Stan's Cafe

I’ve spent the last couple of days editing together animations I made in a school last month. The deadline is now in sight and the soundtrack has been delivered. Conceptually the project makes sense: a storyteller works with the pupils so they all write stories, a musician works with the kids turning a small selection of these stories into audio pieces before finally, we turn up and work with the pupils adding the visuals. In reality it’s all a bit of a compromise. What works as a short story becomes over-written as the narrative for an animation. Ideally the narration would have been delivered earlier so we could put the animation over the top and the sound effects would have been recorded later, with the visuals as a reference. As it is I’m desperately stretching out our fragments of animation to cover vast swathes of audio.

By way of contrast we’ve had news from the Edinburgh Fringe people that in listings hyphenated words count as two words not one, which makes sense but seems harsh when the words are abbreviations: ‘sci-fi’ and ‘lo-fi’. The obvious repost is to rewrite the forty word copy using the most extravagantly polysyllabic vocabulary available. Surely a character count can only be around the corner. As it was time was of the essence.

Home of the Wriggler.
A lo-fi, sci-fi, docudrama. Investigators in a post-oil world, power lights with bikes, tracing entwined lives of a community once built on cars. ' ... one of our most tirelessly inventive theatre companies' (The Guardian).

The title is included in the 40 words.

James