Articles by Catherine Bray

Caroline Archer is a Partner in UKType (www.uktype.com) and blogs here about this year’s Plus International Design Festival exhibition, part-sponsored by media partner 4Talent.

Plus International Design Festival

There’s not much to queue for on River Street, especially in November, but for four days last week cars were doubled parked, coaches arrived in convoy and expectant delegates lined the pavement outside the newly opened Fazeley Studios. They’d traveled to Eastside from across Europe and the Middle East, from London and around the UK and had even found their way from far-flung corners of Deritend. River Street sprang to life.
The reason for this influx was the Plus International Design Festival, which had returned to Birmingham for its third year.
This year the exhibitions were disparate and unconventional. Agencies and freelancers exhibited work that was unproven and untried. Two of my favourite pieces included Shanghai-based WOKmedia who showed Between Lines, a three dimensional, flexible typographic ‘bookshelf’; whilst type designer, Timothy Donaldson produced Plus non-Plus: a vast canvas covered in letters so large they had to be formed by the whole body with the assistance of scaffolding. Alongside established exhibitors such as Clusta and Fluid was Smile a trio of exciting young newcomers to the local design scene who are definitely ones to watch for in the future.
The lecture series is always the jewel-in-the-crown of Plus. This year an international line-up of speakers - both known and unknown - held the audience over three days during which time they delivered a series of informative and inspiring talks. In particular Jonathan Barnbrook commanded an audience that would have been the envy of the Guillemots and which roused as much passion.
However, the Festival was not simply about watching and listening - it was also about doing, and there were plenty of workshops to keep the visitors entertained, and the ever popular walking tours ran to capacity as visitors explored the typographic complexity of Birmingham’s urban environment under the able guidance of local historian, Ben Waddington.
But what was the purpose of all this activity?
Plus is not about acquiring clients or pecuniary gain: it had a more significant and richer purpose than simple commercialism. To this end, it was edifying to seeing a stone carver from Devon, chatting with the creative director from a London agency who was talking a young graduate from BCU who had engaged the attention of an eminent type designer. This, in microcosm, was what Plus is about: the great and the good mixing with the great unknown in parity.

Contributor Ian Ravenscroft blogs from the 4Talent stage at Gigbeth festival on the 8th November and would like to note he was not paid to say all the nice things he says here.

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Exchanging indie haircut bands for an eclectic line-up of unknowns is a brave move for an up-and-coming festival. I went to find out if the gamble paid off on the 4Talent stage at Birmingham’s Gigbeth festival.

Thingamagoop has a new friend.

Photo c. Pete Ashton

Following a hectic Friday night with Hot Monocles after they raucously opened Gigbeth’s unsigned bands stage, I made my way once again to the Dragon Bar at the Barfly to check out the eclectically-assembled 4Talent stage. Exciting, innovative acts were the name of the game and in the event the billing did not disappoint.

As I entered the room I was greeted by Pete Ashton’s bleeping, blooping, buzzing boxes, also known as the Film Dash-winning Thingamagoop and new addition, Thingamakit, tentatively named King Tubby. Confused? Let me explain…

Pete’s hi-tech toys are light-sensitive synthesizers, which he manipulates using the bots’ built-in light stalks, an ingenious LED glove and any source of light within reach. The result being a cacophony of piercingly ambient electronic bleeps and bloops, which visitors to the stage found equally intriguing and inexplicable, especially once given an opportunity to have a go themselves.

After all that frantic commotion, the unassuming Rich Batsford settled into his seat to sooth our bleeping brains with his emotive classical piano compositions. Playing to a crowd of incredibly-attentive leather-clad metal fans added a hint of the surreal to his set of hypnotic melodies and powerful, booming chords, but this could not distract from the calibre of his musicianship. A brave choice for a festival crowd maybe, but a worthy stage for such artistic talent.

The act that really marked out the eclectic nature of the evening however, was 4Talent award winner, Iain Woods & The Psychologist. Melding grimy hip-hop beats with soaring gospel and soul vocals and strings, Iain strutted provocatively into his first gig with the group - which included a DJ, two violinists and live painted visuals - with ease, trying in vain to disguise his sheer excitement. His stage persona may split opinions in the wider world, but his raw enthusiasm and originality will surely gain many admirers.

