Michael 'Gay at weekends'.

Visit their website for more info & sign up for screening info when it's released in the UK - you won't regret it. The image to the right shows the band singing with the producer & director at the closing party.

It reminded me of Bata-ville in a funny way, and how moved I was by the experience of making it, and the commitment of many of the films 'characters'. Bata-ville has been called 'a sad film about hope', in many ways Heavy Load is a sad film about happiness, it obviously had as big an impact on the director as Bata-ville and its participants had on Karen & I.

The other film I saw was Man on Wire ... also a cinema visit you won't regret, although at a festival focussed on composers & music, it was shame to see a film with such a miserable off the shelf top-classical-hits sound track. For me it spoiled an otherwise top notch film.

Other highlights were my 'surgery' with Danielle DiGiacomo of Indiepix & an extraordinarily helpful hot housing session (we BritDoc grantees get extra special treatment) with the forthright Documentary Doctor Fernanda Rossi. The woman is an advice power house, I could see why you might end up paying her to Skype you with exec. feedback!

Posted Monday 28th July, 2008 at 5:49 pm by Nina

Tudor Screening

We had a great turn out from Kentwell last week, for our special screening of Living with the Tudors, so much so that the 'regular' audience members are virtually invisible! The manager of the cinema was very excited to see a mid week queue of Tudors stretching out down the block.

It felt great to finally show the film to a big group of participants from the re-creation, and a really interesting Q&A followed the screening. Questions touched on what our expectations had been, why we didn't show more 'non-gentry' characters and how we ultimately felt about the bad feeling the filming caused with some participants at the time.

Karen and I were too nervous to sit through the actual showing and went for the obligatory Somewhere regional curry. Fortunately we returned to the sound of much applause for the film as the credits rolled and there seemed to be a general good vibe to the evening. Of course some might argue that it's impossible to expect that everyone involved in making a film might like it - but of course it doesn't stop you hoping that this might be the case. I think the poor distribution manager from Soda pictures had certainly had enough of hearing about the Tudors by the time we let him back out of the car in Hackney.

Posted Monday 7th July, 2008 at 2:56 pm by Nina

Next stop Sarasota

There's no stopping Living with the Tudors now ... the Blog from SXSW has hardly gone up before we're announcing our next screening. Sadly we won't be there to see this one, which is a shame as the historic cinema looks amazing ... still if you're near Sarasota book now!

Wednesday April 9th 6.00pm or Friday April 11th 6.00pm
Both at the Historic Asolo Theatre

You might even get one of our new 'Limning Badges' ... as they predictably arrived too late for our big fat SXSW Tudor party!

Posted Wednesday 19th March, 2008 at 5:35 pm by Nina