Next up....Everywhere!

So now it gets serious...the tour so far has been only a warm up for the next couple of weeks away.

As you can see by the tour dates listed to the right we are non-stop with a two week stint of Durham, Glasgow and Edinburgh followed by Inverness, Sheffield (led solely by Mark and Jo), London at the BFI, Falmouth then with a brief respite at the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre for Rebecca Davies' 'The Elephant' residency, Huddersfield, Bradford and an an adopted homecoming gig for three of us in Leeds!

We'll try and update here as often as possible, interweb access depending, but big thank you's in advance for everyone who turns out to see us - we can't do it without you!!!

Sunday at the De La Warr Pavilion

So straight after our two days at The Big Draw we hopped on a train to the South coast to Bexhill for the De La Warr Pavilion. We were put up in the Dunselma hotel which was great - never scoff at free bananas - and were just over the road from our venue, the 1935 built Art Deco building.
Regular readers may remember we saw Ian Breakwell's 'The Other Side' installation in September at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival filmed in the DLWP and it was a pleasure to see Melanie Iredale, the director of Berwick's festival come and find us at the Big Draw on Saturday during her busy schedule at the London International Film Festival.

At Bexhill we met up with our good freind Leah Fusco who graduated with Chris and Maria at the RCA in July. Everyone should check out Leah's fantastic illustrations when they get the chance - particularly her evocative field drawings of Beachy Head that inspired some of the filming we did for the project on our H16 Bolex during the summer.


Aside from having the best chips we'd had that side of the North/South divide we had a great day sat both inside, as part of the Access All Areas youth festival, and outside overlooking the sea in fantastic weather allowing passers-by the opportunity to join in.
The end of the day culminated in our screening being part of a series of performances that marked the end of the youth festival. This was the first time we had projected to a screen size scale, with the soundtrack pumped through a PA making the experience very intense! We loved it... but it may have freaked out a few younger viewers! Thanks Bexhill!

Friday and Saturday at The Big Draw Festival

This weekend was the first time we had three workshops in a row after each other, which came immediately after a major group art exhibition opened  in Leeds on thursday called 'The Plaza Principle' in which we were all involved (Maria having to take a 9 hour return coach journey to London in one day!). So the energy levels were looking dubious until the excitement kicked in when we saw we had a marquee all to ourselves for two days immediately outside Tower Bridge in London as part of The Campaign for Drawing and The Big Draw Festival!

These were two incredible days which suited us perfectly - our ethos of being a free and open-to-all event having never been more fully realised than here - allowing very young children, fantastic groups of prize-winning school kids, and every generation from families of all nationalities to spend time in each others' company working together.

We met so many amazing people, youngsters of all ages including the lovely couple who are soon to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary (who got married three days after they met!) to the creative genius of Danny, a budding young artist/director/storyteller extraordinaire, whose creations included 'gross elf', 'bomb breath', 'spikeyman' and the (living) 'monster airport'! We also were joined by thirty talented artists from Shaftesbury Primary School who almost covered the film completely within half an hour and explained to Chris on video what 'LOL' means!

Thanks loads to everyone who took part - amassing our most epic film yet and to all our helpers throughout the weekend - Caroline, Angela, Zamira, Victoria and the wonderful Zsusie! special thanks to Nick and Sue for making this all happen - it was an amazing weekend!

We will be hosting the video of the results of the workshop as soon as possible - check back here very soon...


(Chris broke his camera so special thanks to Victoria Ahmed and Zamira Murati for their photography skills)

Skeletons, Vampires and Little Monsters at Dalston Eastern Curve Garden.

Sunday saw us reach Dalston Eastern Curve Garden and what an amazing space it was. Anyone passing remotely near this space should peak through the door near the huge mural opposite Dalston Junction Overground station and enter a Narnia-esque portal to the only bit of green and foliage you will find for a long stretch of East London.