Dancing of the night goes to The Keyboard Choir, whose enthusiastic lead key-basher pioneered some ingenious leg-bending moves, twisting and turning to keep his Casio firmly planted through the group’s synthesised hip-hop tinged epics. At times I felt like I was peering in on a team of prog-scientists trying to crack some musical cypher as their conductor fought to maintain control of the chaotic, frenzied fingers of his team.

Finally, Einstellung took to the stage purposefully, arming themselves with weapons of guitars, bass, amps and drums. And what an assault we were in for. Starting off with an upbeat two-chord progression, the Krautrock five-piece built and built the volume and distortion to a wall of crashing noise and pounding rhythm, layering screaming slide guitar and crunching riffs to create a scorching, tumultuous soundscape. One track, two chords, and half an hour later, I felt like asking the band politely for my eardrums back, but I fear it may have been too late.

As 4Talent stage curator Catherine Bray admitted, it would have been very easy to populate this stage with safe, carbon-copy indie bands, which would have been an easier sell. But in the end, artistic innovation won a minor victory that night in the tiny Dragon Bar.

Imagine a rubber festival wristband. Now imagine a 1GB USB memory stick loaded with video, podcast and MP3 materials. Cross the two and you’re looking at the 4Talent Gigbeth stage limited edition multimedia USB album, a small slug of memory built into a wristband you can plug into your computer.

We’ve pre-loaded it with videos, MP3s and a podcast from the 4Talent acts gracing Gigbeth festival 2008 on Saturday 8th November. We’re not a fan of locked content, so everything on the memory stick can be ripped to your computer and the memory stick reused as many times as you like. This is what the album contains:

Video: Bugs, The Keyboard Choir
The video to Bugs by The Keyboard Choir was made by the acclaimed new production outfit Bang, who use time elapse black and white film to create a distanced dystopian vision perfectly accompanying the laid-back electronic glitch-pop of this track.

Video: Konstant live, Einstellung
Relive the live experience with this thumping video of Brummie favourites Einstellung tearing it up onstage.

Podcast: Einstellung, Rob Horrocks
Einstellung manager Rob Horrocks put together what he calls a Krautcast about the inside story of managing Krautrockers Einstellung, with contributions from band members explaining the practicalities of life in a band.

MP3: Futuristic BBoy, WiZe
WiZe is someone who should have been playing the 4Talent stage at Gigbeth. The winner of last year’s 4Talent Music Awards, outstandingly talented MC WiZe tragically passed away this year. We include his music as a tribute to his memory and thank his family for allowing its inclusion.

MP3: Namaste, Rich Batsford
Gorgeous virtuous pianical tinklings from Birmingham’s own Brian Wilson. You can download Rich Batsford’s entire album Valentine Court for free from his website, and we recommend that you do.

MP3: In This Situation Thinking Won’t Help, The Keyboard Choir
A sample-happy track from the finest all-keyboard act we’ve ever heard of, this unwieldily-titled tune makes and wins the case for fusing prog and hip-hop.

MP3: Stream, The Icarus
Shortlisted for the 4Talent Music Award 2008, Edinburgh’s The Icarus have gleaned comparisons to Massive Attack, Overseer and Rage Against The Machine from The Skinny, who called their album “curiously different and immensely gratifying, [...] fusing hip-hop, ambient leftfield, rock and even hints of funk and jazz.”

MP3: Wireless World, Camille Davila
Shortlisted for the 4Talent Music Award 2008, Camille Davila was born in Los Angeles, and spent most of her life on the West Coast before relocating to Liverpool where’s she’s been producing such gems as Wireless World.

MP3: Iain Woods & The Psychologists
He named his act after his own panic attacks, but on the evidence of his music, Iain has no need to panic. Winning the 4Talent 2008 Award for Music is just a tiny part of the recognition that his unique gospel grime soul sound merits.

WHERE TO GET IT
4Talent are giving 100 of the limited edition album away free to the first 100 people through the door of the Dragon Bar on the 8th November.

