A short update here and a thanks to Mind the Gap who have invited me to work on developing a concept for a big funding bid later in the year. As per the heading, I’m not in a position to say what the project is, but I would just like to explain my role in short:

For this development project, I was asked to film some fantastic practical theatre workshops in a school which caters for young people with disabilities – and what a fantastic school in a beautiful area it was!
The workshops lasted for 3 days and was facilitated by Mind the Gap staff: Tim Wheeler, Mind the Gap’s Artistic Director; Bee Skivington, Mind the Gap’s Theatre Worker and Fiona Johnstone, who has recently worked on Mind the Gap’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ tour.

  I feel very lucky to have such a positive working relationship with Mind the Gap studios, an award winning theatre company in Bradford which works with adults with disabilities. I have been asked back to continue working on a variety of projects since December 2010 including media training in digital stories, promotional shorts and documentary as well as web …

I’ve was lucky enough to be invited back to Mind the Gap to take part in another project which took me out of my usual role as film and video man and sat me firmly in the driving seat with one of the previous members of Acting Company as project assistant and Wordpress development guy.
This project was funded by the Culture Company’s Artimelt Academy and was a project dreamed up a few years ago. In that time, the ideas was taken around conferences such as York’s Premier tech event, Shift Happens in 2010 where it was tested and reviewed in front of lots of clever people who did many jobs in many things.

The third week was when we really got stuck into our filming – and with only 7 wees in total, we really had to get cracking. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, for the first two weeks we spent a long time planning our project by deciding on scenes and creating a plan. FINALLY, we got down to filming, and as you would expect, the excitement in the air was palpable.

As with all things though, we had some challenges facing us, and for this project our challenge was that we only had a mere 90 minutes with the cast and some of the crew from Of Mice and Men. This meant that we had to pull together as a solid team and play the roles which utilised everyone’s key strengths.
So we marched down Studio 1 and began bossing around ourselves and some of the cast and crew.

In our second week of the OMAM Mockumentary project we pulled together to get into groups that are quite akin to that of a professional media production. Being the responsive people that we are, when our Making Theatre group asked us for more responsibility and a broader range of things to do on media projects that reflected the real world more realistically, of course we responded.

I put on my production hat and disappeared into a my office for a few hours to draw up some plans. Charli was also taxing her gray matter for the best way to make sure our guys got the most out of the project.
We put our ideas together and came up with a great solution, some solid groups and strong plan.

Yes that’s right folks – I’m back at Mind the Gap Theatre (great news!) and we’re pushing our production skills even further. Having explore digital stories in December, Interview techniques in January and February, we are now ready to take on our most ambition, exciting and fun project yet.
We have decided to do….

A Mockumentary on ‘Of Mice and Men’.

Of Mice and Men is the latest touring theatre offering from Mind the Gap theatre. Currently touring the country, Of Mice and Men has previously won awards for the adaptation by Mike Kenny of the play origionally written by John Steinbeck.
For the next 7 weeks I will be working with the Making Theatre group to produce a fantastically funny mockumentary which will blow the funny socks off anyone who watches it and will be the most fun and engaging way I have every approached a project. As someone who has dabbled in stand up comedy, and as an avid fan of all things silly and funny – I personally cannot wait to start shooting this.
The group,as you would expect, has had some amazing ideas already. Myself, Charli and Bee who are working on the project with me are just about holding ourselves back from getting carried away in giddy fits of laughter. It’s seriously good fun.

For my second media project at Mind the Gap, I worked with the Making Theatre group again and we took the skills we developed during the December 2010 Digital Stories project and improved on them. The second project involved us using video as well as photographs, and planning interviews, picking topics and deciding on different editing styles. You can read …

During my time at Mind the Gap Theatre in December 2010 I worked with some of the guys there to make some Digital Stories.
You can read my blogs on the project here or find more about my time working with Mind the Gap here.

As part of the project I created some supporting learning materials which capture the essence of what we learned during the project. I created a screencast and written document which could be freely accessed and shared as reference in the future if anyone wanted to explore the skills we developed or pass them on.

In the New Year of 2011 I was invited back to Mind the Gap Studios in Bradford to deliver another media workshop with some of the Acting Company and Making Theatre group.
Working in partnership with Bee and Charli – Mind the Gap’s theatre and education workers I set off on a slightly longer media project, at four weeks, to follow up form December 2010′s two day digital stories project.

This is a short post on the final two weeks of the project

After my short but enjoyable project in December, I was unsure about whether there was any more work on the horizon at Mind the Gap. I went into the New Year hopeful and more than pleased with the end products and the quality of the project for all involved – so I hoped that were there a chance and good reason I would be invited back to Mind the Gap. Thankfully I was invited back again by Julia. So I set off again to Bradford with a little knowledge and a lot of faith and enthusiasm.

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