The Stroud Community TV Awards night

I am exhausted. We have been preparing for this event for months and now it is over and I'm delighted to say it all went brilliantly.  It is one of the annual parts of the Stroud Film Festival. We had more than 125 people turning up to celebrate the films by and about the people of Stroud and we held it in Lansdown Hall for the first time. That is another celebration for me as I've been involved in planning and then organising the huge improvements to the building over the last six years, when I was a town councillor. It felt really good to be able to benefit from all the improvements as part of a community event, which is exactly what the town council purchased the building for.

Stroud Community TV was established, and is still run by Philip Booth, pictured on the right of my blip. This link sows other images and all the nominations from the event tonight. There are now more than 2000 local films linked on the website.

I have had the task of organising the collection and showing of more than 25 films from my laptop (what a star my Macbook Pro is with not a single stutter), projected onto the large screen in the hall. I'm so pleased that it went without any observable hitches, although I know there were a couple! I had a couple of moments when I could take a few snaps, which I have added to the 'Extra photos'.


Last spring I was watching a peregrine falcon in one of the hides at Slimbridge, the main Wildfowl and Wetland Trust centre, which is only a few miles from Stroud. I was talking to a young volunteer at Slimbridge when i had the idea that WWT is one of the biggest media producers in our local area. I wondered to myself whether we could get them to come and give a presentation at the 2017 awards event? We always like to involve film makers to encourage others in our community.

So here we have Sam Stafford, a local man who started by volunteering at Slimbridge, and has risen to become a senior producer in the media department. When we first met to discuss this idea, he mentioned that his boss, Sacha Dench, was filming a special project to follow 'The Flight of the Swans', following the annual  autumnal migration of Bewick's Swans back from the Russian Tundra to Slimbridge. Uniquely she was doing this by flying 7,000 km using a paramotor all the way back with the swans!

Tonight we were so privileged to have Sam and Sacha telling us about their work and showing unique images of her actual flight. Scary is not the word, although beautiful would be a suitable adjective.  So thank you to them and I'm hoping that we might develop a small project for local young people, to tap into their expertise and maybe show a film by them next year!

But there were so many other amusing and moving filmed stories and their creators who were honoured last night.  They can all be viewed via our website which I linked to above. I've got most of a day off before the small party for the organisers of the Film Festival gather after the last event on Sunday night.

The 'Extra photos' include the award of the Best Music Film to a local band, who were featured on a BBC4 docco about part-time bands last year. Also Domonic White gets the award for Best Local Film for 'Little Stories', a short drama he made with his family and friends.  His son starred and quite rightly also joined him on stage to receive the award, which included a special 'Winners' Mug, much prized it must be said. My work bench also features just to the left of the stage. If something had gone wrong I would have felt rather exposed!

Local filmmaker Jimmy Edmonds writes of a previous Awards evening: “There was no red carpet and no tuxedos, no massed ranks of photographers and no star spotters – neither was there a big name celebrity to clutch a golden statue to her breast before revealing the winner. But what there was, was pure Stroud……The audience fed on…small but intense delicacies with enthusiasm and true appreciation of the ability of film and video to reach the parts that bigger movies might not – a community recorded and represented in its own way, unmediated by any need to make a profit or sell an idea.”

Jimmy (who made the film I blipped about two days ago) attended tonight as well and I think he'd agree that it felt like that again.