In my experience the week following a festival tends to involve lots of sleeping, eating, clearing up, looking for things that have got lost, paying bills and gazing into space. There’s also a fair bit of googling for festival writeups. Although this is mainly narcissism, it’s also curiosity about what kind of festival experience people had while we were running around town shunting gear and barking into phones. Gathered here are some of the results of our self-googling…
Last Saturday animator Andy Wyatt kindly brought along the contents of his kitchen for the Animate Your Own Vegetable event at the Electric. After showing the audience the basic principles of stop-frame animation a group of eager young assistants made their own film, and here are the fruits (arf arf) of their labours:
Some good stories are trickling in as we clear out venues and get buried in invoices. The couple who met while Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan wailed in the background. The metal fan from Telford who went to Until The Light Takes Us and ended up returning to the festival every day. The gentleman at the same screening, reading Folk Tales of the North York Moors (see above). The Flatpacker who locked her keys in the car and had to smash her own window so she could pick up Stuart Braithwaite from the airport. And the woman with two bags of heavy shopping who mistook Julien Maire’s Digit performance for an information desk. She asked where the computers were. Julien paused for a moment and then swiped his finger across the paper in front of him, leaving a line of text in its wake. The woman’s bags plunged to the floor.
Today Flatpack has seen workshops on animating vegetables, tours of the region’s old Odeon cinemas and more shorts than you can shake a stick at. We are now preparing for A Plasticine Party, an Eastside knees-up featuring a DJ set from Stuart Braithwaite from Mogwai, punk-dub multimedia threesome Jackdaw with Crowbar and Zappa influenced Moon Unit. There will be plenty of plasticine to play with and competitions between some of Eastside’s cultural organisations in building an alternative plasticine universe!
Tomorrow (remember that the clocks go forward one hour tonight) sees more films for children and the young at heart, including the rarely screened The 5000 Fingers of Dr.T, the only feature film written by Dr.Seuss. The hyper fantasy musical looks like the Wizard of Oz might have done if Salvador Dali had designed it. Later there are a multitute of music documentaries including a rare screening of Rudies Come Back on two-tone with footage of the Specials in ‘79 in Three Minute Heroes and The Family Jams, travels with Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart on their 2004 US tour.
On Sunday evening Belbury Youth Club comes to Vivid with a screening of spooky seventies drama Penda’s Fen and a night of psychedelia, folk, squelchy synths and clattery breakbeats from Belbury Poly, Moon Wiring Club and The Focus Group.
Today Flatpack has seen workshops on animating vegetables, tours of the region’s old Odeon cinemas and more shorts than you can shake a stick at. We are now preparing for 
