Category Archives: Digital

Time for a Digital Spring Clean

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I became a digital convert in 2013 when putting together The Sillitoe Trail for arts and media platform The Space. At the time I had no social media profiles, lugged a physical diary around with me, and thought YouTube was home to farting cats and people who wished they’d been on Jack Ass.

Part of The Space commission required us to make content available in multiple forms and accessible across media platform. In short, I had to buy a smartphone which in turn led to recording meetings in Google calendar and creating a Twitter account (hence @TheSpaceLathe).

Having no idea about social media I paid other people to manage this for me. This is one reason why The Sillitoe Trail does not have a bespoke YouTube channel. Fast forward eight years and I now manage numerous Instagram, YouTube and Twitter accounts for subsequent projects and have a deeper understanding of the identity of a project and how it operates at a transmedia level. All of which leads me to the point of this blog: A digital spring clean.

I’ve spent three days rebranding all of the YouTube videos for Dawn of the Unread and the D.H. Lawrence Memory Theatre. To do this, I first completed some training on LinkedIn (which I can access for free via Nottingham Trent University) about managing a YouTube channel. This typically involved adding contact details to the profile, changing thumbnails, and creating playlists.

Dawn of the Unread currently has 63 YouTube videos and some of these have specific themes: ‘The Nottingham Essay’ series explores key literary figures and was originally created to support Nottingham’s bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature in 2015. The ‘How to Create a Comic’ series features artists from our graphic novel doing everything the title suggests. The D.H. Lawrence YouTube channel has 33 videos and now includes a playlist for ‘The Student Essay’ whereby students produce a short five-minute insight into an aspect of Lawrence’s life as part of their dissertation.

 

There’s so much content online it’s really important that producers curate this to signpost readers to relevant stuff. Yes, there are marketing benefits in the sense that themed playlists can encourage binging on samey content. But a more important motivation is professionalism.

Another fantastic tool in my digital spring clean was the discovery of Canva – a graphic design platform with user friendly templates for all social media platforms. It uses a simple drag and drop function and is pretty easy to get your head around. But I did a bit more Linkedin training in Canva and graphic design before making my changes. Now all of the thumbnails include the project logo and one block of colour. It looks pretty. It directs readers to specific content. It suggests professionalism.

Important lessons to learn from this

  • Social media encourages instantaneous reactions to culture. Work uploaded is often guttural and raw. But the age of amateurism is over. There are so many tools available now that there’s an expectation of better production values.
  • You have to constantly upskill and retrain because digital doesn’t sit still. And why wouldn’t you want to learn new skills?
  • Now that everyone can upload content, we need people who can curate and bring order to the noise.
  • When you’re a creative producer you fall in love with ideas and jump and bounce from one project to the next. But being disciplined and making time to go back and perfect work is vital.

 

Twitterature: Reimagining Sillitoe’s classic for the covid generation

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To mark the 84th birthday of Sir Tom Courtenay, who played Colin Smith in the film adaptation of Sillitoe’s 1959 short story The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, I’ve updated the tale for the lockdown generation. This second of two blogs explains why Twitter was the best medium for the project.

During my A-Levels, many moons ago, I binge read every book I could get my mucky paws on by Keith Waterhouse. Next up was Alan Sillitoe. When I’d read every kitchen sink novel and play of postwar Britain, I watched the British New Wave films. Sir Tom Courtenay played the part of two of these iconic figures: Colin Smith in Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Billy Fisher in Waterhouse’s Billy Liar. These books and films had a profound effect on me during those formative years, not least in terms of class, culture and identity.

To say thank you to Sir Tom, and as a means of passing time during lockdown, I decided to update Sillitoe’s story of defiance for the covid generation as The Loneliness of the Lockdown Runner. Sillitoe’s story is 17,209 words long. I broke it down to 100 tweets that were published over five days, starting on Thursday 25 Feb – to commemorate the 84th birthday of Sir Tom Courtenay, who played Colin Smith in the British New Wave film of 1962.

I chose Twitter for numerous reasons:

Twitter is a medium of constraint and constraint is a vital component of creativity. When you have a limited mode of expression you have to be economical with your choice of words as well as consider other ways in which you can utilize the medium to create meaning.

To create a ‘beat’ each set of 20 tweets had to end on a ‘page turner’ that would encourage people to come back and see what happened next. This also created another layer of constraint.

The form reflects the content – a story about someone running, taking slow thuds along the pavement, is, in some respects, like the methodical beat of a tweet.

Images and hyperlinks

Tweets can include images which enable another layer of meaning. This meant I could take stills from the film and update them to reflect themes from 2020. I was also able to mash-up covid slogans with popular cultural references.

Sillitoe was born in Nottingham and set many of his novels and short stories here so I wanted to include images of the city in my updated version. For example, in Sillitoe’s story, Colin Smith is running in the countryside and mentions a giant oak. I changed this to the Royal Oak pub in Basford.

Tweets could include hyperlinks, enabling the story to document key events from March 2020 – masks being dropped on the floor, furlough, contradictions in policy, a divided nation – people who follow restrictions and rules, sloganism, Joe Wicks – all set against the backdrop of Trump, Farage and Brexit.

I love digital storytelling because of the intertexual references and layering of meaning it allows. This enables the story to broaden out and possibly draw in a wider audience who may not otherwise have read the original story. As much as I love digital storytelling, all of my projects are about reminding the ‘user’ they are primarily a ‘reader’ and so guiding them back to the original text.

Sillitoe did not go to university. He did not do a creative writing course. He refused to have his work edited. This is what gives his writing such a raw authentic voice – it does not have the polish of a good edit (and in some places would benefit from one). There has been much talk recently that there are no working-class writers anymore and this is hardly surprising given the process of getting your work read in the first instance. Agents act as the first form of gatekeeping and are (understandably) driven by how a voice fits into the market and what will shift copies rather than notions of authenticity and what makes a good read. And I very much doubt that a lot of working class writers – especially those who do not have a degree – have any idea of where to send a book to.

All of which is an added reason as to why I love digital storytelling so much  – you have a platform that is accessible, you can say what you like without worrying about whether your words are marketable, and, should you have the inclination to do so, you have a quick and easy reference to refer publishers to should you wish to take your work down a traditional route.

Further Reading