Scraps Of Mind

There’s a great scheme going on with some of our independent movie theatres over the last couple of years where they do direct live broadcasts of operas from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

I’ve been going for the last 18 months and the experience is fantastic. Not only do you get a fabulous high definition up-close-and-personal  viewing experience of the production (and The Met productions are seriously over the top), but you also get to see what’s going on behind the curtain when the scenery is being changed between acts. And that has to be seen to be believed. And on top of that, the whole thing is presented by a leading opera star, such as Placido Domingo or Renee Fleming, who catch the lead performers as they leave the stage at the end of an act and chat with them.

A couple of theatres in Melbourne subscribe to this broadcast but my venue of choice is The Sun Theatre in Yarraville; a beautifully restored art deco theatre with intimately sized theatres and comfy armchair style seating. The last opera production was a couple of weeks ago. Bizet’s Carmen, a well known story and a truly magnificent production.  And because it’s broadcast live and has plenty of close-up camera work, you get to see all the little prop malfunctions and how the performers  deal with them in such a way that the people in the ‘real’ theatre would not actually see.

Just recently The Sun have branched out in this area and are including ballet performances from the Russian ballet as well as plays from the West End of London. These aren’t broadcast live but they’re recorded live and are presented within two weeks of the actual performance so there’s a feeling of currency about them.

I went to my first play on Saturday: Nation by Mark Ravenhill based on a book by Terry Pratchett (nothing to do with the Discworld Series of which I am a huge fan). It’s a production from the National Theatre, London.

“A parallel world, 1860. Two teenagers thrown together by a tsunami that has destroyed Mau’s village and left Daphne shipwrecked on his South Pacific island, thousands of miles from home. One wears next to nothing, the other a long white dress; neither speaks the other’s language; somehow they must learn to survive. As starving refugees gather, Daphne delivers a baby, milks a pig, brews beer and does battle with a mutineer. Mau fights cannibal Raiders, discovers the world is round and questions the reality of his tribe’s fiercely patriarchal gods. Together they come of age, overseen by a foul-mouthed parrot, as they discard old doctrine to forge a new Nation.”

I wasn’t sure how I would go watching a stage play in a movie format. And it took me about 15 minutes to get my head into the right sort of place. But once I was there I truly enjoyed the experience.

The production mixed projected film and puppetry in an unlikely combination with the ‘organic’ performance in a way that worked wonderfully. Speaking as someone who likes a story to be delivered pretty straight and not given an ‘arty’ treatment I was a little nervous of how this was all going to come across. But it worked brilliantly.

I’m always fascinated by stage productions and how so many different places, moods, times etc. can be created ‘live’ in front of your eyes without all the ‘trickery’ that’s available with cameras. The Nation production was a minimal scenery production (not usually my favourite option) and performed on a revolving stage that centred on a dome that represented the Asia Pacific region of a globe of the world, and doubled as the deck of a ship and a South Sea island.

All the performers did a wonderful job and the script explored some interesting corners of the human psyche, whilst still being a fun and entertaining story.

Because they had only received the file from London that day, the Sun team hadn’t had a chance to give it a run through to test it and sure enough, we had a couple of glitches. We lost the last couple of minutes before the Interval and, more importantly, the curtain came down two and a half minutes before the end. Things were looking ugly in the theatre when the management came to apologise for what had happened and said that if we could hang on for about 10 minutes they’d get it sorted and we’d get our ending. Then they gave us all a complementary pass to sooth ruffled feathers and all was well.

So if you’re fortunate enough to live in or around London and you’re looking for something a bit different (without being off the wall) to see, I can highly recommend Nation.

And for everyone else, why not check out your local independent cinema and see if they participate in this worldwide broadcast scheme. It’s a great way to try out something different without buying expensive tickets.

Other Related Articles:

No Longer an Opera Virgin

Turandot … or ‘Mastermind: Chinese Style’

Well Summer is in full swing here in Oz. And I’ll be honest with you; I haven’t done much in the scrapbooking line for a few months.

But I haven’t shut up shop entirely. My Tuesday night craft group ensures that I still keep projects on the go.

Last year I introduced Marla to the concept of  Artist Trading Cards and I’ve never seen someone embrace anything with as much enthusiasm as she has with ATCs. She’s joined several swap groups and in a few short months she’s built up a huge collection, filling two binders already. She makes beautiful ATCs as you can see here.

At the moment she’s got a couple of swaps which she’s organising herself, so in a fit of buddy support I’ve volunteered to contribute to them. Here’s one of my efforts on the theme of ‘birds and feathers’. It’s called Soar.

