The End Is Nigh...

Maybe a little melodramatic perhaps... I could have easily titled this entry 'The End Is In Sight' or something similarly benign. But hey, I'm sticking with melodrama, dammit!

So yes, 2012 is gradually creeping out to make way for the new year. I can't say I'll be sorry to see it go either, as it has turned out to be quite a challenging year in many respects. It didn't exactly start well with the prospect of clearing out the family home following the death of Dad in late 2011, a stressful activity not to mention emotionally draining. And then of course there was the selling of the property, all virgin territory for me being in the hands of estate agents and solicitors. It didn't help being so far way from the house either. But mercifully it sold relatively quickly, the monies dispersed (a very sad day) and business concluded.

But the experience affected me emotionally, more than I realised, and rendered me somewhat needy, as if my life suddenly had no meaning. It led to a difficult period in the latter half of the year when I got too attached to a certain someone which led to complications. I had to extricate myself from the situation but felt bad for just abandoning the other person without explanation. I still think of and miss him.

But the year also proved good in so many other respects: getting involved with Cardiff Players, completing the Photography Beginners course run by ffotogallery, organising and editing the IPO/ONS booklet Winter Bizarre Vol. 2., camping at Out In The Open, attending the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time since 2009. Oh and lets not forget being inadvertently cast as a disaster prone elf for the works pantomime.

I've also seen some great live performances this year, from the brilliantly funny Fascinating Aida to the stunning light and sound spectacle of Muse performing at the LG Arena. Seen some pretty good films at the pics this year too - Avengers Assemble, Sightseers, Skyfall, Holy Motors, Shame, Looper, Ted, Chronicle, The Artist, Hunky Dory to name a few. Inevitably some dire stuff there too; The Raven, The Darkest Hour, Mirror Mirror, Total Recall were all pretty bad, but none so as much as Elfie Hopkins, a film so inept it has to be seen to be disbelieved.

I've met some fantastic people during the last twelve months too: the cast and crew of Cardiff Players, the other students on the photography course, and online friends from Wales, Northern Ireland, the US and even New Zealand. They have all helped me get through the tough times - and I would like to thank them so much for this!

I was gearing up for a tough time over Christmas this year, being the first one ever not going back to the family home in Abingdon. And although it was sad, it was passed pleasantly with Stu's family in Brynmenyn and Nant-y-moel. (I also got to spend time with my own family when we gathered at my sister's place in Radstock a week before, which was lovely.) So, all told, it was nowhere near as emotionally traumatic as I was expecting it to be.

But that's all over now - and it's time to look forward. 2012 is done and dusted, so I would like to wish my readers a very happy new year - may it prove peaceful and fruitful for all.

Lx. 31/12/12

Laugh! Or the elf gets it...

And so, following on from my previous post, I am no longer a 'stage virgin'. Let's just clarify that -  my 'acting' debut as Stunt Elf in The Stats and Pats Players production 'Santa Gets The Sack' has finally come and gone... and although rather battered (less physically, more in terms of dignity), I have to say I did enjoy the experience*.  But then it was a relatively easy role - no lines to remember, just the ability to fall over, look terrified and/or shell-shocked and grunt in the right places. Which seemed to please the audience, made up of IPO/ONS staff (performance 1), under 10s (performance 2) and pensioners (last performance). In fact the whole production was very well received (and I should hope so, the amount of time we put into it!) and already requests are being made as to what is being put on next year. Let's just say that we have an original idea brewing...

Here are the pics. The ones I dared to put up anyway.

*although I have fallen from grace with the Cardiff Players techies but breaking the rule 'techies don't go on stage'. I'm now labelled as the 'Traitorous Techie'.

...oh no he isn't...

Having managed avoid the phenomenon of pantomime for the majority of my adult life, I suddenly find myself involved with not one but two of them. Ah life, who knows what it is going to throw at you!

To clarify firstly, I don't actually dislike panto - I know it can be big camp fun and everything - it just never really appealed to me enough to want to watch it, associating it more as entertainment for kids (which it primarily is of course). And the idea of Christopher Biggins in a dress brings me out in hives.

