Shoot the Summer

Last night I (also) attended a screening of Shoot the Summer (or http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/shootthesummer on your mobile) - a film made by some of my colleagues (Hugh Garry and Jo Bellingham) in BBC Audio & Music.

What a blast it was – and a great example of how mobiles can be used to capture stories from users that we’d never get to see or cover otherwise.  The basic premise was that Hugh and Jo provided loads of punters, radio talent and bands at summer festivals with mobiles to film whatever they wanted and then pieced it together to document last summer’s festival scene.

Afterwards I was asked if I thought my colleagues in BBC Vision (the telly-and-video-making bit) or BBC Journalism (the news, sport, weather bit) should be doing this.  And, while of course they could, I left Shoot the Summer feeling like this was the perfect thing to be coming out of one of our radio-based areas.  The texture of it just felt like radio to me.  Audiences voices mixed with radio talent and bands, first hand experiences and – of course – music.  Sure it didn’t have all the polish that a TV production on summer festivals would have had – but it had something more intimate than what you’d capture otherwise.  Having been to ALOT of the festivals in my day, I definitely felt like it capture the feel of festival going far better than the professionally-produced Glastonbury: the Movie did.

Watching it also backed up another hunch I’ve always had – that while musicians are great on stage, they’re not nearly as interesting as crowd members when you meet them.  The only parts of the film that left me fidgiting and not laughing or enjoying myself were the ones where the bands were on as opposed to the punters.

I really hope I see more of this type of work coming out of the BBC in the future.

Crossover Participants Kill! Kill!

This afternoon we tried an exercise that I video-ed so that even if your’e not here, you can give it a try.

Just try to watch this clip.  Watch carefully and try to figure out what’s going on:

Now try to watch the other half of the group:

What’s going on in each?  What similarities and differences do you see in the groups?  How do people adapt and adopt different roles/characters?

The group was divided in half and each was instructed ‘to copy exactly what you see on the screen without speaking. Don’t stop no matter what happens and don’t make noise.’ They were then shown clips from Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! while the other half of the group tried to figure out what was going on in the group, in the story, with the characters, etc.  The groups then reversed roles and the second acted out a scene from The Wicker Man.

If you’re a participant, please add a comment and let me know your thoughts on how it felt, what you noticed, etc.

These were (approximately) the scenes the groups were acting out:

and