For more on the 4Talent Gigbeth stage line-up, go to:
www.channel4.com/4talentcentral
www.twitter.com/4talent

Frankie Ward blogs for 4Talent on being part of Internet Zombie Movie ‘World Wide Dead’

The project was begun four months ago by 25 year old graphic designer Bryony Matthewman, aka Paperlilies. After being bitten whilst using the London Underground she enthusiastically came up with the idea of getting the You Tube community to help her produce, write, act and direct a feature length horror film. With over 40,000 subscribers Bryony knew she had power to start something big, and big it became.

After a generous response Bryony set up a forum and was also approached by Hat Trick Productions. They wanted to make an online documentary on the project and follow it from beginning to its end; which was ambitiously scheduled for Halloween.

I first discovered the project when a ‘call to audition’ video was featured on You Tube. I submitted an audition for the female lead, then known as Maddie. There were also three more London based roles, a couple of American roles and a German pair who would be involved in a subplot, depicting how the zombie infection had quickly spread overseas.

On the forums, debates became quite heated. Controversy involving the script threatened to deteriorate the project, and with Bryony leaving for Canada over August, certain members of the forum felt that they were not being kept up to date and had to rely on the online documentary for news. Casting was also affected which meant that instead of announcing her shortlist for main roles in August, final preparations to start filming were only made in mid October.

I was told I had the part of Abbey, formerly known as Maddie, less than a week before I was due to film in London. On the 18^th October a camera crew, two directors, four actors and a handful of willing Zombies descended on Shoreditch. Fighting against darkness we moved from our original location to one outdoors and back again. Hat Trick followed us around for the majority of the day, asking to let them film me applying my makeup and recording general shooting. It felt strange being the subject, rather than behind the scenes for once! (Particularly with four cameras being pointed straight at me for parts of the day.)

Back on the Internet Zombie Movie forums, two scriptwriters wrote about how they felt the project was no longer their own and now unrecognisable. They disliked the casting and the actors themselves and despite the newly found positive attitude displayed by most of the contributors, they continued to write about their unhappiness. Had it not been for the support from the rest of the forum, I may have found this demeaning but as I was aware that nothing could be done, I was not alarmed.

The London screening will feature Video blogs from a worldwide You Tube community, some fearing the zombies, and others believing the outbreak to be pure rumours. Then we’ll see the segment shot early this month. 12 hours of work, which will probably yield less than five minutes screen time, but that’s showbiz, as they say!

The project will hopefully be completed after the screening depending on interest from outside parties. As a no budget movie however, I believe the results so far will be hugely impressive to all.

In a 4Talent special live event, we’ve put together the line-up for a stage at Gigbeth festival 2008, from 18:00 til midnight on 8th November 2008 at the Dragon Bar in the Barfly, Digbeth High Street, Birmingham. You can read all about this eclectic line-up of the best bands you’ve never heard of over here on the 4Talent Central site, including the winner of the 4Talent Awards 2008, music category, but we thought we’d blog here to let you know about not one, but two, competitions to win tickets.

• The first comp is sitting pretty with those doyens of the best niche music, Artrocker
• And the second comp is over on The Line Of Best Fit, you one-stop shop for all that’s good and pure in new music
• Plus BandWeblogs.com has a few more details on the acts…

Early ticketage is advised: you can get hold of £18 day tickets for the Saturday and £25 weekend tickets, plus check the full line-up of Gigbeth acts including the Sugarhill Gang and the Young Knives, over here on the Gigbeth site.

Keyboard Choir: from Brian Eno's 60th birthday party to the 4Talent Gigbeth stage in one easy move.

Film Dash took place over 48 hours in Birmingham, with teams putting together films of less than five minutes in length, in a competition organised by Created In Birmingham’s Chris Unitt, honouring the memory of Birmingham-born Ealing comedies producer Michael Balcon. 4Talent Commissioning Editor Catherine Bray was one of three judges.

I’ve seen short films that people have spent thousands of pounds and months or even years of their time on. Some of those shorts have fallen below standards set by some of the inaugural 48 hour Film Dash shorts.

If there was an award for Best Facial expression, Mars Elkins in Love On The Rocks would be taking home the gong for her five second cameo, and while I’m mentioning Mars, I’d like to thank her for putting together so much of the Hello Digital festival of which Film Dash was just one part.

