You Are Here Aim Background Focus Location Matchmaking this group of children were chosen because they had helped Katy Hallet make the mosaic seat earlier in 2000 by September some of these children had moved up to a new school, so we brought them back to Dolton Primary to create their miniature film Timespan after initial planning discussions with Louise and head teacher John Taylor, we spent two and a half days working with the children, travelling from Plymouth to North Devon and back each day Day One: The Tarka Trail on location to create words and pictures On the Sunday evening before the week of our miniature film production, we heard rumours of petrol depots around the country being blockaded by people protesting against the price of diesel - preventing tankers from travelling to keep petrol stations supplied with fuel. We filled our tank on Monday morning, but by evening there were long queues of cars waiting to get into petrol stations around Plymouth, and the fuel depot in Cattedown in the south of the city was completely blockaded. By Tuesday afternoon almost all petrol stations in Plymouth had run dry. TV News reported farmers were slowing traffic on motorways by driving at 10 miles an hour, with others putting barriers up across roads to stop people driving around. We worked out the mileage between home and North Devon, and guessed we could almost manage our three trips up to Dolton and back on the petrol we had. Wednesday morning, more fuel demonstrations, no tankers being allowed out of oil depots, hundreds of police on duty to keep order. We set off along the western edge of Dartmoor in the mist, taking a detour near Okehampton to avoid a roadblock of a trailer and tractor. Dolton Primary School is tiny and fits into a space between the Royal Oak carpark in the centre of the village and the church. We’d asked all the children to bring their bikes and a packed lunch to school that day so they could take us on a trip up the Tarka Trail cycle path. The bikes were upended and loaded into a trailer, children distributed around several cars. We set off in a convoy along steep, winding lanes with high hedges on either side for the carpark at Petrockstowe where our section of the Tarka Trail begins, following the route of a disused railway. The sun shines down
as the children lead us along the cycle path past clipped green meadows,
the china clay works, a golden delicious tree with apples on
it as big as you’d get in a shop. Country smells of wood-smoke, diesel,
cows and earth. The swish of bike tyres on the track, jets overhead and the
liquid trilling of a robin. All the kids get a little blue notebook and a pencil, and we dish out five disposable cameras for them to share, showing each group how to take photographs - how to frame a picture, and how to choose the best position and light for different shots. We concentrate on the five senses plus the ‘sense of place’. Over the next hour in five teams the children explore, photograph and write about what they can see, smell, touch, hear, taste and imagine at the location - to tell us and an audience about their experience of this unique place. The children to investigate The Bird Trio and the surrounding area, taking photos of each other, the mosaic bench, trees and plants and the views in different directions. A robin is a focus for several children. In his notebook one boy writes “I saw a robin in a birch tree and I was standing on the path near the gate. I heard a robin when I was sitting on the sculpture. Blackberries taste sour and seedy. A hogweed leaf behind the sculpture smells herby. The bricks on the platform are hard and cold. People pass on bikes, crackling stones like fire.” We race back to Plymouth to get the five rolls of film into a fast processing lab, bagging ten quid’s worth of petrol from a little garage rationing it out near Lydford. The Health Service is on Red Alert and troops are getting ready to drive fuel tankers. No bread at all in Sainsbury’s. All the photos come out - we have 130 colour images to use as reference for the animation artwork. Day Two: At School shaping up the poetry and making moving pictures Darren next door out on pizza delivery last night said there were JCBs blocking the roads out of Plymouth, but we set off hopefully in thick fog for Dolton. Over Dartmoor the fog turns to rain. Straight to work on production as
soon as we get to the school. The children are thrilled with their photos.
We are using cut-out animation because
of its immediacy, and because of its resonance with the mosaic technique
the
children
used when they worked with Katy Hallet on the sculpture: small pieces
coming together to form a picture, individual frames of video building
up to become
an animation, words forming phrases, then a poem. Children pick phrases to illustrate and we have a storyboard for the animation. We set up an animation rostrum in the corner of the classroom. The churchyard is a few feet from the windows. For the rest of the day children work in production teams making backgrounds and artwork. We show them how to animate and create an illusion of movement, and how to operate the video recording equipment. The children take turns to film frame by frame under the rostrum camera and watch as their animated poem ‘You Are Here’ takes shape on the screen. There and back is a hundred miles. On the way home we score another tenner’s worth of petrol from a country garage - enough for another trip to Dolton and back. Day Three: At School polishing the poetry and wrapping up Heavy rain overnight and a severe weather warning from the Met Office. Head north out of the city, tuning into local radio Plymouth Sound. We discover that “Wolseley Road is under three feet of water and supermarkets brace themselves for another wave of panic-buying as shelves are cleared.” We drive very carefully through the watery lanes near Dolton. It’s our last day and all pictures and sounds need to be on tape by 3.30 when school breaks for the weekend. Throughout the day the classroom is full of activity as groups of children draw pictures of cows, cycles and birds then cut them out and animate them against a background of grass green paper or blue sky. The structure of the poem is a chant by all fifteen children, then thirteen lines spoken by four individual children, followed by the group chant - all together timed to just under sixty seconds. A selection of the children’s photos are arranged and filmed to accompany the chant, and for the start of the animated poem a pixillation sequence is filmed of a child’s hand opening to reveal ‘our’ Royal Mail stamp. We also film a animated portrait of each child for the end of the poem. After a few run-throughs we record the children speaking their poem onto DAT, then screen the animation to the other children at Dolton Primary. We clear the classroom of bits of cut-out paper and pack away our animation rostrum. It’s time to say good-bye. Once back in Plymouth we spot a line of rush hour traffic up ahead, stuck along a flooded road - just in time we nip off and make a quick detour, and arrive home with a trickle of petrol to spare. The next week the older children were back at their new secondary school, and the ones still at the primary school in Dolton made an exhibition of their photos, storyboards, designs and animation artwork. The petrol blockade ended. We edited together the children’s animated poem, added the funders’ credits to the film, made and posted off screening copies for the school and the Royal Festival Hall, and the project was wrapped up. Afterwards The animated poem ‘You Are Here’ was shown as a central focus of an exhibition in the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall, along with the other eleven miniature films as part of Poetry International during October 2000. After the Poetry International festival, all twelve miniature films were screened at the National Film Theatre on the South Bank and toured to twelve BFI regional cinemas across the country. Credits the animated poem ‘You Are Here’ was made by: Giles Atton thanks to: Text Copyright © Kayla Parker Sundog Media 2000 |