My Route
Sampad commissioned us to produce a 16 minute documentary film capturing the whole My Route project featuring interviews with project staff, volunteers, participants, artists, workshop leaders, photographers, academics, etc. This also included extensive archive research work and organising a visit for us and My Route project staff to Media Archive for Central England (MACE) to view rarely seen newsreel footage of the Stratford Road area from the 1940’s to the 1980’s. We licensed the footage for use in our documentary film and on an interactive touch table, showing a map of the Stratford Road with people, buildings and places of interest.
Alongside the documentary we also filmed 10 x oral history interviews with people from the local community, working closely with the oral history volunteers. These 1 hour oral history interviews have been permanently archived at the Library of Birmingham for future generations to access and enjoy. They were also transcribed by project volunteers and the professional audio recordings we supplied were featured in the My Route sound-pods during the public exhibition; transcriptions were included on the My Route website and within learning packs for schools. In addition the clips from the oral histories were accessible via a smartphone app which used AR scanning technology within the My Route publication.
Another outcome of working on ‘My Route’ was the opportunity to produce a 50 minute documentary with the Randhawa family on the history of the old Waldorf Cinema and its former manager Avtar Singh Randhawa. This film features a number of archive clips from Bollywood films which screened at the cinema. It aired on PTC Punjabi Channel (Sky channel 815) in January 2016.
The ‘My Route’ documentary will be screened on 16th March 2016 at 5pm at the Arts & Science Festival at the University of Birmingham. Click here to book your free place.