The Digital Edge Shepton Mallet Digital Festival

And the winner is, me!

On Saturday I went to the Shepton Mallet 2012 Digi Fest as I had been shortlisted for photography and digital innovation. Before my wife and I drove over to the ceremony I had a good look at the other finalists and was pretty certain who I would choose to be winner, (which wasn't me!) So you can imagine how brilliant it feels to be chosen over works which you admire, respect and rate considerably higher than your own.

Now I am not one to bang my own drum, as I would rather be humble than showy, but every now and then I get pulled up short and this is one of those occasions. I am really pleased with the story walks works I have created, and feel they are new and progressive in my own way, but to get high calibre names reinforcing that is just wonderful. 

On the night, before the awards were given one of the judges Angela Williams (below) came up and said some really positive and encouraging words to me, which I took as 'you've got some great work so don't be too despondent when you don't win!' So you can imagine how chuffed I was to be stepping up onto the stage receiving the award for Fine Art Photography a short time later.

But then came the award for the overall best in show for 'photography and digital innovation', and I was called up again! So I now have book ends, and lets just say that there are not many trophy's in my history (none) though I do remember winning a ribbon for speed walking at my primary school though I'm not sure if I can put my hands on it just now.

But the real key part of the night, wasn't the award, but the people, those who you respect and admire have just turned around to me to say they like what I am doing. So thanks to every one, I am keen to stay in touch and do some work with this storywalk player. No point in leaving it idle now, that would be criminal! 

Where shall we lie Timber Toes?

What shall I do with you? I have been beavering away with my storywalks over the last month or so and have three new tales which are yet to be christened for public consumption, (it won't be too long, but more of that on another blog.) But the most recent, has yet to be linked to place. 

I must explain to those who are less familiar with my story walks, that the place where the tale is located is an integral part of the writing process. My most recent, and currently unavailable stories are 'The Twins Tale' at Nutcombe Bottom (fabulous name of a place if every there was one), and 'The Green Thief' at Holford, on the north side of the Quantock hills. Both tales respond to place in some way, and all though I can extract these stories and put them in a book, somehow that's not what the Storywalks were ever about.

When I walk in a place, the story evolves, the pacing changes, the interactions of reader and walker become one, and this tale 'Timber Toes' has just started and I need a home to place it, a bed for it to lie in.

So the question is dear reader, where would you like this tale to be placed?

Timber Toes

There once lived a young boy and his mother in a broken thatch hut which was little more than a bramble covered lean to. But it was dry and they kept each other warm through the winter months and shared the work the best they could. When she had been a child she would run bare foot through the forest and some how it had lodged there for now in later years her feet were turning to wood. 

Every night he would massage them and rub life back into them, but they seemed to get harder and stiffer as the days progressed, until she could hardly leave the cottage at all. The boy was a different matter though for he could catch sounds in his hands, and though this seemed like magic or impossible it was neither. 

He would bring her the lace work which she was so poorly paid for, and run errands about the home to keep their ship from sinking, and when she was bed ridden he would go out into the forest and catch the sounds of birds singing, or the trickle of the stream for her. He could only catch one sound at a time, and would run, and run, and run with clasped hands until he came home to share it with her. Her eyes would twinkle, and her toes twitch at these fresh sounds from the forest, and so he called her timber toes.

The boys father had been lost to a war which had forgotten it's reason for ever having started. He believed he had a heart made of feathers, but this was not true for one frosty morning as snow flakes landed on his broken body, he looked to see and there was nothing but flesh, bones and blood. The low paper sky and the trees about him felt like ghost parts, and as the sound of the battle rolled away over the ridge he remembered running barefoot with his wife in a forest just like this one. He wished that he had had a chance for his toes to turn to timber too but that was not to be.

What's the story?

Well Saturday was a great success, we had a great group and the sun shone, which for this summer was a surprise! 

But what was it we were doing? Well all the current walks are tricky to install and have flummoxed the minds of scientists and would be walkers alike. So there has been diligent work behind the scenes on developing a browser based walker, sounds easy but in fact rather a tricky job. If it were easy then the player would have been live long ago and tweeked to run all the stories for Art Week.

 

Well the best minds rose to the task, and the player was built, tested, then rebuilt, and on Saturday we did a full live test with eager kids and inquisitive adults. But there had been so many technical obstacles that this became the first full field test (yikes) but with some confidence in the smaller tests we had done, it was all systems go.

After a brief chat and intro at the Tantivy Cafe we set out up towards the Church (Chapter 1 of The Watching Way) On the player it showed how many metres we needed to go to trigger the images, text and tale. As we walked up hill the distance numbers reduced - perfect but then they started to rise!!

So quick as a flash, I dipped into the back-end of the system on the iPad, swapped the first two chapter zones around (my mistake) and refreshed. Then straight away we were live, the story revealed and the tale telling began. 

Wow (phew!) and testimony to the strong user interface of my code man Mr Joiner.

The walk progressed with ease, going from zone to zone, making mental notes as to what worked and what needed to be improved, alongside quite a few comments and questions from the children who came. But I kept focused and all was good.

One of the hurdles was that a few of the walkers had come with smart phones which were actually not smart enough, and it was rather disheartening to say, I'm sorry but you're phone just doesn't cut the mustard for this task. But the tech requirements are pretty high as the ask is so big, and some of the HTML5 code used is as pioneer as it comes.

I lead the walk, so I read it out showing the images to the group as we progressed, then deep in the woods we stopped to make clocks out of leaves and twigs. When that was done, we finished the tale on the hill top with a great vista of Dulverton whilst the kids climbed trees and signed the journal.

All in all a fabulous day, and the kind which makes you pleased that you wrote the tales, and made everyone come and step inside your world just for an hour or so. Personally I shy away from the public reading, I created the walks to be enjoyed by you and your family, which make them personal and special in a different way. Everyone invests a story with a different voice, a style and I think that's just what makes them shine.

So keep on shining please.