We were looked after so much by our hosts Marie and Brian and all of the workshop participants throughout the day were offered coffee, croissants, homemade soup with bread, crisps, cake and popcorn!!!
The garden was protested for by Marie, Brian and other local residents in order to save the last bit of green-ary from property developers and is lovingly maintained by them seven days a week which is clearly a lot of work, but looks amazing and is even growing its own vegetables.

We were joined by a large amount of people who wondered into the space including two young garden regulars who terrorised kelvin for the majority of the day. As soon as their young vampire teeth and skeleton masks came out we knew the final film was going to be something special!

     

Thanks very much to everyone who came and took part - it was another fantastic day. If you are in London next friday and saturday come to the Southbank and join us for the Big Draw followed by the De La Warr Pavillion in Bexhill...

Great video of us at AND Festival!

Check out this video of us at Abandon Normal Devices Festival.

The interview is with Mark and Jo and you can see us all at work! Thanks again AND!
After our workshops had finished we saw outstanding work at the Kinematic show by Sally Golding, Kerry Laitala, Greg Pope and Matt Wand/Ben Gwilliam  and loved Sam Meech's work from the North West Film Archive. Everyone should also check out Seaming To who collaborated with Jenna Collins to create an epic soundscape with her dramatic and amazing voice. Click on the names to see the links! Enjoy

We have some very exciting dates just confirmed that we will post on here just after our workshop this sunday at Dalston Eastern Curve Garden - this venue looks great and we look forward to seeing many of you there!

Many thanks to Rob Birchall for the great video!

Next date....Dalston

Our first outdoor gig is in Dalston, East London at the Dalston Eastern Curve Garden on the seventeenth of october.

This should be a good one in a fantastic space...more details here

Abandon Normal Devices (Day Two)

For our second day at NoiseLab the name of the venue became much more apt as over four or five more workshops occurred in the space at the same time creating an energised abstract loop of noise and electronics sound as the background for our activities. Despite the rain we had another hundred people show up and participate into creating another fifteen minutes of footage to go towards our final film.

We met more great people including Marion Hewitt from the North West Film Archive and more of the lovely people running AND festival and our friends from the Cornerhouse (who's gallery has just opened a new show by Phil Colins and who's cinema 1 is currently adorned with a great sequential poster taken from the infamous ten minute scene of a single tracking shot of Jean Luc Godard's 'Week-end' reminding Chris all to well of his MA dissertation!).

Before our final screening we watched a performance of The Face Visualiser performance by Daito Manabe - a truly amazing and very very strange performance whereby electrodes taped on their faces were synched to his music which made their faces spasm in a synchronised way!!!

They followed the performance by a twenty minute talk but had to have a fifteen minute break beforehand to allow their facial muscles to rest! Very wierd and very brilliant! Chris asked them in the bar later on 'does it hurt?' and the answer....yes!

AND Festival continues until thursday - if you are in Manchester it's really worth going throught the programme as there is so much to see. We will be at the Kinematic gig on tuesday, the Gleaners show tonight and hopefully the end party on thursday by Kazimier.

AND AND AND AND it was great!

Abandon Normal Devices (Day One)

We had a two day residency at Noise Lab in the heart of Manchester's busy Market Street as part of the Abandon Normal Devices Festival. The festival is really impressive and boasts a strong line up of expanded cinema, AV performance art, exhibitions and film as cabaret. We had a great day and had over a hundred people take part throughout the day - many just wondering in off the street wondering what was happening in the space.

The ten minute film was fantastic and this was the first time in the tour that all the members of Unravel were able to be in the same workshop - so OKO were there showing us even more techniques and Kelvin managed to get many people to sit and talk about their experiences of Manchester and Britain. Some brilliant stories were documented including a tale of a man being trapped in the Blackpool tower for 2 weeks surviving only on Mars Bars and different variations of people complaining about the rain!

After the screening we all went to see the Premiere of Turner Prize winning Artist Gillian Wearing's debut feature length film 'Self Made' - a truly raw and intensely emotional documentary. This was an absolute privelidge for us and comes thorughly recommended. Gillian was there in person and answered questions about the film for half an hour after the showing. Look out for it as and when it gets a national release!