Fans of atmospheric, fascinatingly shot shorts won’t be disappointed by Stef Lewandowski’s enigmatic entry Xela - ‘Ut Nos Vivicaret’. I’ve asked Stef for permission to screen his film at 4Talent’s Gigbeth stage on the 8th, as it fits perfectly with the request made by one of the bands for carefully crafted experimental films of total artistic integrity to play during their set. Falling into a similar category, The Ascension intrigues and baffles in equal measure.

At the more conventional end of the spectrum, gangster-style film Black Widow, from Stickleback Productions, features the largest, and in my opinion, most skilled cast. The Bid, also filmed in a naturalistic style, should strike a witty note of mockumentary realism for those familiar with the language of development strategies in corporate Birmingham.

The Landlord offers the broadest characterisation of the competition in the larger than life grotesquerie of its eponymous character - you can read about the process of putting together that film on the 4Talent blog. One of my favourite on-page concepts was that of Mobile, where a character follows texted instructions on a randomly discovered mobile phone - at least as worthy of being made into a film as Phone Booth starring Colin Farrell.

I’d like to thank all those involved, both those I’ve mentioned by name and those where there hasn’t been time, and huge thanks to Chris Unitt for bringing it all together.

But there can, of course, be only one winner. My favourite short brings together an at times experimental ethos with quirky, humourous narrative. It’s also one of the shorts that most utilises the underused film location that is Birmingham, from the commercialism of the Bullring and its environs to the graffitied underpasses and abandoned wastelands.

That short was Pete Ashton, Rachael Marchant and Danny Smith’s Dunkirk, in which light-responsive synthesiser Thingamagoop goes on a journey around Birmingham, encountering cityscapes, street art and a failed hope of love that is oddly touching when you consider that you’re empathising with a piece of bleepy noisemaking hardware on an entirely human level. This short is both amusing and experimental, two things associated with Michael Balcon’s work, so in the spirit of Michael Balcon that informed Film Dash, Dunkirk ultimately seemed to be the short that most deserved to win.

It was a difficult call however, with more than one serious contender - perhaps because as a new competition, the ethos has yet to become set in stone. It’s been an exploration for filmmaker and judge alike, and one that I very much hope will be repeated. Only next time, I’ll hopefully be making a film and not judging them.

Just wanted to let you all know about a quite cool opportunity arising out of a potentially diasppointing situation. There was to have been a Q&A panel following the Electric Cinema’s screening of 28 Days Later tonight, but that’s sadly now not happening. Boo hiss.

However, the cool thing about this is what we’re doing instead, which has a wider reach and is not so time or place specific. We’ll be putting together 4Talent’s first collaborative interview, with questions from 4Talent users to Chris Gill, editor of 28 Days Later. It’s journalism democracy in action…

You can send your questions for Chris to catherine@4talentmagazine.com by 31st October - they can be about everything from editing, to working on 28 Days Later specifically, to digital film, to working with Danny Boyle, and whatever weird and wonderful queries you may have as filmmakers, editors, filmwatchers, journalists - who and whatever you are.

You can read all about Chris and his fantastic acheievements on DNA films website (scroll down) for Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, on which he also worked, or you can check him out on IMDB here - it’s a CV spanning 20 years that includes Brideshead Revisited, 28 Weeks Later and the forthcoming Ricky Gervais directed comedy glitterati-studded This Side Of The Truth. So send in those questions and be fully credited in a 4Talent interview…

Currently halfway through the Online Communities 4Talent Inspiration Sessions (part of the inaugural Hello Digital festival). Online Communities consultant Ed Mitchell just showed us a tag cloud for his blog created using Wordle, so I’ve created one for this blog:

4Talent blog's visual tagcloud, 26/10/08

You can make your own at Wordle, it’s completely simple.

This has been the last session of the weekend - check the website for rough cut audio of what we’ve been talking about in the four different sessions, or drop by later in the week for fully integrated podcasts. We’ve been Tweeting over the weekend, so for a microblog of what’s been going on, check our Twitter feed.

As a judge of Film Dash, I was hugely excited to watch the films that resulted from the 48 hour film challenge. Perhaps as interesting as the finished product is the journey that the filmmakers themselves went on as they made their films. Here’s just one of those stories, from filmmaker Ian Ravenscroft, who with only a few no-budget sketches under his belt, set out with Dice Productions to tell their story.