Anyway, here's how it all happened...

After the success of Glorious! Cardiff Players (who have now well and truly got their hooks into me) announced that their next production would be the annual pantomime which this year is Robin Hood, written by Geoff Lake of the Players. Initially scheduled for early December, the production has had to be put back until late January due to venue problems.

And just as well...

As before, I will be involved primarily as videographer and projectionist, and I therefore asked what visual apparitions I would need to conjure up for this production. I was told. And when I came round again...

Glorious! was a big challenge technically, but I think this production is going to ten times more so. There are certain video sequences that I still have no idea how to tackle. However, as with the previous Players presentation, I always cherish a challenge and it will be fun being creative to find solutions. But I think an investment in some advanced video software will be called for... much as I like iMovie there's only so much it can do!

We already have one sequence 'in the can'; it involved a cold but bright Saturday morning a couple of weeks back where cast members in costume had to emerge from bushes in Heath Woods. (Don't ask.) It was a fun couple of hours shooting it though (a lot of laughs!) and I think the edit for it looks pretty good. One down...

And the other?

Members of the ONS/IPO Creative Writing group were approached earlier in the year to pen a pantomime to be performed at ONS in late November (two performances, one for staff and the other for under 10s) and December (an extra performance for OAPs). The mighty Mr Stephen Lurvey stepped forward to create a completely original panto premise titled 'Santa Gets The Sack', involving the titular Christmas character, his arch-nemesis the wizard GoneDaft and malfunctioning robots...

Having rather been bitten by the theatrical bug by this time, I offered to help with staging and to provide sound effects for the shows. (Note to self: get sound effects for the shows...).

And the next thing I know...  I have a part in it. (And this is after taking the solemn oath that 'techies never go on stage'. I should be ashamed.) How did that happen??

Given that Santa's helper elf 'Andy' has to undergo some rather alarming physical abuse at the mechanical hands of the malfunctioning robot, it became apparent that the person playing said elf could not perform all the stunts herself due to health problems. The result? Why of course... a 'stunt elf' was written in! And to play him? Well, I think I you know where this is heading...

To be honest, I'm quite looking forward to playing the part, as it involves minimal dialogue and the ability to look alarmed, grunt and roll around on the floor a lot. I think I can handle that. The rehearsals for stunt elf scenes has left me with carpet burns, but - oh, stop it!!

So the next few weeks I will be like a thing possessed - or more like a demented, punch drunk elf staggering around with a video camera and a laptop, tapping along while sketching out ideas for a his next written piece.

Dull life, eh...

Eulogy: John Bruce Norman Eggleton

A year ago today our Dad passed on. I feel I should mark the occasion by publishing the eulogy I read at his funeral.

***

We are all here today to celebrate the life of a man. But let us not be mistaken. This was no ordinary man. This was, in fact, an extraordinary man; a brother, a husband, a father and a grandfather, and… well let’s face it… one remarkable person.

For many people Dad was a kind, gentle and infinitely generous soul, always ready to put others before himself and more than willing to help out wherever he could. These are very true and accurate sentiments indeed.

However, now that we are here reflecting on his life, I would invite you all to consider the extent of this man’s particular personality and talents.

He was not only a family man totally dedicated to his wife and children; he was also an amazingly talented, artistic and creative individual, whose enthusiasm for life and art invigorated and inspired those around him.

Dad and Mum managed to raised six of us children… six!... in a time of austerity. Yet all of us were cared for and none of us ever went wanting. However it must be noted that the increasing number of children in the family seemed to correlate directly with the decreasing number of hairs on Dad’s head. By the time Marcia arrived the poor man was practically bald. I do hope it was some hereditary trait that caused this and not the stress of bringing up six adorable but very individual children.

It must be said though that he loved all his children equally and nurtured within them the love and passion for life that has inspired them to become the people they are today.

And while we’re on the subject of passion, let us take a moment to reflect on Dad’s own passions.

His love of classical music, for example. How could we forget waking on weekends to the rousing strains of Tchaikovsky’s 4^th Symphony, Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, Chopin’s Etudes? I like to think he instilled within his children a musical appreciation that we have carried forward in our own lives.

