Essential media about the arts

Blunted Points [updated]

21.02.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Digital media, Television

Tomorrow Arts Council England and the BBC announce the projects to be funded for this summer’s exciting digital arts project The Space (see my earlier post Make it new). I did some initial consultancy for The Space but then decided that I wanted to pitch an idea. This entailed pulling back from any contact with those who were judging the applications. The idea, which I called Points, was turned down in the first stage of applications because it was felt that Illuminations did not qualify as ‘an arts organisation’. I appealed this call, successfully, and Points went forward to the second round. But we learned today that it has not been successful. So I thought it might be interesting – in part because people rarely acknowledge their failures in these processes – to reproduce below the core of the Points first-round application, written back in November. The application at this stage was seeking a grant, including all rights costs, of £73,400.
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Catching up…

17.02.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Performance, Television

Yes, I’ve been super-busy – and, yes, I feel guilty about not posting here for nearly a fortnight. So let me construct a post about a few of the things we’re involved in and also about one or two new developments relating to previous posts. First up…

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

One of the truly great coming togethers of theatre and television is the 1982 Primetime/Channel 4 adaptation of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dickens dramatisation. The day-long immersion in its world at the Aldwych thirty years ago remains one of defining theatrical experiences of my life (see here) – and a week on Saturday, 25 February, BFI Southbank offering a chance to re-live that in a way, with an all-day screening of the television version. There’s also a Q&A with co-directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird, writer David Edgar and actor David Threlfall (and me as moderator). The event has been sold out for weeks (it’s in the modestly proportioned NFT3) but a few tickets are back on sale – and if you are quick you might snap one up here. If not, watch out for the blog that will follow.
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Postcard from the battlefields

4.02.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Digital media

For a project about the First World War to be released later in the year (when I’ll blog it), I have been filming in Belgium and France. The weather was bitterly cold and our car got caught in a scary blizzard, but we had a fascinating time. On the Menin Gate in Ypres I discovered a trace of a Wyver (above) who was entirely unknown to me, and I was pleased to visit Edwin Lutyens’ vast memorial at Thiepval. From the generous and gracious historian Piet Chielens I learned a lot about the way in which cemeteries write histories across the landscape, and I developed a deep respect for the work of Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). So having not done a ‘postcard’ for many a month, here is one from the battlefields.
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O brave new world

4.01.2012 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations

As the out-of-office alerts are turned off and and the Christmas chocolate biscuits run out, there is inevitably something about this week that prompts reflections on the future. Not The Future in very general terms, but just how things might pan out over the coming couple of years for a small independent production company committed to innovative forms for the arts and media. That’ll be us. And what strikes me, more perhaps than ever before, is just how hard it is to prepare and to plan for whatever may be coming down the digital pipe. At the same time, and for all the reasons that promote the uncertainty, I know there has never been a more interesting and exciting time to be involved in cultural media production.
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A parting post for the old year

31.12.2011 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations

So… first, I hope everyone has had an excellent holiday break – and that you will all have a wonderful 2012, Happy New Year!

Now, it will hardly have escaped your notice that I have not posted here for some ten days, which means there has been a longer gap than any I’ve allowed to open up for more than three years. In part, this can be accounted for by a frantically busy few days in the run-up to Christmas, but there’s clearly more going on than that. Perhaps the simplest way of expressing this is that somehow I’ve suddenly lost confidence in my blogging, and I’ve been trying to work out why this might be so and what the blog’s future might be.
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Busy, busy, busy

9.12.2011 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Visual arts

I can’t remember the last time I’ve neglected this blog in the way that I have over the past week. Apologies. Reasons – but not excuses – include having two performance films in development (only one of which has been announced), a music documentary for 2012 and three possible iPad apps, as well as dealing in the past few days with possible proposals for the Arts Council England/BBC project The Space (submissions close today). And then there’s the documentary The Art of Clare Woods, which I’m speaking about next Thursday at The Hepworth Wakefield, where there is a wonderful exhibition of her paintings. The film’s not yet finished, but I’ll be showing sections of it and talking about how it relates to earlier visual arts films that we have produced. You can see the trailer for it here – and over the weekend I’ll be back with our usual features. Thanks for your patience.

We need to talk about Tracey

2.12.2011 posted by Linda Zuck Category: About Illuminations, Television, Visual arts

Sunday evening sees our new one-hour broadcast documentary with Vic Reeves looking back at the highs and lows of twenty years of the Turner Prize. (Why Vic Reeves? Because he’s quite a serious painter in his spare time.) Frustratingly, despite our presenter being something of a household name, Vic Reeves’ Turner Prize Moments is scheduled at 11.15pm on More4, sandwiched in between two Father Ted repeats. Broadcasters pride themselves on their scheduling skills. Don’t ask me what the logic is. Something to do with art loving Father Ted fans being insomniacs possibly?
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‘Friends, Romans, countrymen…’

24.11.2011 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Performance, Television

Needless to say, we are completely thrilled at the announcement that we are to film the RSC’s 2012 production of Julius Caesar for the BBC. The full text of this morning’s press release is here, but here’s the heart of it:

Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s greatest political thrillers and, as directed by the RSC’s Chief Associate Director Gregory Doran, the play finds dark contemporary echoes in modern Africa. The cast will include Adjoa Andoh, Ray Fearon, Paterson Joseph, Jeffery Kissoon and Joseph Mydell.

This will be the third Shakespeare film for television that we will have made with Greg Doran, after Macbeth (2001) and Hamlet (2010), and we could not be more delighted to be collaborating with him once again.
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Why film Clare Woods?

18.10.2011 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations, Visual arts

We have been back today at the rather wonderful The Hepworth Wakefield (above), filming the installation of paintings by Clare Woods. (There are photos on the museum’s blog.) Her show The Unquiet Head opens on Saturday (until 29 January) and features more than a dozen works created over the past two years. To complement these, the artist has also selected a small group of pieces from public collections by British modernist artists, including Barbara Hepworth. Since 2006 we have been documenting Clare’s work, the preparations for this show and for an Olympic Legacy commission, and now we have to complete an hour-long film before a premiere at The Hepworth on 15 December. We’ll release this film on DVD, but no-one has commissioned or funded it and we have no broadcast sale so far. So quite why are we making the film?
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Starting over

8.10.2011 posted by John Wyver Category: About Illuminations

So working with Codegent we’ve made our move across to WordPress – and so far it seems that the transition was largely without incident. It will most certainly take time for us all to get used to this, and there are still all sorts of things we have to work out, but we hope that the new structure for the site will give us much greater flexibility. One of the actions I can do much more easily now is to post several times a day – so look out for the regular Something for the weekend post later today, with Sunday links to follow tomorrow. In the meantime, please tell us what’s not working – and what you think of the new look and feel.

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