Month: October 2016

When Momo met Ooman and Moof

Posted on by Timo Peach

Nickelodeon’s new animated short has Mr Peach tuning up his jungle drums to follow the charming, colourful prehistoric action.

 

When illutrator Benedict Bowen invited Momo:tempo to join him and Karrot Entertainment in the swampy everglades and ignious plains of ancient Earth, none of them had much of a clue whether the bloke from Bournemouth could score a cartoon. Or get inside the mind of a young caveboy and his best mate, a baby woolly mammoth. ..Well, and you’re there already – turns out, this was not going to be a problem. Especially with such a beautifully drawn world to explore.

 

“My absolute favourite board game from Christmases past was called Lost Valley Of The Dinosaurs. It evoked a kind of cartoon sense of adventure from the mines of old King Solomon himself, or something – larva flows and swamps and terrible lizards and lost gold” says Timo. “The very opening frame of Ben’s animatic, sent over to me from the chaps at Karrot a couple of years ago, had me instantly transported back to that tabletop reverie. It was an immediate, single-image trigger for me to want to dive right in.”

Ooman & Moof is written for young children. Those just about to start school, in fact, so the storytelling had to be almost completely straight. An interesting audience to write for, in any sense.

“Ben was clear on the way Nickelodeon wanted to target the tone to those who’s humour is largely slapstick and friendly. But I think we all felt that the best way to talk to, well, anyone – but also littler humans – is honestly from the idea. If we found that prehistoric world kind of gorgeous and evocative, anyone might. All we had to do was not clutter up the experience for them.”

Was this a challenge to turn into music?

“Nah,” grins Timo. “Cute little tunes is essentially just what I do. The thing for this was to make it sound in some way like animal skins and bits of bone are in the mix, even while we allow a kind of bouncy bright coloured production. The point is the same on anything I get to tackle – can I make something the audience will love that I will also want to put in a Momo live set? And the theme to Ooman & Moof? You freaking bet!”

And writer and production team seemed pleased with the result. As Ben says “Can’t praise Timo enough. He came out of nowhere with that first mix and nailed it!”

“It was a pleasure working with such positive people in such a beautiful little pocket universe,” responds Timo. “A wonderful little glimpse at making something for the little adventurers in us all.”

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Open Sauce – peering forward.

Posted on by Timo Peach

The bloke from Momo is speaking. How is this news. Well, surprisingly, he’s been invited to share ‘something’ at the brand new ideas initiative from Think Create Do – and whatever it is he’s going to say to a room full of like-minded explorers, he’d better make it snappy.

 

Open Sauce is the latest brainchild of Matt Desmier – digital ambassador and founder of Silicon Beach, She Who Dares Wins and many other creative conferences in the UK south. And as he says, “the aim is to create an inclusive event.” One of the most inclusive aspects of the format undoubtedly turning out to be watching the invited speakers sweat over a timed pecha kucha-style presentation – 20 slides of 20 seconds each.

 

“A PLACE FOR PEOPLE OF ALL WALKS OF LIFE TO CONNECT, LEARN AND SHARE.”

No one likes the word Networking. It either implies a more boring version of speed dating over business cards or possibly a lot of tangled cables. Either way, Open Sauce aims to be different. And the inclusion of Momo’s own Timo Peach in the proceedings may help this aspect of the event. The question is, a little too much?

“When Matt asked me to consider talking, I did wonder who the hell would pay to hear me babble. And about what, for goodness sake?” Timo says. “I am famously this unqualified bloke in a shed, not an expert or representitive of something really blooming clever and interesting. ..My entire back catalogue of music not withstanding, of course…” he smirks typically.

But that seems to be part of the goal of Matt and the team from Think Create Do. They even use the word ‘fun’ in their blurb about the upcoming night at favourite Bournemouth night spot Canvas, explaining that Open Sauce is for “anyone and everyone to come along” hoping that they will leave “having been inspired by the exciting, interesting and novel speakers”. Which means Momo might at least provide some entertainment.

“That I can usually find a way to do” Mr Peach confirms. “And timing the talk as a pecha kucha sort of turns it into more of a performance – it’ll feel a bit more like a spoken word piece.  But crikey, it also puts the pressure on to do something uncharacteristic for me… get it right.”

 

“EXPECT TO BE SURPRISED AND ENTERTAINED…” AND WORRIED?

So what can the first Open Sauce audience expect from Momo’s 6min40sec?

“Confusion” he says.

“And in the middle of it, a first idea of what I’ve been working on over the last year. I’ll be peering forward a bit. But the official title of my talk is: Cursing the future: Coping with now in 20 C-words. It just feels like a time for some colourful language.”

“But don’t worry,” he adds, “we won’t be raising money via a swearbox.”

If you fancy being in that exclusive audience and being among the very first to hear what colourful language comes next from Momo, you might want to try to bag the very last tickets still available on Eventbrite here.