Dad’s wonderful artistic talent even went as far as cake decorating. His festive,  culinary embellishments were monumental and sculptural masterworks of icing, marzipan and food-colouring. It felt almost criminal to cut into them.

Dad also loved tennis and would be seen regularly on the courts at his workplace in Harwell. He enjoyed not only playing but also watching the sport too – there would always be that fortnight during the summer when we would all have to fend for ourselves as Dad sat, unmovable and enthralled in front of the television - Wimbledon!

Personally, I will never forget Dad’s ingenious inventiveness. In particular, one Christmas when the electric whisk failed and he improvised by using a power drill, with the whisk head attached to it, to whip the trifle cream. And the result was a success – albeit a rather messy one, for some.

Throughout his life, Dad loved to travel; motor biking to Rome over the alps and cycling to Paris in his youth. Not even a growing family could diminish his sense of adventure, though perhaps necessity put it on a more modest scale. I remember holidays in such far flung places as the Isle of Wight (in a simple flat), Wales (in a caravan), sailing trips, if you could call it sailing, on the Thames. One time we even went as far as (gasp!) Inverness.

Even in his advanced years Dad’s wanderlust could not be quenched. Mountaineering in Scotland, partying in Vegas, cruising round Canada. Only last month he was living it up in Barcelona – an international jet-setter right to the end.

As you can see, Dad was a man who was unafraid to live life to the full. That is exactly what he did and in doing so he inspired his children and his grandchildren to do the same. For this and so much more we are grateful to him; a brother, a husband, a father, a grandfather and, as I’ve mentioned before, an extraordinary man.

I’d like to add just one thing more – time to rest now, Dad; you’ve earned it.

 ***

John Bruce Norman Eggleton

1928 - 2011



Midlands Madness

I haven't posted on here for, oooh, quite a while... and to be honest I haven't had the impetus to do so. But things  have getting progressively better since the rather strange blip I had in late August and September. And events have reached somewhat mental proportions over the last seven days...

Last Tuesday, my friend Kev and I headed up from South Wales to the LG Arena in Birmingham to see the god-heads of spaced-out rock Muse, on tour after the release of the rather wonderful The 2nd Law. They were supported by the superb Welsh rock outfit The Joy Formidable, whose epic songs got the audience fired up for the main act. And after a rather lengthy wait (and the arena got packed to the seams), the deceptively simple set was suddenly shrouded in darkness... And then the opening of 'The 2nd Law: Unsustainable' blitzed into life accompanied by blazing shafts of red light shooting across the arena. From that moment on, the whole stage exploded into life; the black panels at the back of the stage were suddenly revealed to be LED video screens and descending from the lighting rack at key moments were tiers of yet more video screens which were raised and lowered through a number of configurations throughout the performance. At one point they were even lowered right down onto the stage to form a pyramid over the boys (for a break, presumably) and played out a visual accompaniment to the gorgeous album closer 'Isolated System'.

True to form, the band were as mind-blowing in their staging as ever - equally as amazing as when I saw them at Wembley in 2007 - and performed a whole range of their stuff, from 'Sunburn' to 'Survival', the rousing number which closed the proceedings. At which point the already hyped up crowd went completely bonkers. And, as far as their music goes, these guys are equally as good live as their recorded work - not something you can say about every band.

Next, and closer to Birmingham (well bang in the centre of it actually), I attended PCS's annual LGBT Seminar, this year held at Jury's Inn on Broad Street. Having attended the previous seminar in my home town of Cardiff I was keen to go again, as I had found the mixture of debates and speakers most inspirational, moving and rewarding. This year's gathering was equally as good, with the focus being more on organising and campaigning - highly pertinent too, given the government's relentless and myopic 'austerity' cuts to public services and public sector workers' pay, pensions and terms & conditions. ("All in this together" Mssrs. Cameron and Clegg? I don't think so.) The class of speakers, including Hugh Lanning and Janice Godrich from PCS, were as superb as before. However, it was the truly amazing Zimbabwean born Skye Chirape who captured the minds and hearts of the audience with her talk about experiences of prejudice against her being African and lesbian. Her fight against the most appalling treatment by the  authorities was shocking yet ultimately inspirational as she has risen above her struggle to be the successful (and proud!) person she is now. Her talk really put things into perspective for me and made me realise that my life, however much I may bemoan it at times, has actually been a luxury in comparison.

