I am *still* circling like a stirred cup of tea.
I was selected for the a-n Mentoring Bursary 2019 and worked with Rosalind Davis for 12 months to push myself and my practice forwards. My aim was to find the confidence and resilience to develop my own ideas on my own terms.
To focus on the journey, the outcome secondary.
At the end of 2020 I applied for and was awarded an Arts Council Develop Your Creative Practice Grant to create a series of poetry films inspired by the dancer Tilly Losch.
The outcome is clearly no longer secondary because I am accountable. But I must keep repeating to myself – focus on the journey.
The film is now getting out there to the public. It is showing as part of Fringe Arts Bath festival 27th May until 12th June and will be screened at Tranås at the Fringe, a multi-disciplinary arts festival in Sweden (2-9 July 2022) and at The International Video Poetry Festival in Athens (30 September – 1 October 2022)
Reviewed in Moving Poems – the film can be watched via Vimeo.
Wow .. has it really been that long since I posted? … I’ve been putting this off for some long while … but I have made progress. I’ve been focussed at least because I have reached a conclusion point with my film. The photography work and editing is complete. It has actually become a complete 10 minute film. Which feels good but confusing on where to go next at the same time. I’m not good at transitional stages.
I feel pleased with it, and having shown it to a small audience at Jelly Associates in Reading – I have had what felt like a positive response to it.
All well and good. But now … getting it out there
I’ve been submitting it to festivals and to venues that have relevance to the film, or who might be interested in it. But I’ve only had one or two tickles on my dangled line so far.
The poetry film festivals that have rejected it so far … I’m wondering if 10 minutes is problematic? It is within their requirements but it would be taking the place of five or ten shorter films so takes a very significant chunk out of a programme that is then less varied. Mmm. In a short film festival which might have films of up to 30 minutes then 10 minutes might be a nice filler in a programme – something a bit different. But it is not easy to put in a genre and it is quite intensive as a film to watch I think. And would it work alongside more narrative films in a programme?
I’m playing the waiting game for now. Staying positive. Hoping for replies to my emails and success in one or two more applications and proposals.
At the moment the film is not available publically online. It will be eventually. But if anyone is interested in one way or another – please do contact me via my website or instagram www.janeglennie.co.uk @jane_glennie
The 2021 lockdown restrictions have thrown out my intended plan of work on my project. The photographic studio I found was closed, the sound recording was closed and I felt this project was so much about a human, a dancer, that I was very wary of going too far without working on photographing the body. I stalled …
However, discussing the photographic sessions with the studio made me think about using studio flash. I’ve always restricted myself to daylight photography, thinking that any kind of studio flash was out of my reach and impractical. But I completed an excellent Skillshare online course on using off-camera flash in order to learn the concepts of flash photography (I had previously only used studio lighting on a City & Guilds photography course many years ago, and I think that was with static lights not flash). I bought a relatively inexpensive Speedlight for my Nikon and I’ve been playing.
The manual settings are so straightforward (at least when you are going for a trial and error approach) that I wish I had tried this years ago. The flash power is just another factor to adjust to get the right amount of light on the subject – in conjunction with aperture, ISO and so on. And the consistency over daylight is just so fantastic because I am repeatedly photographing the same thing over and over.
It is an unexpected outcome, but this is certainly developing my creative practice – so thank you to the Arts Council and the DYCP award. It is already making a difference.
The photography studio is now open again and I’m going for an induction later this week. Then I will plan the session with the model – and I’ve got more options than I would have had. I’m feeling nervous, but its another step into something new which is exciting.
Oh … Premiere Pro … how do I get frustrated by you … let me count the ways …
Working on single films I had pushed and pulled and screamed, and got to a happy method of working with Premiere that enabled me to combine and layer my sequences of images. Now I’m building up the ground work for a series of ten films, I (possibly mistakenly) tried to tidy up and organise my folders by deleting temporary and render files.
Aaagh! Premiere started to endlessly give me error messages.
OK .. now what to do. Will I fall at the first hurdle? Clearly too risky to carry on with my current workflow. I use so many thousands of images that the software or my system is not going to work when I multiply this by 10. So I had to find a new way of working.
Thankfully (for now at least) I have solved the issues and Premiere and I are friends again. It has been a reminder that however much it is important to learn to focus on my creativity and the journey not the outcome, there will also always be the technical or practical problems along the way. I’m quite good (I think) at solving those and I’m not failing if I concentrate on them for a bit. They will always be a necessary part of that journey.
In my last post I wrote about my A-N mentoring bursary coming to an end. What I didn’t mention was that the last activity I did with my mentor, Rosalind Davis, was to complete my application for a Develop Your Creative Practice (DYCP) grant from the Arts Council.
The amazing news is that I was successful and have been awarded a DYCP grant. Over the next 10 months I will be collaborating with Rosie Garland to develop a series of 10 poetry films. Its taken a long, slow path to get to this point, but I think my year of my mentoring bursary has without doubt helped improve the position I am in now, with better focus and more clarity on my aims.
I’d been dithering about funding for a long time – weighing up the benefits and the likelihood (or not) of success against the time it would take to prepare an application when I have very limited working time available. In the end it was finding a writing collaborator for the project in Rosie Garland that swung it in favour of making the application. She had previously been successful in an application for a DYCP award and so was on hand to advise me and encourage me. But most significantly I now was not only considering myself. Getting funding would mean that I could share this with Rosie. While she was entirely willing to collaborate with me funding or not – for which endorsement and encouragement I will be eternally grateful – but how could I proceed without trying my very hardest to secure funds for another creative.
This gave me focus and over the summer I drafted and redrafted, and drafted again when first of all only Project Grants were available, but then someone gave me the heads up that the DYCP would be reopened, and so I edited and redrafted yet again to be ready for when it would be open. The final step was to redraft with Rosalind to tighten it up with the benefit of her experience.
Thank you A-N, thank you Rosalind, thank you Rosie, and thank you to all the others who have helped me get to this point.
