Made by the Sea

Tour Producer & Curator / Workshop Facilitator

Mar 2017 - Mar 2019

Growing from the success of the urban tour Made in My Toun and rural tour Made on Our Land, Made by the Sea was a six-date tour offering a fascinating big screen presentation of life on Scotland’s coasts and seas through a unique selection of archive films from the Moving Image Archive of the National Library of Scotland and the archives of STV, RNLI and local museums. The tour was supported through the BFI Britain on Film programme and took the UK-wide theme of 'Coast & Sea' as its foundation.

For each location, I curated unique selections of archive films, featuring live commentary, performance and a post-event ‘blether’ with special guests: performers, specialists in local history and archives. Touring to key coastal communities, participating tour locations were:

Follow-up Secondary Schools Filmmaking Project

Inspired by the 2017 tour, in 2018-19 I worked with Regional Screen Scotland / Screen Machine and film education specialist Alasdair Satchel on a collaborative film heritage and filmmaking project supported by Highlands and Islands Enterprise enabling young people living in three Highland coastal and lochside locations to explore and creatively contribute to the social and cultural heritage of their own communities: Tobermory, Castlebay and Ullapool.

I presented a film analysis session for each group about archive films of the local area. Encouraging the young people to think about representations of place in the archive and on the big screen they created their own films of their community for archive film audiences in 30, 50 and 80 years’ time. Alasdair Satchel then led workshops on simple yet effective filmmaking techniques drawn from film history such as the Lumière minute.

The young people then went out in groups and filmed in their community over a period of two months, working as teams, negotiating and selecting locations, camera angles and subjects. Coming back together, Alasdair led a group editing session where the young people made the decisions and the edits using iMovie. The final films were screened at a special community screening alongside the original archive films with an audience Q&A with some of the young filmmakers afterwards.

TOUR VIDEO PRODUCTION: Cutscene Media

Tour Producer & Curator / Workshop Facilitator

madebythesea.net