Central Station » TV

SummerhallTV Selection: Dave Rushton

kim — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 08:30:32 +0000

SummerhallTV is an arts channel dedicated to capturing and sharing artistically wonderful happenings. For the past year their channel, Art in Scotland TV has been dotting about Scotland to cover various art news and events. With such a vast archive of videos, we decided to ask creative individuals to filter these and share their favourites. First up is SummerhallTV’s Director, Dave Rushton (pictured below).

David Rushton was a founder editor of Coventry-based Analytical Art in the 1960s and subsequently worked for Art & Language from 1972 to 1975, notably on the Art & Language Indexes.

Rushton was a key agent in student-led activism and print throughout the 1970s and co-edited Politics of Art Education, 1979. Since then he has divided his time between an analysis of ‘making art’ and local and community based communications. Throughout the 1990s he work on policies and legislation towards the introduction of a more locally accountable TV and with Edinburgh Television and Channel Six Dundee (2000-2002) introduced a browser TV service with programmes scheduled by the viewers using their phone’s key-pads. These channels featured local and international music videos and pioneered short local arts-news.

Rushton is the Founding Director of the Institute of Local Television launched in 1989. The Institute’s most recent arts-news sites include www.summerhall.tv, www.artinscotland.tv, www.writerstories.tv and in partnership with Craft Scotland, www.craftscotland.tv.

My Top Five

As the first Top Five I’ll let my selection start with the early days of making news-clips on Super 8 film. Many of these films are now accessible on the Archive pages of www.summerhall.tv and also form part of the National Library of Scotland film collection … in chronological order:-

So this is Christmas … 1980

A roughly edited film of a demonstration in Glasgow in 1980. As a single copy Super 8 film this had a maximum audience of fifty viewers when it was shown two weeks after filming at Red Star’s Cinema held at the Netherbow (now the Storytelling Centre) on Edinburgh’s High Street. In August 2014 it went viral and was watched almost 3000 times over a couple of weeks, as a digital clip from Red Star’s Super 8 films archived on www.summerhall.tv.

Gore Vidal : In Conversation

Another ‘sleeper’ clip, this time made by Robert Morgan for Edinburgh Television in 2001. It started to be more widely seen after we launched www.writerstories.tv in January 2014. One of several hundred short arts, political and community clips originally shot on standard definition mini DV for Edinburgh Television and Channel Six Dundee between 2000 and 2004. The author interviews continued throughout many of the Edinburgh International Book Festivals with clips now finding a home on our Vimeo sites.

Angelika Schnabel

Moving away from arts-news this film from 2004 opens-out an interview with artist Angelika Schnabel. Here the construction is more lyrical, a montage of picture and soundscape, affecting the quiet confidence of working in the enclosed slow-paced discipline of Angelika’s Buddhist tradition.

Phillipa Aitken : Gerhard Richter

Shot by Ben Grieve for www.artinscotland.tv this interview with Phillipa Aitken is a good example of our daily arts-news coverage of exhibitions and artists throughout Scotland. These are now filmed on a variety of HD camcorders and DSLR cameras. Published openly via social media arts-news, these clips fit the short-time span required of .tv and increase the ‘virtual footfall’ to Scotland’s artists, writers and performers by remote and international ‘visitors’.

Ellie Harrison : After the Revolution, Who Will Clean Up the Mess?

Luci Wallace’s clip of Ellie Harrison’s Referendum Canons was our most watched arts-news clip of 2014. Luci’s film explores an event that at the time of filming may or may not take place depending on the Referendum result. A sequel was filmed on the morning of the announcement [Ellie Harrison : Counterpoint]. While the project didn’t go off with a Bang, the metaphor proved resilient; the result not so much a whimper as a Bigger Bang postponed.

This is the first part of an ongoing series selecting films from SummerhallTV’s archive. For a chance to curate your very own SummerhallTV film selection, please email Central Station on hello@thisiscentralstation.com.

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Where I Make: The Brothers McLeod

guest — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 07:30:02 +0000

The Brothers McLeod are Illustrator-animator Greg and screenwriter Myles. They are known for their animations created for TV, short film, games and the web. Here is were they create…

Welcome to our turret. Where we spy on the world and make words and pictures.

We’ve been in situ for 3 years. We were previously locked away in our respective abodes with nowt but our own dull company to cheer us. Now sing hallelujah, we get to spend each and every long long hour together swilling about in the brotherly love of creative nirvana.

The wiring in the building pre dates the renaissance and the cold winter of last year froze the water in the toilet. We battled through in hats and scarves and Myles learned to type wearing gloves. We burnt Greg’s drawing board for warmth and severally depleted the whisky supplies.

