Posts from the “Bridport News & Views” Category
02/02/2012 No comments

Bridport by Night: An alternative tourism video by Stephen Banks

So, it has been over a week since I uploaded my ‘labour of love’, Bridport by Night, to YouTube. The video really took off in the first four days, accumulating some 8,000 views in that period alone. Hits from technology site Gizmodo and Anglotopia helped it along its way, but the majority of views were picked up by an organic sharing frenzy on Facebook and Twitter.

Throughout last week, I had people who I didn’t know from the local area following me on Twitter and adding me on Facebook. Many of them commented expressing their praise for the video. To date, the video on YouTube has had about 75 comments (and the same number of replies by me), 206 likes and 2 dislikes – a comment reading “Two dislikes for this video? The pair of you: YOU ARE DEAD INSIDE” made me chuckle.

Interest has died down at the moment. A few people have quietly complained about how much I was mouthing off about it, so I haven’t been sharing it around so much. But the other night, ITV West Country Tonight came to West Bay and filmed me for a piece they are running. And this Saturday, the film is being shown at the Bridport Arts Centre as part of a Spirit of Bridport event.

My target number of views for the video is 12,977 (which is Wikipedia‘s listed population for Bridport). It should soon surpass that. I already have plans to make a second, improved version of the video. Difficult second album?
21/11/2011 No comments

Excitement at prospect of new Bridport Mayor

AS THE LEAVES of our calendars turn remorselessly onwards, the evenings lengthen, and the sound of Cliff Richard singing some nausea-inducing seasonal ditty drives us all out of shops around Bridport, excitement at the prospect of a new Mayor grips us all.
02/11/2011 No comments

Digital first for Dorset at new Bridport festival

A NEW digital edition of The Waste Land, by the UK’s favourite poet TS Eliot, is to be shown in public for the first time in Bridport.

The Waste Land app for iPad will kick-start a debate – sponsored by Bridport-based Watershed PR – about The Future of the Word.

The event on Saturday, November 19 is a coup for the new Bridport Open Book Festival, set up by Bridport Arts Centre to tie in with the famous Bridport Prize and celebrate reading and writing.

Faber’s Head of Digital Henry Volans, who published the app with Touch Press, said: ‘Though it has been presented at industry conferences in New York, London and Frankfurt, The Waste Land for iPad has never been shown at a public event.

‘So this is an exciting opportunity. Publishers spend much of their lives discussing the digital future of books but they rarely ask readers what they want.

‘Here’s a rare chance to bridge that gap, to bring a pioneering digital book to a book festival and provoke debate around new ways of presenting literature. Sceptics welcome!’

Mr Volans will be on a panel at Bridport Arts Centre alongside Jonathan Hudston (who runs the Real West Dorset site and is a director of Watershed PR), The Bridport News’ news editor James Tourgout, Bridport writer Katherine Locke and Exeter-based poet and IT specialist Damian Furniss.

Screenshot of Fiona Shaw performing the Death by Water of The Waste Land by TS Eliot in The Waste Land app for iPad

Fiona Shaw performing The Waste Land

The Waste Land app is much more than just an electronic book. It includes a specially-commissioned film of actor Fiona Shaw performing the poem, archive recordings by Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes and Eliot himself that are otherwise hard to find, a new reading by actor Viggo Mortenson, and numerous interviews with such luminaries as Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, many of these filmed by the BBC.

The Waste Land app has just been shortlisted for a 2012 Interaction Award by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) for Disrupting – Re-imagining completely an existing product or service by creating new behaviors, usages or markets. The app is up against products including the Ford SmartGauge, Nike+ GPS and the Morgan Stanley Matrix.

TS Eliot (1888-1965) is buried not far from Bridport at East Coker in Somerset. He was voted the nation’s favourite poet in a BBC poll in 2009. The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is commonly regarded as the 20th century’s greatest poem.

Tickets (£5 / £6) are available from Bridport Arts Centre (01308 424204).