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“Inside Art” from Six

Posted on by Timo Peach

I may have said it before. I mean, that’s likely, right? On anything. But I do like autumn. And one of the reasons I like the back-to-school season where I currently live is that a few things conspicuously cultural happen. But this year, I was lucky enough to boob about the fringes of something additional on Bournemouth Arts Autumnwatch – Inside Art. A pop-up network of galleries across one weekend in Southbourne, from fine art chums Six Projectspace.

 

If you’ve not caught it or my sharing of it before, Six was originally a micro white-cube gallery in Rumelia Lane, bang in the heart of Boscombe. Founded by fine artists Theresa Bruno and Sarah Grace Harris, with Sarah’s husband filmmaker and writer Mark VK of 612 Media, for eighteen months that little space saw new original work curated or commissioned every week. Every single week. It was energising.

Artists from a range of disciplines put work into Six and as the network of people meeting through the name grew, the team decided it was time to close the commitment of a dedicated space and go roaming. Which our dear chums Mark and Sarah literally did, moving their home from round the corner to Sheffield. Sad for friends at the weekends, but happy for expanding the network of creative connections.

Since then, Six has produced various pop-up events as well as fostering young talent. It’s been one of the most quietly exciting arts projects to come out of Bournemouth – so when I heard the team was planning a weekend of open studios in my back yard, I simply hollered: “J’need any help?”

 

EIGHT VENUES, ALMOST FIFTY ARTISTS, ONE END OF TOWN.

Inside Art was a bit of a revelation, I think. For everyone involved. Certainly for me. For, while I had no thoughts to attempt to gatecrash any work into any of the spaces myself, I did rather want to cheer on those curating the spaces and meet some folk I’d only heard of up until then. And curation was the interesting twist in this project, for while all bar one of the venues were artists’  homes, each location was a themed collage of talent and work, not simply a chance to gawp at people’s studios. Fascinating as this can be.

The revelation appeared in a number of ways, I think. Mainly, I heard a lot of the artists sound actually surprised at how many of them were on each other’s doorsteps without realising. The meeting and sharing sense of Inside Art was probably the primary win for everyone, including me. My involvement at the fringes turned into four little introductory films to the spaces, where I popped out to meet some of the artists behind the venues.

The sculptor Rebecca Newnham, whose fluid use of hard materials such as glass, bronze and concrete explores often scientific themes through large-scale nature-istic forms, shared her collaboration with filmmaker Lizzie Sykes, Allusion – whose own choreographic screen work shared as part of Rebecca’s Inside Art curation Edge was beautifully human. Rosemary Edwards and Ineka Vanderwal presented a collection of artists under the title Nothing Exists In Isolation, with Rosemary’s own fabric exploration of where inside meets outside creeping around the house and garden like a friendly multi-coloured virus. And Ineka’s brooding large painting Coil is something I could sit in front of and meditate upon for an hour.

Meanwhile, former circuits class chum Denise Poote opened up her and husband Chris’ home under the title Shift, 3, with a selected host of drawing, sound installation, performance and projection work – including a bit of a favourite for me personally from the weekend, the sublime and ever-personable Language Timothy, evolving their gently playful broken-toy ecclecticism into Denise’s understairs cupboard for the beautiful, immersive Spandrel.

Finally crossing paths properly with Lucy Turner, herself a sort of living crossroads of dynamic creative knowledge in Bournemouth, was also rather a highlight for me, as she presented some of her video work in Velo Domestique – a very friendly bike shop run by fine art grads that sells locally roasted coffee and gorgeous lunches and in no way adds to the ‘hipsterification’ of Southbourne, as I pointed out to bandmate and neighbour Martin.

And then there was the revelation of Woodside Studios, whom I didn’t get to with a camera before the weekend, even though it’s right along the road from my local CoOp – the shared home of a splendidly diverse group of artists like Oya Allen and Mark David Lloyd and Noel Holmes. Oya’s warmly beautiful organismic abstract paintings in the Ephemera series encript art “as excavation”, exploring “the unifying of impermanence.” While Mark’s work, bringing some of the energy of his street art history into painting and video pieces, such as The Singularity, looks squarely, or rather roundly, at “the unknown… confronting what it means to be human”.

Or the revelation of Scott from Big Top Heartbreak playing a solo set in the kitchen of writer Nell Leyshon, to say nothing of his preacher in a shed. I’ll just leave you to even ponder it.

But perhaps the main revelation for me, in the end, was how all of this jolly nice creative sharing and co-creating and encouraging, all pottering distance from the Momo studio, actually illustrates something taking much of my thoughts at the moment. New ways of seeing our economy. Believe it or not. Because, while everyone involved is looking for commissions and sales and, y’know, ways to pay the rent and generally stay alive and independent, talk of it came way down the list of objectives – behind getting to share work, meet other artists, develop the local scene and find new collaborations.

If art is indeed the creating of new ways of seeing, might ordinary artists in my own back yard be already helping to shape how we see the future?

A basically brilliant couple of days, co-inciding with the biennial Dorset festival Inside Out (don’t get confused) this year bringing pieces to the beloved meadows of Hengistbury Head on the same weekend, between them showcasing too many artists for me to mention. Such projects certainly do make something out of nothing – including an expectation of future things.

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