Despite working mainly on the evil device that is the computer we like to surround ourselves with paints, pencils, pens and various drawing surfaces. This keeps the evil digital demons at bay and gives us something to do when the electricity has a ‘moment’

In truth tis a wondrous space offering, as it does, unparalled views of the upper middle class town of Stratford Upon Avon. If Shakespeare were alive today we’d have him locked in a cupboard writing short films.

Much love form our turret of creativity

The Brothers McLeod

Ps – Our surname is pronounced MacCloud for those not versed in Norse-Scottish history…

Find out more:
Website | YouTube | Tumblr | Twitter

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

My First 5 Jobs: Paul Logue

genny — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 08:39:56 +0000

Paul Logue is a freelance screenwriter working in television. His credits include the likes of Taggart, Sea of Souls and Casualty. Here are his first five jobs.

1. McDonalds Glasgow / Crew member
Sixth year at school and I took a weekend job at the first McDonalds store in Glasgow. Travelling from Paisley every Saturday to wear a bad uniform and punt burgers to shoppers. Made some good friends, had some good laughs and stuffed myself with burgers. This was at the height of the BSE crisis so the CJD should kick in some time soon.

2. Oddbins Glasgow / Sales Assistant
Now sadly in administration, this was the job that supported me through art school. Long hours spent in freezing shops selling Superbock and Glenloth Red by the caseload. Great staff discount mind and I learned a lot about wine. Old World is best. It just is.

3. Clydesdale Bank Central Records / Admin Assistant
Night shift, Clydebank, a warehouse crammed with row upon row of shelves. Filing direct debits as Radio Clyde pumped out of the Tannoy system. I lasted a week.

4. East Kilbride Arts Centre / Leisure Assistant
A great job! Working as a janitor in an arts centre. Good wages and free use of the facilities: dark room, editing suite, studio. A very productive time – making work and organising exhibitions. In a way it was too good. I stayed for three years. Beware the comfortable job.

5. Scottish Screen / Training and Education Assistant
My first real “industry job”. Providing support to the Training and Education Department. A great two years helping to organise industry training, scriptwriting courses and student film festivals. They were also kind enough to let me read all the scripts in the script library which got me started thinking about screenwriting.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Watching the Watch Man (Tony Mills)

guest — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 12:09:02 +0000

You’ve been hitting the contemporary dance trail lately… how would you characterise your work? Is it still bboy or has it become something else?

None of the work I have ever made has ever been straight up breaking. Whe ever I have worked with hip hop dance vocabulary i have always looked to present it in a different way. This is because I’m not interested in bboy moves, for example, being the eye candy in a show. Currently, I aim to create work that has some backbone, that resonates with members of the audience and demonstrates power and skill in a subtle manner. BBoying has given me a path into the dance world but through my recent productions I’ve tried to show myself in a different light and as a more versatile performer. I don’t want to be pigeon holed and I hope whatever I produce will keep evolving.

Watch it has a crack at the power of TV. How does dance give you a space to explore ideas like this?

My first moment of inspiration for Watch iT! was seeing how the TV directly affect the movements of the people watching it. From there I thought of other instances where you might find TV-specific movement and the work grew from there. So straight away i had movement ideas. Some avenues I was exploring needed other mediums of expression however. By including animation, text and film I was able to create a different world on stage. Dance allows you to explore such themes because it invites collaboration between other mediums. However, in this situation whatever dance is present really needs to be relevant and not lost amongst the other aspects. It is an expressive art form and as long as you are staying true to your ideas and not embellishing it (too much) then, i feel, you can pretty much explore whatever you want.

What sort of audiences have you been getting, and how do they respond?

For the room 2 manoeuvre tour the audiences have been mixed. From the riotous Dance Live crowd in Aberdeen to the quietly indifferent theatre goers of Shetland. The two pieces are quite different. Such a Bloke is a much more subtle and abstract piece where as Watch iT! has been described as a multi-media dance odyssey. People have tended to like one more than the other, but overall the programme has received a very positive response.

Apart from being the hardest working man in scottish dance (c), what projects have you been up to lately?

Once the tour and BC are over i’ll be going underground, getting off the grid and unplugging myself. Once i’ve detoxed i’ll be planning a small education and performance tour with my crew, Random Aspekts in Jan/Feb 2011. I will also be creating a new piece with Jennifer Paterson choreographed by Natascha Gilmore in Feb/Mar 2011. Myself and Matt Foster (Random Aspekts/David Hughes Dance) are also programming the Breakin’ Rules event which will take place at the Dundee Rep on Jan 14/15th 2011.

What is influencing your work these days?

In terms of influences, I like the aesthetic of companies like DV8, Jasmin Vardimon and Frantic Assembly. They always seem to put together an intelligent mix of dance, theatre and design. I had a short spell working with Derevo and being exposed to their working methods has definitely impacted on my own. I have also been getting involved more with contact improvisation and learning about improvisation techniques. Doing more contact has changed how i dance, both in the clubs and the studio, and has provided me with new qualities to explore when making material.