Top Talent

This week I approached some of the top creative and technical talent in South Dartmoor, if not the UK. You see I have a stack of DVDs with impressive recordings of quality events and performances- productions such as Starchild and Les Miserables; dance sequences from Body Language; recordings from Onside and the Futures Vision Award Ceremony.

I’m not good at juggling them around and wanted a way of selecting a medley of brief highlights to show at conferences: the best of South Dartmoor- or at least some it. I had in mind a sort of BAFTAs without the prizes- just the glitzy bits we all like to watch; like a promotional video for the next Sunday night BBC costume drama adaptation. Add in a stirring sound track of spine-tingling music, clips of confident students performing to perfection with audience ovations, smiling, polished faces, affectionate gazes and you can imagine the impact. I’m already planning the Hollywood promotion. Well why not? World class is our motto after all.

Lucy Mccance and Luke Flegg from Media came to my aid with a great offer to search through the material, load it onto the computer and edit it into a highlights promotional piece, complete with soundtrack and titles. Although this doesn’t mean the end of career for the six other staff who I thought might have helped (they know who they are because they have my begging email) I now realise who my friends are. So if they want to work again….

Of course if you want to see some stunning examples of work, just look under the subject section on the new website. Wow! The old site was described to me by someone from the DCSF (Department for cows, sheep and frogs- actually children, schools and families but easier to remember the first version) as like a Footsie 100 Index Company.

Well the new site is so impressive, we have already had requests for Nat Parnell’s head. To find out how he did it, of course. But we’re not letting him out. His whereabouts are a closely guarded secret. Actually we might be willing to exchange him on short term loan for air miles and some Tesco vouchers. In fact, he’s easy to contact- just look on the website. Lin Blackman is like an electronic decorator, wallpapering and painting the site each day in new colours and patterns. You can have any colour you like- even one mysteriously called ‘don’t like green’. What would Al Gore make of that?

The site is now the display board for the whole school- an ever-changing, uploaded interface of all that we do and beamed across the world. Candidates for posts (Psychology, Maths and Art already filled this year) speak in hushed, awed tones of what they discovered when they logged on: like entering Ali Baba’s cave and marvelling at the gemstones. The number of hits is extraordinary- 132,640 different individuals last year, each spending on average 166 seconds and viewing 4 pages. And they say Big Brother isn’t watching us! In the first week of this year there were almost 5,000 hits on the new site. Have they really nothing better to do?

Seriously, just stand and be amazed at the latest RS, Drama and ICT department sites- and all the others I have forgotten to mention, but they are just as good. Honest. Then there’s the new publication revealing John Bradford’s secret addiction to arson- but humour him when you see him and you won’t get your fingers burnt.

Look at that old Lightshifts clip again and you can see that it wasn’t pen torches at all. If you peer into the corner, I swear you can see our budding pyromaniac with a box of matches! He was playing with fire even then. So how safe is the Art Block? On second thoughts….

Those hands aflame belong to Heather Stimson and Richard Short- two of the other creative talents on the outstanding Soundbeams project. And Rachel Robinson’s musical inspiration really gets those creative juices flowing.

So by the time I get the new edited DVD, there will be another one to put together- more and more of the best of South Dartmoor. Coming to a website near you. But check out the Hollywood sites as well- ‘achieving world class standards’, after all.