Like many of my ATCs it’s a hybrid of digital and paper/scissors techniques. I find this approach especially useful when I have to make 7 cards all the same. I can design the backgound, duplicate it and print out 7 identical versions. Then add the cut outs and three dimensional stuff. In many cases I’ll print out digital elements, cut them out and mount them with foam tape, mixed in with ‘real life’ embellishments, as I’ve done here.

Cuttlebug Crafting

The group has recently clubbed together and purchased a communal Cuttlebug. I wasn’t that excited until I gave it a try myself.

What a bunch of fun it was! Quite ordinary looking card or paper embossed a gorgeous patterned texture which looks fabulous in card or scrapbooking projects. Or you can create embossed embellishments using card or papers that coordinate with your scrapbook layouts. Here are a couple of cards I made for my niece’s  birthdays and one for another niece’s engagement. I just love the effect.

If you are a user of one of these babies and have some cool ideas for ways to use it, I’d love it if you could share them in the comments below. Often something that seems quite straightforward to one person can sound like a revelation to another. We’re all still pretty new to the world of Cuttlebugs so we’d welcome any suggestions that help to get the most value from it.

What is your favourite scrapbooking tool?

And whilst on the subject of scrapbooking equipment…do you have a favourite piece of equipment that you just love?

Even though I’m in love with the Cuttlebug at the moment, I think I would have to say that my fine cutting scissors are really my favourite piece of scrapbooking equipment.

I love my little embroidery scissors but I recently bought a funny looking pair that have now taken first place on my scrapbooking ‘must have’ tools list. They have no normal handles and you work them by squeezing the single handle which works a spring which works the blades. They really take the effort out of cutting and there’s no more red indentations on my thumb and fingers when I have to do a lot of cutting. And best of all, they make doing really fine and detailed cutting so easy.

Well as you can see, I seem to be drifting back to the more tactile side of papercrafting, after spending the last 18 months immersed in the world of digital scrapbooking. I still like to combine the two wherever possible. Most of my cards and ATCs are hybrid creations. And I think that I’ll always prefer the freedom that digital gives me when creating scrapbook layouts. But I’m really enjoying getting back into the ‘glue and paper’ stuff again.

Other Related Articles:

Artist Trading Card Swaps

Christmas Card Making in July

Yes folks it’s on again!

Antoinette from  Sparky’s Scratches has organised another huge roundup of scrapbooking freebies for your crafting pleasure.

Just click on the logo below to get to the special blog she has set up with all the links to a Wonderful World of Christmas Scrapbooking and Cardmaking items

I didn’t have anything to do with the organising of this year’s event being otherwise occupied cruising up the Danube and down the Rhine, but I’ve come home in time to do my part in providing some Christmas Word Art Freebies for you.

Just click on the sample graphic and you will open a .PNG file. Save this file to your computer and you should be able to use it with any of the mainstream graphics editing programs (eg. Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paintshop Pro).  You can resize the image to fit your scrapbook layout or card.

Enjoy.

(This looks better in the PNG format. the O doesn’t look so good in this sample)

Make sure you visit the other contributors to the Worldwide Christmas Scrapbooking Freebies.

I have been writing Scraps of Mind for nearly five years now and I’ve had the chance to ‘virtually’ meet many wonderful people. I live in Australia and most of my readers live overseas from me so there’s not much chance to actually meet in real life.

So how exciting it was to finally get to meet up with Antoinette from Sparky’s Scratches whilst I was in Amsterdam yesterday. If you’ve been a regular reader of Scraps of Mind you’ll know that Antoinette is one of the most regular commenters here and we’ve been emailing each other a lot too.

I’ve been travelling from Budapest in Hungary to Amsterdam in The Netherlands over the past three weeks (you can see the journey in photos on my Facebook Page) and I’d arranged with Antoinette to try and meet up whilst I was here.

It almost didn’t happen as I was waiting with my travel buddy Yvonne at Central Station when Antoinette’s text message came through…”Oh no. I’m on the wrong train and it doesn’t stop in Amsterdam!”. A tragedy in the making and exactly the sort of thing I could see happening to me.

Fortunately she managed to get on another train and we were soon hugging each other in front of the station.

We headed for a café for a coffee and a good chinwag. And it was terrific. Antoinette is exactly the same personality in real life as she is on her blog and we loved talking about this that and everything until finally she had to catch the train for home.

Yvonne and I were feeling a bit end-of-holidayish as we had just wound up a fantastic two week cruise along the Danube and Rhine Rivers that day. We’d had a fabulous time (if you ever get the chance to do this, the tour is with Scenic Tours and the experience is amazing with these people) and we had no fizz left to really get into enjoying our last two days in Amsterdam.

Antoinette was just what we needed to inject the enthusiasm back into us so we could really get into doing stuff on the last two days.

So a big thank you Antoinette. Not only are you a fun person to talk with, but you managed to kick start the life back into our trip so that we could enjoy it to the very end.