Date posted: June 27, 2011
Date posted: June 20, 2011
Date posted: June 16, 2011
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Date posted: June 7, 2011
-Gilly
Date posted: June 6, 2011
-Gilly
Date posted: June 5, 2011
Here’s a video blog of our brilliant day today at STV filming eight pre-records. Thanks to EVERYONE involved in the day – we had a blast!
-Gilly
Date posted: June 3, 2011
Here’s the first of my rough and ready video blogs – check back for more over the next few weeks!
-Gilly
Date posted:
Look at these yahoos!
This could be a mock up of the equipment that will be set up at each of our Five Minute Theatre hubs. It could be a highly technical, terribly official dry-run of expensive equipment and high-technology. It could be three of the brightest people at the National Theatre of Scotland, planning processes and testing out every feasible possibility with equipment they’re not used to using.
Or.
Could it be three grown men building the adult equivalent of a fort!? I feel like, thirty odd years ago, this three would almost certainly have been tearing cushions off the sofa, stacking up books and videos, stringing up table cloths and creating a safe haven in the living room from which to conduct their extensive military operations.
18 days and counting… Bring it on!
-Gilly
Date posted: June 1, 2011
20 days and counting until Five Minute Theatre.
Unbelievably, the clock that was once in triple figures on the front page of this website is now at twenty. And still it counts down.
Even more incredibly, over the last few days, we’ve been receiving the first of your pre-recorded pieces of Five Minute Theatre. They’ve been going to our Digital Editor, Seth, so that he can upload them and get the all ready to be streamed live on the day.
This afternoon, I asked Seth if I could watch a few of them. “No way!” he responded incredulously, “you don’t want to ruin the surprise, if you don’t have to watch them until the day, then I won’t let you watch them until the day.”
I caught a glimpse of one though, a lone performer on a hill, speaking to an audience and I was overcome with excitement for the day. I must admit that I welled up slightly, but then, I cry at adverts for toilet paper so that’s not saying much.
I love Seth’s commitment to keeping them as secret from National Theatre of Scotland staff as possible. It does feel like it will be an incredible reward when we get to see them live, for the first time. More than that though, we will hopefully have as close an experience as possible to people watching all over the world – fresh, a bit anxious, incredibly excited.
-Gilly
Date posted: May 17, 2011
Niall, Marianne, Catriona and I met this afternoon to try to tidy up the schedule before its announcement on Friday. We’ve been in touch with almost everyone to tell them the exact time they’ll be broadcast during Five Minute Theatre and inevitably, some people have got back to us saying they can’t do the time that we had originally allocated for them.
This is a completely understandable and expected part of the process – some people need to arrange child care, some can’t travel to a performance hub at a certain time and some just want to be streamed at a more convenient time for them and the their friends to watch it. We are as accommodating to these requests as possible and will never issue an outright “no” to people who ask to be moved around in our master schedule. It’s just not how we roll.
All this shifting things around reminds me of one of those sliding puzzle toys I used to try and do when I was little. The tiles comprised component parts of an image and you had to move them around until the image was clear and made sense. I was never terribly good at those puzzles, I never quite had the patience needed. The difference here though, is that we are a team of people, all working together to figure out the final picture. Moreover, that final picture isn’t a cartoon character or an arbitrary image of something unrelated to me, it’s a picture of a theatrical landscape I can’t wait to see.
-Gilly
Date posted: May 16, 2011
Just over one month to go until Five Minute Theatre.
Personally, I’ve got an imagined picture of how June the 21st will look. I talk to my colleagues and friends in between or during meetings. We chat and laugh excitedly at each other’s desks and after work as we walk to the train station or bus stop. We joke about how frantic the day will be and we get more and more excited with every conversation.
I try to imagine how I’ll get on in my role for the day. Whether we’ve been chosen to operate computers, to manage a performance hub or to film a five minute play in the park with people we’ve never met, we will all be doing jobs that are very different to our day to day here at the National Theatre of Scotland. That’s incredibly exciting and slightly daunting.
Then I try to imagine the wider context. All over the world, people will be coming together to perform and watch these plays. They have the potential to redefine what makes theatre and what is needed to make a performance into a play. The scope is enormous and difficult to visualise in my mind.
I think this is why this final month feels so different and so exciting. Our imagined pictures are becoming clearer and better defined. Our conversations are gaining detail and precision. We are tying things together. We have a very rough schedule of who will be performing when. We have a marked map, a list of the jobs that need done and the names of the people who we hope will do them.
We can chart the journey of Five Minute Theatre as it scours Scotland and chases round the globe, seeking out the theatrical diamonds that will spring up on June 21st and the performers, writers and directors who will present them.
Now that we can start imagining how the day will look and feel, we are at once humbled and galvanized for the day. 24 hours of theatre by you, for you, from us.
-Gilly
Date posted: April 15, 2011
T-minus two days until the announcement of all our Five Minute Theatre participants and there is a frantic energy around Civic House. Over the last few weeks we’ve been pouring over more than three hundred submissions from around the world. We’re thrilled at the top quality of entrants and gutted that we can’t give everyone a place.
Last Monday, Niall, Shihui, Marianne, Gilly and Hannah from Envirodigital spent the afternoon planning the structure of our 24 hours on June 21st.
This was one of the trickiest meetings yet – all Countdown-esque number crunching and scribbles on the whiteboard. It was really hard work and felt like a cross between a Rubik’s Cube and a Sudoku puzzle, but we’re pretty confident that the structure we have in place and the balance between live and pre-recorded shows will work.
