In the Studio: Peter Beatty

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2021, with UK Covid restrictions putting plans for his creative collaborations on hold, British artist and musician Peter Beatty decided to take the plunge into animation. He wanted to create an animated film as a music video to accompany a song he had written called Tell Me Where to Go. To make things extra interesting (and complicated!) he decided to shun modern digital approaches and instead to build a multiplane camera – a meticulous, painstaking system for stop-motion animation invented by Disney Studios in the 1930s and now rarely used. He then set to work animating with his film-making/photographer friend Joseph Boyle. Neither had made a stop motion animation before, but their final film has won seven international awards - and counting!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dear Daughter is the Award-winning Podcast from the BBC World Service, full of thoughtful letters of advice, personal stories, and life lessons for daughters everywhere.
0:11.0	Search for Dear Daughter, wherever you get your BBC podcast.
0:15.0	Welcome to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service
0:20.0	which gets into the mind and process of some of the world's most creative people.
0:25.0	What started out as a song about a boat trip by a man who lives on a boat, ended up being a film about a man on a boat trip and it was all made on a boat.
0:37.0	I'm Antonia Quirk, and this edition of the programme is a little unusual.
0:41.0	Most in the studios follow creative projects that start as
0:44.8	commissions, but this is very much a project born from happenstance and curiosity,
0:50.3	a desire to set oneself an artistic challenge and it was made entirely offshore.
0:57.0	We're always looking for signs and signals to tell us what direction we should take in our lives.
1:05.0	And sometimes it's decided out of choice and sometimes it's out of circumstance, things beyond our control.
1:11.9	And that was a theme in the song, but actually all these things played a hand in what this piece of work came to be.
1:19.0	And the process, which was itself pretty all-consuming and in many ways also a total surprise.
1:28.0	This is Peter Beatty. He's a British artist and musician who creates illustrations and songs, and he's made work for
1:36.3	Friends of the Earth and the UN and performed at festivals like Glastonbury.
1:41.4	Peter lives along a stretch of Canal in central London on a boat which he turned into a studio called nightjar, living and working on board making a stop motion animation film, a music video for a song he'd written called
1:55.4	Tell Me Where to Go. Painstakingly, second by second for some two years through
2:01.2	record-breaking heat waves and rainstorms.
2:04.8	And I'll be stepping on board Nightjar to hear how it was done.
2:08.0	So this is day 412. I don't know something like that I should work it out and we've got a
2:19.4	blackout so none of the boats seem to have power at the moment.
2:24.0	I've got a fire going, it's warm, but there ain't going to be no filming today.
	...

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