Here is a link to Noizy Image, of which Skye is co-founder.

And of course, on events such as these, we work hard and then party hard!! (Well I did at least). So, with boots and combats in place, my room-mate and now very good friend Michael hit the pubs of Lower Essex Street and its surroundings with all the force of gay men on a mission to have a good night, including a fair bit of time in Missing, where we danced our feet off and got our pictures taken with mad random women.

(And the less said about Boltz the better...)

Inevitably though, all good things must come to an end - and probably just as well they did last Sunday as my rather intimate acquaintance with a certain Jack Daniels may have proved fatal to my liver. Plus the fact that I haven't been to bed any less than 3 o'clock for the last few nights. Liver failure and sleep deprivation really does leave you in an odd state of mind...

All said though, it was a week that will stay with me and has returned a certain joie de vivre that has been so missing in my life of late. Having said that, I don't think I could do the same again just yet...

Into Glorious Unknown Territory

Ah, Florence Foster Jenkins - glad to make your acquaintance, madam! For the uninitiated, she was an American amateur operatic soprano who was known, and ridiculed, for her lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, aberrant pronunciation of libretti, and overall poor singing ability. (Thanks, Wikipedia). And she is the subject of Peter Quilter’s (he of End of the Rainbow fame) 2005 play ‘Glorious!’, dramatising the tuneless diva’s later years in the 1940s as she engages the jobbing pianist Cosmé McMoon to accompany her  for her compellingly catastrophic chirruping. 

I had never heard of Ms. Jenkins or Quilter’s play (though I loved End of the Rainbow when it came to Cardiff earlier in the year) and was intrigued when I was approached by Cardiff Players to produce some video backgrounds for their production of it. So, borrowing a copy of the play, I read it en-route to my sister’s house in Aldershot... and got some very funny looks when I was helplessly giggling away to myself while reading it in Leigh Delamere services. It was really rather amusing. And from then on I was hooked.

I was over the McMoon to be invited to join the project and asked if I could be of any further assistance - for instance projecting the images on the night, perhaps. Little did I know what this would lead to; before I knew it I found myself painting props, hanging lights and just generally helping out in the pre-production. 'Glorious!' was proving to be one of the Players most ambitious projects in respect of props, furniture, scene and costume changes, as well as incorporating projected video on a custom made screen. Pretty daunting stuff that came with all manner of challenges, including one truly stressful evening when the digital projector decided it didn't want to be involved thank you very much and malfunctioned. This with only a few days to go before opening night. Luckily, a replacement was found very quickly and proved to be a much better projector with a much brighter image that wouldn't be drowned out by the stage lights. See? Things happen for a reason!

The two sequences that I shot with members of the cast and crew were great fun to do and the results were great, thanks to video capabilities of the Canon DSLR. As well as this, I also got the opportunity to research, incorporate and edit existing archive footage of 1940s New York and Carnegie Hall, create a title sequence (see below) in iMovie and become familiar with the capabilities of the Keynote program which proved invaluable, not only for cueing the video slides but also for creating some rather snazzy intertitles and credits (ultimately not used but were fun to create anyway).

Involvement with a theatre group was all virgin territory for me, but I learned a lot about theatre terminology during this time. For example: you know that flat thing that the actors perform on? That’s a ‘stage’!... ooooh...

Joking aside, the experience has been a steep (and very intense) learning curve for me, but one that has proved to be immensely rewarding. I guess I have never been satisfied just being a passive consumer of entertainment and have always secretly craved to be involved in its production somehow. Like a lot of things in my life, the opportunity came about when I was least expecting it. It also introduced me to some wonderfully committed individuals (that’s not individuals who should be committed) who made up the cast and crew of 'Glorious!' They have been so welcoming and encouraging, and really appreciated what I had created for them. And even though I never actually got to see the performed play (too busy backstage, finger poised nervously over the MacBook’s spacebar) it was a genuine pleasure to be involved in this most fabulous of productions.

