Week commencing 13 August 2012:

It’s been an exciting week in the Studio as we geared up for Mail, Maps and Motion. On Monday Julien Vuillet joined Joanie and the team in the edit suite to work on the development of the piece. They then spent Tuesday and Wednesday putting the finishing touches to it before moving out of the edit suite and over to The Passenger Shed for rehearsals. More about how it went later...

You may remember from the blog a few weeks ago that REACT producers Matt and Jo submitted two panels for South by Southwest, well this week voting opened. The two awesome panels they submitted are: Platforms for Haunting and Hacking the University. It would be an amazing opportunity for them to showcase REACT projects on an international stage so if you like the sound of the panels, please sign up to the website (it only takes a minute) and vote here. If you are a twitter you could help to spread the word:

Please help @reacthub #sxsw panel & vote for Platforms for Haunting with @FutureCemetery @0standandstare0@dave_kirk bit.ly/TBXKL6

Please vote for @reacthub #sxsw panel: Hacking the University with @toodrew @tomabba @katybeale bit.ly/TBXxaR

Talking of voting, the awesome guys at nu desine are very excited to have the AlphaSphere in the running for Design of the Year for the Stuff Gadget Awards 2012, so make sure you vote for them here. This week the lovely Jenny Savage also joined the nu desine team, she’ll be working on finance and administration as they start selling in earnest.

Over at the Calvium desks it’s been a busy week with lots of projects on the go. This week, one of their Dutch AppFurnace customers published an iPhone and Android app Hasselaerroute. The app leads you on a tour around Castle Groeneveld in Baarn. You can see a video of the experience here and it’s available on app store here & Google Play here.

The end of the week brought the event that we’ve been looking forward to for weeks; Mail, Maps and Motion, a large-scale night of music film and projections curated by Clare Reddington and Mark Cosgrove of Watershed. The evening explored themes of industry, modernity, technology and communication, juxtaposing our industrial past with the technological present. With projection and visuals onto 4 enormous screens from studio resident Joanie Lemercier from Anti VJ and music from Adrian Utley from Portishead we knew we were in for something special, but didn’t know just how good it would be...

On Friday, Verity, Matt, Nicola and Vic headed down to the Passenger Shed to join Clare and help out with final production bits and pieces. Jobs involved putting up massive flags, sorting out the guest list and organising back stage. It was surprising calm the whole day as we waited for the doors to open. At 7pm Matt took to the decks as DJ Ciao as the 2500 strong crowd started to arrive! 8.30 saw the evening kick off with the first of three sections:

Section one was a screening of the iconic 1936 film Night Mail directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright. The film sums up the collaborative approach of the General Post Office Film Unit, with a musical score arranged by Benjamin Britten and the rhyming verse written by W.H. Auden. This was followed by another beautiful film made for the general post office film unit; Trade Tattoo, directed by Len Lye.

Section two was an awesome visual and musical performance by BEAM that drew on the themes of the General Post Office films. The band was led by Scott Hendy (Malachai/Boca45) and included Si John (Roni Size/Reprazent Bass player) SJ Eseau (Anticon Records / multi instrumentalist) and drummer Andy Sutor. They were accompanied on stage by Inkie; graffiti artist and Curator of See No Evil who created live ipad art that was projected onto the 60m wide screens.

The final section of Mail Maps and Motion was a collaboration between Adrian Utley from Portishead and Studio resident Joanie Lemercier from Anti VJ. Adrian who was joined on stage by a large number of guest musicians including 15 guitarists created a mind-blowing score to accompany Joanie’s visuals, which included Brunel’s own architectural  sketches being projected back onto the building. It was a spectular end to an amazing evening.

After the show finished everyone moved backstage to pack away equipment and to celebrate the culmination of a lot of hard work and dedication to make the evening happen. Don’t despair if you missed the event however as footage will be on DShed in the near future.

We have received some fantastic feedback for the event and one review that we felt summed up the event perfectly for us was by Andy Batten-Foster for Bristol 24-7, which you can read here. Clare has also written a post about the making of Mail Maps and Motion which you can read here on the Watershed website here.

Remember that there’s no Open Studio or Lunchtime Talks during August but we kick off again on 7 September with a talk from the awesome guys from Slingshot about the success of 2.8 hours later and the challenges they now face creating the ‘difficult second album.’