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Hello Stranger

28th March 2023 by Simon Wainwright

If you happen to be around Leeds in the next week or so make sure to drop into Leeds Playhouse for the Hello Stranger exhibition, celebrating performance design in Yorkshire. We’re included in the exhibition with my storyboards for our lockdown-project Airlock.

Storyboard frames for Airlock

Airlock was our series of “live graphic novels” devised and made during the first lockdown, commissioned by The Space, Arts Council England and the BBC as part of the Culture in Quarantine programme

We’ve used the aesthetics and language of graphic novels a lot in our work over the last ten years or so. When the first lockdown started and we were forced to cancel our touring work we started to discuss the possibility of making a live-action graphic novel in real time using Skype and our beloved Isadora media software. It was important to us that the pieces were “live”, recorded as a performance, and so the planning and execution had to be precise to allow movement and storytelling from five separate performers in five separate locations. Storyboarding became more important than ever and I used the process to work out exactly how we would achieve the narrative and onscreen “tricks” whilst the performers were all confined to the small square of their laptop camera. The process involved a lot more precise pre-planning than the normal organised chaos of an ITD process and so I spent some time making the storyboards themselves something worth looking at for more than just reference.

More information on the exhibition can be found at https://leedsplayhouse.org.uk/event/hello-stranger/ and all episodes of Airlock can be watched on the website at https://www.imitatingthedog.co.uk/watch-at-home/airlock/

Simon

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