With no camera, sound equipment or lighting, and our only actor delayed on his way back from Cheltenham, I sat awaiting the brief for Film Dash: Digital Galore!, Birmingham’s latest 48-hour film competition, wondering what I’d let myself in for.

My cohort Louis arrived after a brisk run through Birmingham just as organiser Chris Unitt was kicking off proceedings. Soon, each team had a line of dialogue to include in their 5min film and a film title to reference in any way we could. Before we knew it we were outside, walking on auto-pilot, brain-storming as we went.

“I don’t believe the world has been in such a terrible mess since the flood,” I said, repeated our line in hope of some inspiration. “The Cruel Sea,” Louis chanted, hoping the same. It was at this point I realised how much of a challenge we had taken on.

Despite the stuttering start, we were soon cooking on gas. With a last-minute favour of a camera from @Warblefly productions and our actor and writing partner Tom back in the picture, we collected our thoughts and picked an idea off the crammed whiteboard.

“A young couple move into a flat only to meet their crazed and sexually-confused landlord” someone suggested. “Why not?” we thought, “we’ll get the line in, no problem.” By 9:30pm we had the whole thing written on two sides of a big sheet of paper, possibly our biggest achievement of the weekend.

Having set up our limited gear, typed up the script, recruited a much-needed female to the cast and planned each scene, we set out on Saturday morning for the shoot. Tom seemed to relish the job of playing such an odd character and everything seemed to go pretty smoothly and everyone was having fun, so by 3pm we had the first batch of editing to do. Then we shot the night scenes and retired to the pub to unwind after a hectic day.

On arriving back to base we found, as expected, that there was way too much footage. The only option was an all-night editing session to cut back the cinematic undergrowth. Louis and I broke the back of the editing overnight, checking our plot progression and using every shortcut we knew. After three hours sleep, a re-shoot of the final scene and some hasty sound editing we were finished in every sense.

Although there were bits we could have fine-tuned with more time and expertise, we were happy with our ambitious effort (for us, in the time) and could overlook the odd bad cut for how it had come together.

We felt we covered the brief well, and with a few nods to Hitchcock we felt we had forged links with the screening of ‘Into the Light’, a celebration of Birmingham born film producer, Sir Michael Balcon, which the winning film would be shown before the following Sunday.

Not that winning should be on any of the teams’ minds. Film Dash was a great laugh to take part in and taught us a lot about our own abilities. If it was intended to inspire new filmmakers like ourselves it certainly worked, we’re already planning more film projects and eagerly awaiting the next Dash!

The winner of Film Dash will be announced Sunday 26th October.

Another week, another festival microblog. The weekend just gone saw 4Talent head to Birmingham’s Custard Factory to bring you Twitter updates from the small but noisily formed Supersonic, featuring a dream line-up of sludgey, grungey, kraut-rocking noise for those who like their music uncompromisingly large of sound and eclectic of source. For those who couldn’t make it, we’ll be rolling out our interviews with teen screamers Rolo Tomassi, local lads Einstellung and the ever popular Fuck Buttons on 4Talent Central over the coming week.

But forget Supersonic for a moment and cast your mind back all of three weeks to grande dame of festivals Glastonbury, where amidst the excitement of secret gigs from Franz Ferdinand, being roped in at the last minute to interview James Blunt for Oxfam, and doing our bit for the planet by taking tea to Oxfam volunteers in a battered jeep, we just about found the time to run a live Twitter competition from the festival site.

We’re now pleased to be able to announce the winner of said competition, who with the best answer to our Oxfam-sponsored question “What gets your knickers in a twist?” will be joining us at sold-out Bestival in September to interview an artist for a 4Talent podcast. The winner, 19 year old Frankie Ward, persuaded us with an answer we couldn’t agree with more. So what, exactly, gets Frankie’s knickers in a twist? That would be: “Interviewers asking bands who they’re doing, not what they’re doing.”

Currently on a work experience placement with BBC Kent, Frankie is an aspiring journalist whose festival experiences this summer have already included standing in for teen folk sensation Laura Marling (pictured below) on stage with the Mystery Jets at Lounge on the Farm. Watch this space for her 4Talent Bestival podcast in September…

Laura Marling at Glastonbury getting her knickers in a twist.