Artist & Video Maker based in Liverpool
I’m part of the Men Dancing group started by Chris Ball and Jen Hale in 2017. We’ve been looking at ways to translate dance ideas into film, tricky to develop collectively as a group but we’ve made a great start here with Crossing The Bar. Full film available soon.
A film collaboration with Lou Chapelle. Through a series of creative workshops,local creative practitioners and young people who live and study in Halton created costumes, dance, poetry, and sound. Together they re-imagined the Bleach Packers, iconic workers from the borough’s past, by creating a holographic video. The resulting artwork enacts a surreal Bleach Packer’s dream, in which he finds himself transformed, torn between chemical and nature. The work was displayed in different public settings around the borough.
Rehearsed over Zoom and filmed on Saturday 5th December 2020 in one day around central Liverpool locations. A collaboration with Movema and Unlock The Box.
I collaborated with MDI’s group for over 50s, Men! Dancing! last year to create a video work, filmed on location at Liverpool Cathedral. The film was funded by HOP (Happy Older People) and explores the idea of harmony and the workers who built the cathedral.
Screened for the first time this year at the first HOP gathering of 2020 at FACT in Liverpool you can now see the film below. I’m hoping to continue working with the group, exploring dance in alternative spaces in future projects, with the idea of taking back our public spaces as we age.
Last year, I was lucky enough to do a short ‘Time & Space’ residency at METAL in Liverpool which I used to explore ideas I had been floating around for a while based on connection, loneliness and solitude and how mostly the idea of being alone is regarded as something to fear.
I think I’ve always been a bit of an introvert so one of the things that attracted me to filmmaking was it enabled me to dip into new worlds and collaborate with different people while remaining safely at a distance behind the camera. In fact, I have often thought of the camera as ‘The Shield’, a way to be part of something while remaining at a safe distance.
As the residency came to a close, one of the ideas I chose to develop (with METAL’s generous support) became ‘Camera Moves’. The concept is a simple one. Everyone involved has a camera and is either filming each other or a particular performer/event. I’ve filmed performances and music gigs before as part of a team, trying to keep each other out of the frame – there’s a certain amount of excitement and energy that goes into that collective approach. This is different – it’s about keeping everybody in the frame, no hiding. It’s an attempt to break down barriers between filmmaker and subject, audience and artist.
I also wanted a quick turn around time for watching the completed film, so rather than use conventional editing techniques, I’ve been working with live editing software Isadora which uses a database to hold the footage (rather than a timeline) and where clips can be selected in different random ways, such as audio or movement.
I thought it would be good to collaborate with someone skilled in movement and dance and I approached Jennie Hale at Taciturn who was keen to get involved. We then put the project to the Arts Council and we’ve been given a small grant to develop the idea and run a few small workshops. Our first session at METAL proved fruitful, just in terms of testing out the tech and how feasible this all was, but also just in terms of how it felt.
Camera Moves – live edit test from Tim Brunsden on Vimeo.
Some of the things we noted during the tests were:-
Next week, we are running a couple more free workshops at MDI, one of them being an open session, so if you want to come along, book a slot now at the link below. Be interesting too see how this develops with different groups.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/camera-moves-workshop-tickets-60418657832
Last year, My friend and Re-Dock Co-Director, Sam Meech had been working with Tmesis Theatre Company developing visuals for a new show called ‘That’s Amore’. Funding to produce the show came in quite late and Sam was unable to continue work on it, so I jumped in to take over.
I’ve worked on Theatre visuals before, notably, ‘Tiny Volcanoes’ and ‘the Readers Wives Fan Club‘.
With visuals for theatre, it’s always tricky to get the balance right, where the projections add to the performance rather than becoming a clever but unnecessary distraction. With this piece, there was also 3 weeks of rehearsal and tech, which included changes and new ideas to the visual design and I wanted to do these in line with Sam’s original aesthetic, allowing the piece to have some sort of visual consistency.
Last week, was the first outing for the new show with 5 performances at the Unity Theatre in Liverpool. It was a tough start, with lots of lighting and visual queue changes and getting the piece lit well without washing out the screens was always going to be a compromise. I had some projector issues (one of them crashed during a rehearsal), and a few times, both projectors were accidently knocked out of position during some re-focusing of the lights requiring some last minute realigning. All in all though, it came together and it feels like it’s in a good place for the small tour that’s taking place this month, mainly in the North West. Now that everything is fixed, I can actually stand back and look at the piece as a whole and I think there’s some really beautiful moments in it. The tour should be fun too. I’ve linked below to some images from the show as well as some of the reviews.