To quote Cosmé's last line of the play: "Glorious!"


Here is the opening video, to the strains of the great lady herself singing Adele's Laughing Song from Strauss's 'Die Fledermaus'. It's pretty painful.

A Liaison In A Public Lavatory*

Ha! Gotcha. Never underestimate the power of a provocative title. Lets just see if this entry can outstrip the current holder of most viewed of mine so far.

The title is actually relevant (as well as being a being a bit of a troll for attention!) as it concerns the theme of a video project that I proposed to undertake when I first started study at the Newport College of Art and Design - as it was known back then.

Rewind... 1995.

Relocating from from Hull to Newport in South Wales, I was all fired up to connect with like-minded students who wanted to create new forms of storytelling in film, push boundaries, generate excitement, stimulate ideas, all that stuff. I was horrified on arrival to find that the majority of the students were 10 years younger than me (I was an old man of 28 at the time) and were all little Tarantino-wannabies (this was when Pulp Fiction was still fresh in their non-expandable little minds).

I was, however, resolutely undeterred and and determined to make a go of this opportunity to expand my limited knowledge of film-making. The first group project we were set was a short video, any theme or genre, with just the title given: 'Intrusion'.

The idea that formulated in my mind was perhaps a little racy for the innocent youngsters around me, but I thought fuck it - what's the point of being here if I can't produce challenging material? The scenario was simple and summarised thus:

A public lavatory. Five men stand at the urinal. The camera focuses on the man on the far left. The presence of the others makes him nervous and he has trouble urinating. He glances behind at the cubicles; they are all engaged. A voice-over expresses his anxiety. One by one, the three men in the middle leave after finishing, but the man on the far right stays. The man on the left looks behind again; the cubicles are still engaged. He begins to notice that the man on the right is taking his time there. They both glance at each other. The man on the left looks away instantly, embarrassed. The voice-over speaks of his growing anxiety but also hints at an implicit interest. The other man continues to look but remains silent. The man on the left’s anxiety grows more intense; the sound of a tap dripping constantly in the background grows louder and more rhythmic, signifying his discomfort but also his uncomfortable excitement in the situation. Just as it looks as if one of them is about to make a move, there is a sound of a lock being released from behind – a cubicle has been vacated. The man on the left glances behind at it, indecisive. Fade.

(I hasten to add this scenario wasn't extracted from experience. Honest, guv.)

I ran the idea past the tutor who thought it would make a good, atmospheric piece that explored the given theme in a fresh way.  Added to this Clarence Place, the large technical institute building that then housed NCAD had the most wonderful toilets with proper Victorian urinals, tiles, the works. It would have been perfect; filming could take place right there in the college without the need to take equipment out on location. Everything was there just waiting to happen.

Except...

The two guys that I was assigned to work with were clearly uncomfortable with the whole idea. To be fair to them, they were just out of school (heads filled with Tarantino) and had probably never heard of cottaging or had a clue that that kind of thing went on. Well, at least not without a lot of gunfire, swearing, bubblegum pop and someone's ear being sliced off.

So, for the comfort of these dear youngsters, the idea was dropped. Instead we used one of theirs,  about a woman seeking refuge in a church from her abusive spouse, who turns up to coerce her into coming back home. A potentially good idea, with some interesting themes that could have been explored. Except not the way did it. They spent a lot of time titting about in the church we were supposed to be filming in and dragging their feet in the edit suite, so I let them get on with it. It would have looked shit anyway.

Like all my ideas though, this one has not been discarded and currently resides in my ever expanding folder 'LIST OF PROJECTS, REAL, IMAGINARY, PROPOSED AND SOME THAT WILL NEVER EVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY' on the Mac.

And who knows? It may yet be made. Clarence Place still stands, the luxury apartment plans on hold as far as I can tell. Here's hoping those wonderful toilets still survive.

Diolch i chi am ddarllen!



*I was actually going to title this entry "Sex In Toilets', but I don't think Blogger would have been too happy with that...