So full of twilight, dreams that glitter

I went to Blackpool a couple of weeks ago to see our new film That Night up in the Illuminations.

Here I am, with poet and judge Polly Atkin, local Councillor Christine Wright, and winning poet Sarah Leavesley who wrote the very beautiful That Night. It was a bit cold outside by the sea during the screening, you can probably work that out from our hunched postures, but it was a very clear night, and a great atmosphere.

The evening kicked off at Blackpool Central Library, with poetry readings and the announcement of the winners. There was also hot pot!! Despite living here for five years, I have somehow never had this Northern delicacy; I liked it. So did my dog Freddy, who accompanied me and Billy, the film's composer. Freddy kept sniffing the air and looking around him quite optimistically.

From the library we took coaches to the Illuminations, and onto a big screen watched the film projected. Suprisingly, I took photos:

Would you like to see the film in question? It's actually still showing at the Illuminations every night for a week more I think, but hey here it is on the inter webs:

That Night from Wordpool on Vimeo.

You can read more about the evening on the Wordpool website here and here. Thanks to Clancy Mason and Lynne Pattinson from Blackpool Council for working with us; we loved it!

Heads turning as the lights flashing out it's so bright

We're back in Liverpool this Thursday night for a Tate Collective party at Camp & Furnace. Emily and I will be running a photo shoot on the night - come be glamorous!

This Autumn seems to have been filled with workshops, and all of the Liverpudlian variety.

Back in September, I ran an animation workshop with a group of military veterans, at FACT. They were a larger group than I have worked with before, and it was more like back-to-back sessions, so a bit of a different timetable from usual. On the morning of the first session I helped the group to come up with their story idea, and after some healthy debate (!) they wrote a script imagining the statues of the city discussing art. The military veterans do a lot of art-based workshops, so this script was a natural extension I think of their meetings.

A couple of the group members are keen photographers, so the animation style and process was based around that, however I mixed that in with some drawn bits and bobs, including lip sync. The script features the voices of the vets, which we recorded on a little digital dictaphone. I showed some of the group how to edit the individual sound snippets together and cut it with the storyboard frames to create an animatic. From there we pieced in bits of stop motion and animated whatnot, and now we have a finished film!

Statues Taking Liberties will screen later this month at FACT, along with photography and poetry by the vets (I told you they were an artistic lot). In the meantime, here are some stills from the film, featuring John Lennon, Ken Dodd, Queen Victoria, Liverpool Resurgent and Bessie Braddock, in statue form: