the devil’s plantation: update 02Mar10 | 3

 Bafta

Tonight it was announced that my love-labour, The Devil’s Plantation is nominated in the Interactive Category for the 2010 BAFTA New Talent Awards. Needless to say I’m delighted. But I’m also very pleased for my only competitor, a wonderful woman, Helen Jackson, from Binary Fiction whose website The Lost Book, I actually stumbled on last year. And a very good site it is too. I reckon she’ll win, and I mean it sincerely because her work is so lovely and accessible whereas mine may be perceived as a bit too leftfield/arty/whatever.

It’s odd for me to be in this place, not least because ten years ago, I pretty much swept the board at the 2000 BAFTA New Talent Awards with my first feature film, One Life Stand. Truth is, I’m just pleased that my peers, especially in the new media field, deemed my efforts worthy enough to be counted. The result will be announced on the 19th March but either way I’ll celebrate whoever wins because any recognition for the work we do - too often un/low paid - is still worth doing because you can’t do it unless you love it, which makes us all privileged.

tagged: , , ,

The Devil's Plantation

May Miles Thomas is an award-winning filmmaker and writer based in Glasgow. This is the blog for The Devil's Plantation, a project supported by the Scottish Arts Council's Creative Scotland Awards. The idea: to explore the Secret Geometry of Glasgow and find magic in ordinary places. It's also about a journey in her home city. Dear green place or derelict dystopia? The project: a video-based website inspired by the writings of the late Harry Bell and her fellow fuguers - poets, writers, lost souls, piss artists, dossers and dreamers - that reveals the hidden tracks that cross the city, connecting the old and new. Here May stumbles over the city's myths and stomps on its remains: city of murder, architecture, industry, ill-health, feral violence, petty corruption, neddery, new money, crime and the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Not so much Glasgow as Glasgone.