Swanning Around With Tomos

As Spill Media followers know, we recently linked up with the Swans in a Community Partnership. The Partnership is allowing Spill Media Trainees the opportunity to gain media related work experience at the Liberty Stadium on match days.

Tuesday night was the first home game of the season, with the Swans taking on Barnet in the first round of the Carling Cup and Spill trainee Tomos Bayliss was there for his first night.

Tomos will be sharing his experiences of his training placement right here on the blog. Here is his first installment:

"I really enjoyed down the Liberty Stadium on Tuesday with Spill Media for the first night of my placement, as the Swans played Barnet in the Carling Cup.

My evening began by meeting the Swans Media team, who showed me around the Press Room, tunnel area and Gantry. My work soon began as I was off to mingle with the fans, filming vox pops with the crowd about their thoughts on new Swans signing Scott Sinclair. I had a lot of fun doing this and it really increased my confidence.

During the game, I improved my filming and photography skills as I took some action stills of the Swansea players as they attacked the Barnet goal.
Throughout the game, I filmed the action from pitch side, to give the Media Team alternative footage, for the clubs use.

Luckily I had a lot of great footage to film, as the Swans ran out 3-0 winners, with goals from van der Gun, a great solo goal from Pratley and Kuqi wrapped things up at the end.

My work didn't finish there though. I was soon off to the tunnel for the post match interviews, where we spoke with Andrea Orlandi about the game.

It was a great experience and I can't wait for Saturday for the first league game against Preston!"

You can check out Tomos's work, see player interviews, highlights and all other things Swans at the official Swansea City website: http://www.swanseacity.net/

Hello, my name is AnnMarie. I am Spill Media’s newest full time recruit, and I am going to be sharing my diary of some of the projects, I’m getting to work on with Spill.

My first couple of weeks in the job and I've been involved in lots of fun projects. The first- "Soap Bocs", is part of my role of Production Assistant, and involves leading a group of volunteers in a quest to produce 3 short films from initial ideas to finished edited films- in 7 days! I know, seems impossible doesn’t it! Last week we spent 3 days brainstorming, story writing, scripting and scheduling, as well as practicing with the camera and editing equipment, and giving basic training in camera and editing techniques to those volunteers not already familiar. We had a great time, and threw around many whacky ideas for plot lines before settling on the main story theme we have running through all 3 films, which delves in to the mind of a disturbed woman. I’m not going to reveal anymore about that sorry, you’ll just have to watch the films once we’ve finished!

This week we start shooting, which will take 3 days in all. Then we have a day of editing the films together, and it will be very interesting to see how many different ideas for editing this story will emerge that day.

The other project I am working on in a freelance capacity is exciting too. It is, at present, called Swansea Telly. It is a collaboration of 5 Media Inclusion companies in the Swansea area, funded through the Wales Cooperative’s Communities 2.0 scheme.

We will provide training workshops, teaching film making to groups of people in Swansea, including unemployed people, older people and people in Social Housing.

Short films will produced by each group, every month, which will be uploaded to a new Internet channel called Swansea Telly.

This week I met my new colleague Chris Reason, an experienced and hugely talented Digital Media Artist, who will bring a lot of valued experience and creativity to the project. We have been very busy contacting organisations, attending meetings, setting up groups to train, designing a training program, and scheduling, in preparation for our first group next month- a group of unemployed young people at Swansea Community Farm!

I am looking forward to finding out what each group will come up with! All in all, I’m having a great first few weeks with Spill Media.

I very much look forward to the great variety of media projects I will be taking part in here with the rest of the Spill Media family.

I’ll keep you posted as to what we get up to….

Spill Media are currently running "SoapBocs" a project where our voluntary trainees can let their imaginations run wild!

We have challenged our trainees to script, film and edit a short film in 5 days...so far, so good!

The trainees have written a dark thriller called "Nobody's Child" but we won't give the story away! They start shooting next week....!

Going Dutch

As you know, Spill Media recently linked up with the Swans as part of a Community Partnership, giving Spill Media trainees the chance to work with the Swans on match days.
Last week, saw the Spill-Swans link strengthened further when a member of the Spill team joined the Swans on their pre-season tour of Holland.

There was lots of video content created for the club website’s ‘Swans Player’, to keep the fans back in Swansea up to date with what was going on. There were match highlights of the 3 games, with every team having their own club anthem, which were so catchy, I was waking up with the tunes of ‘Viva Haaglandia’ (to the tune of Viva Espania) and ‘Oh-Oh Den Haag’ engraved in my head.

As well as the usual interviews with players and new boss, Brendan Rodgers, fans got to see their favourite players during training sessions and there was an interesting visit to one of Holland’s famed attractions ...a visit to club Director, John van Zweden’s ‘Swans Museum’.
This was a very interested place indeed and had to be seen to be believed, with everything from old Swans’ programmes, to jerseys, to ticket stubs...and even included a giant Swan model.

The tour was a great chance for new boss Brendan Rodgers to get to know his players a little better in readiness for the big kick off against Hull this Saturday, as well as giving players and staff a chance to see the sights of Holland...in between training of course!

To see the video content from the tour, check out Swans player on the official Swansea City website...and there’ll also be a video from Spill’s experience of the week on our website, www.spillmedia.co.uk very soon.