Back in June 2020, The Paper Cinema team, began meeting virtually to work on ideas for an original project provisionally titled “The Keys of Tobias Brown”. We received funding through the Arts Council England’s Emergency Response Fund that allowed us to undertake this work and we are incredibly grateful for the support.
New Artwork by Nic Rawlng
We’ve been working on this project on and off for a few years, most recently producing on a script outline with ace animator Joseph Wallace as part of Bristol Old Vic’s Ferment, this was presented as a talk at The Pervasive Media Studio titled, ’How to Grow a Story’.
Normally as part of our development process, we would meet up and begin to put together some ideas for the show. Then we’d typically test out these early versions with a real audience to see what they think. Before lockdown we had started to have regular sessions at The Wardrobe Theatre called “Paper Cinema Club” - yes we need a better name for it!
Photo credit: Cat Rock
The idea was to create a space for the company to meet up, do some development work, then share straight away with a live audience. Through doing this we were aiming to create momentum for us as a company, but also community as we share and play and collaborate with the audience in these open sessions. We only managed to have one session before Covid hit, but it was great fun and hopefully we can resume at some point, but until then, we will be shifting that process online here.
With social distancing in place we had to figure out a way to develop the piece in isolation - with our normal way of working unavailable to us, we made a group decision to spend the time exploring and expanding the visual and sonic tricks and techniques available to us, and creating a unique language for the show. This new palette includes: old sound effects LPs, shadows, plants, point of view camera angles, scale model buildings, glass light filters, morse code, telephones, 3d puppets, waterphone, and um… phenakistoscopes. Don’t worry there will be our tried and tested cut out illustrations and live animation too.
Hopefully, without giving too much away about the new show, we will be sharing some of that process as a series of blog posts. Each one focussing on a different member of the team and showing their unique approach to this early stage of the project. Expect to see rough drawings and demo recordings along with process photos and video edits where we experiment with putting all these elements together.
First up, we will be hearing from puppeteer and performer Teele Uustani about what she has been up to as part of our remote R&D process.
If you would like to support our work, please consider donating the price of a coffee via our Kofi page here