And today we’ve been busy getting ready for the announcement on Monday of who exactly will be creating work for the day. We can’t wait to have our whole team together and start conversations with our Five Minute Theatre makers.
-Gilly
Date posted: April 6, 2011
Last Wednesday, the Five Minute Theatre team all met to read and discuss the submissions. There was Seth, Dawn, Wendy, Amy, Roberta, Gillian, Gilly, Marianne, Caroline and Vicky. We had all read every form in advance but we still gave ourselves two hours to discuss them all. There were over 300 so it took a while – so much that we needed an extra hour and a half. Other meetings were re-arranged, plans cancelled, but we got there in the end. It turned out to be one of the most uplifting, celebratory and epic meetings I’ve attended at the National Theatre of Scotland and we now have the basis of our schedule taking shape.
Later that day, we gave a short presentation about the project at the Digital Connections event at the SECC, Glasgow, and throughout the week conversations with partners and venues have been taking place here and abroad.
All that remains now is for us to fine-tune all the information that people taking part will need and getting it ready for our announcement on April 18th.
Date posted: March 28, 2011
A great big huge THANK YOU to everyone who has submitted an idea to Five Minute Theatre.
It’s impossible to tell you just how uplifting it has been to see all these emails pop in to our world filled with such creativity, brilliance and imagination.
So, now the deadline is passed, what will happen next?
The first step for us is to log all the submission forms which will take a day or two. Then, on Wednesday 30th March the full Five Minute Theatre Team are meeting to take a look at and discuss all the submissions.
Following that meeting we will start to plan the schedule. This is going to be a big task and we’ve given ourselves a week or two to do that.
Everyone will hear back from us by Monday 18th April.
Some of you may hear from us before that if we have specific questions about your five minutes that will help us build up the final performance schedule. Please don’t worry if someone you know has heard something and you haven’t – there are so many things to consider in advance of confirming the line up that it may take some time to get it all together.
We’ll be keeping you up to date over the next couple of weeks and you can always reach us viagra no prescription overnight
Date posted: March 16, 2011
There’s not long to go before the submission closing date on Friday 25th March. We’ve been getting more and more people signing up each day – and we think our new five handy hints video might have helped. Have you seen it yet?
Making that trailer was a lot of fun. That firm-but-gentle voice you hear is our very own Company Stage Manager, Jessica Richards, and the man having all the trouble with his idea, is of course the multi-talented Gary McNair, currently to be seen at the Citz in his one-man show, Count Me In. Gary took a quick break from rehearsals last week and popped his cardy on to help us out. We’re thinking the newsreel theme might be a winner and there are a few more ideas in the pipeline.
We’ve been doing lots of work on the ‘hubs’ and it looks like our Aberdeen and Glasgow venues are in place (more news on that very soon). But we’ve also been putting other ideas into action all round the country. We’re working with the guys at cialis online no prescription and we plan to have a roving crew based in Fife for the day. We need lots more Fife ideas so if you’re in the area, let us know – we want to hear from you!
It’s going to be fantastic announcing the final running order. The ideas are all interesting and different. As each one comes in, it get’s logged and a pin goes in a map. We’re starting to spread across the world and now that Shihui, our Associate Producer, has translated the eflyer into Mandarin Chinese and sent it to her contacts in China, we can really go global.
If you’re thinking about submitting an idea but are struggling with something, have questions or aren’t really sure how to proceed, get in touch, drop us a line, we’re here to help.
Date posted: March 4, 2011
One week since the launch of Five Minute Theatre and it’s all go. It’s been a rapid fire task to get the word out about the project as much as we possibly can. We want to reach a lot of people in a pretty short space of time before the submission deadline on March 25th, so there’s a lot to do and a lot of people to contact.
We’ve had our first big meeting since the launch. Hannah and Erin from viagra without prescriptionwho are our technical consultants, joined representatives from all the departments at the National Theatre of Scotland to talk about the project from every perspective. The ideas are flying and the spreadsheets are filling up.
Niall and Amy are on the working on hubs, Marianne’s on the marketing, Seth is on the digital content and livestreaming, Colin is online, Gillian is spreading the word to all her contacts and Tessa and Gilly are focussing on the submissions as they arrive.
Once your submission comes in, we log them and hopefully soon, the event will start to really take shape. We’ll start to see who is planning what and where and what’s live and what’s pre-recorded.
We thought a lot about the sign up process on Five Minute Theatre. We don’t want you to think that we’re controlling your content – we totally trust you. But we do want to get to know you, build†a relationship with you and hopefully continue to know you long after these five minutes are up.
We also want to put the hubs in the right place, make sure they are full and keep our roving crews busy. We realised pretty early on that we can’t talk to everyone who enters, establish national live broadcast hubs and send roving crews out without knowing in advance who you are and where you are going to be.
The scheduling day is happening in early April – it’s going to be absolutely massive.
The first submissions came in last Friday. It’s been brilliant to see each one as they arrive. They are varied, imaginative, interesting and sometimes pretty emotional. There have been submissions from Scotland, England, Ireland and America and a real mix of people too. It’s inspiring, it really is.
If you want to talk about Five Minute Theatre, you can do that in lots of ways – post a comment here, tweet using the #fiveminutetheatre hashtag, use the Facebook stream on the france cialis or email viagra no prescription overnight. We want to hear what you think.
