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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!
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....
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!
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'!
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.
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