Map - Animation - Crochet

We are gearing up for the event next weekend, still lots of work to do finishing off the last bits of the film, and getting everything ready. Today Dave and I went into town to get some photos of the cutouts. We set up in the green area outside St James Church and started snapping photos. It took a good few attempts with the

self timer... but I think we got there in the end!

 
 
 

Making Plans

As the animation starts to take shape, we are making plans for the screening, due to take place on the 16th October. We have decided to show the film in one of the empty market spaces in Accrington Market Hall; and are going into town to check the location out later this week. We will be decorating other spaces in town in the run up to the event, by placing cardboard cutouts of some of the characters around town, and Rachael from ArtYarn will be unveiling her new crochet sculptures for people to spot as they go around town. The event on the 16th will also be the launch of phase 1 artist John Flanagans new map of the town centre.
We are designing the publicity today, to include all three artists that have been involved in the project so far.

Radio Lancashire

Rachael (ArtYarn) and Caroline (Huckleberry Films) had an afternoon out in Blackburn on this week when we went to visit Gilly at the Radio Lancashire studio. We chatted about the LET project and Rachael taught Gilly to crochet live on air! Dave came along too with the video camera and got some great footage of the interview to include in the documentary about the 3 phases of the project.

Accrington Library writing group

We've been working with the writing group that meet in the library in Accrington over their last few sessions. Tonight we recorded the last contribution from the group, and now have all the audio recorded for the project. This week Dave has been finalising the characters, and designing the backgrounds. He has taken photos of some of the Accrington places mentioned to include in the film too.

Rachael has told me that the crochet elephant is finished - we are excited about seeing that later this week and working out how to best animate it for the film.

Character Designs

We had a great chat with Rachael from ArtYarn about characters for the film, and  we have asked her to make us an elephant. She has found a fantastic design for an 'Amigurumi Elephant' that we are really looking forward to seeing and excited about animating.  Dave has been creating sketches for lots of characters, based on designs created by the public at the event at Hyndburns' summer Mela. We had loads of inspiration to work from at the Mela, and it has been a difficult process to narrow down the characters we are going to use.

Meeting Up

Today  we met up with John Flanagan, (the phase 1 artist), and Rachael from ArtYarn (fellow phase 2 artist) to have a catch up. John is making a new map of Accrington, and we've had a look at some of his ideas today for the first time which we've been really excited about. As we are documenting the process too, it was a great opportunity to film some of his findings and take a few photographs.

We all had a walk around Accrington town centre after our meeting, to share ideas for the best places to Rachael and us to display our work next month, and see if there were new places for us to discover in town. Rachael is making some crochetted pieces for the animated film, so we discussed how to proceed with that and came up with lots of ideas.

Waiting for the postman...

This week the 25kg of clay for Hyndburn Mela was due to arrive. So we waited. And waited. And worried, and made alternative plans... but fortunately this afternoon it finally arrived. The postie asked if it was a great big box of marzipan! We've split the big bags up into 200g balls of clay, and just spent a fun hour playing with it to make a couple of sample 'creatures' to put on the stall. Dave has made a pig, and I have made a sparkly spider with googly eyes. We have got about 120 bags of clay altogether - hopefully it will be the right amount as we are hoping for a good turnout.

Meeting the writing group

The animated film we will be making will draw inspiration from Johns work on phase 1, and will be continuing the theme of exploring favourite places in Hyndburn. We want to interview local people and capture snippets of memories and feelings about the town centre.

We met up with the writing group that meet in Accrington Library last Monday evening to see if any of the members would like to be involved in writing a poem or piece of prose writing to read out in the film. Their next meeting is in three weeks - and we are really excited about going back and finding out what they have written. We want to include lots of different memories/places, so are looking for short written pieces. One of the members mentioned that he has a favourite chippy in town - but as he lives a few miles away in Rawtenstall, his chips are always cold by the time he gets home! We all laughed when he said this, and I can already imagine how this anecdote will look as an animation

Getting Started

Hello from Caroline and Dave at Huckleberry Films.

We are a small friendly film company based in Accrington, who have been commisioned to work on the Hyndburn section of the 'Liberating Empty Terrain' project. We will be making a documentary to look at all three stages of the project and have already filmed some great footage of the 'Portable Pixel Playground' event and with Phase 1 artist John Flanagan as he interviewed the public in July.

John has been researching how people use Accrington town centre and will be using his findings to make a new creative map of Accrington. His blog can be found here http://mappingaccy.blogspot.com/

We have also been commisioned to work on phase 2 of the LET project to make an animated film; and we'll be working alongside Rachael Elwell, who has been appointed to run a creative knitting/crochet project.