The Sleepers Awake


A Tabletop Cinema Lab workshop
and activity pack for Hastings Museum & Art Gallery’s Digital Museum

We celebrated the dreaming and creativity of Scottish inventor of television John Logie Baird, reimagining his early experiments in poverty during the 1920s whilst living in Hastings.

Hastings Museum & Art Gallery hosts an important archive of Baird’s artefacts, letters and documents relating to television history.

Baird’s fortitude and inventiveness was our core inspiration for this workshop. We celebrated his dreaming and creativity with playful film experiments. We chose a selection of artefacts and placed them in a small box, filming them with our phones. We used lights to make special effects.

Everyone made one-minute video clips. These are layered together to re-imagine Baird’s experimental mood with voice-over recordings and sound effects created during the workshop.

A Dear Future Filmmaking activity pack was designed for the Hastings Museum & Art Gallery’s Digital Museum.

The activity pack is available for download HERE

CREDITS

Film clips, sound effects and voices by workshop participants:
Michele Eaton, Sian McWilliams, Joyce Rook, Val Scoot and Louise Witham

Music + editing Rebecca E Marshall

Thanks to all at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery