Runing around like crazy for about a week, with today morning the first time for a breath of a break. However, on the other side it is good fun to be busy – especially with a variety of tasks, so every day is interesting and exciting and successull in one way or another.
On Thursday I finished the “Women Vs. G8” video finally after about 3 months. Not that I was able to edit every day, but good thing will take a while, because of the time neeed in between to reflect and create a distance to be more able to see the flaws, especially if the video-making experience is limited and it is only my second video anyways. Fortunately enough i had quite a lot of people to input in one way of another, but at the end I could only take suggestions on board which were quick to resolve.
So, though in my opinion the video has quite a strong structure, it was suggested to make changes to it, and could not change it, without having to spend several more weeks on it, for which I haven’t got the time really.
The Camcorder Guerillas premiered their video “Why close the G8” in the Glasgow Film Theatre, with seemed to have contributed the biggest theatre for the event and it was quite well filled with only few places left, but still a comfortable atmosphere and not yet too crowded – maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty, even two hundred?, people or so. It was a big fantastic community event, which is so much fun when you know the people appearing in the video and you also know their politics and then to see and gun for how they are represented in the video for example, and the choice of pictures, footage,what they say and how – in short – the edit in general. Also the atmosphere in the cinema – cheering, hackling a bit the neverending political party speakers (“Hey Steve – don’t rant about the war in Iraq – tell us about your band!”) and clapping- making jokes and having lots of fun – is pretty impressive and makes it quite a special, memorable event – as well as getting everybody together, meeting people who you haven’t seen for a while.
The Glasgow Mayday Carnival was good fun, though in this year it seemed to take more the form of a street party than a carnival.
3 people got arrested this year, which is a novum, or it was said that the Glasgow Carnival passed for 15 years without any conflict at all, and the reasons for the arrest given – drinking beer in public – is present every year, and usually doesn’t matter at all, as it is a big party, usually the route is pretty much the same every year and it is really a lovely event, but this year the coppers seemed to have a bit of a “G8 scare” bringing along 3 video cameras- which they never id before, 8 horses – a novum, too, and tried to do a tighter cordon around the demo and in general were much more serious and stressed out than usual. Probably because they had this young hyperactive fellow in charge this year – whereas in previous years the greyhaired boss seemed to more trot and smile along with a relieved
“At least its not Rangers fans this afternoon!”.
Hopefully they move all these hyperactive cops after the G8 down South again, taking these crazy exaggerating journos with them.
Back to the Carnival – I guess they were probably also so busy with all the other events going on that the time to make costumes fell a bit short. Anyways, there are some nice pictures on Indymedia UK, as Indymedia Scotland is still not working after upgrading the DADA system. Luckily enough we did not get hacked – such as other Indymedias – but we were considering downgrading again to get it going again in the meantime, when all the hackers exploited the flaws in the older version.
Luckily enough we have an older Imc Scotland subsection on the Indymedia UK site, though our pseudonationalist Scottish lefties strongly disagree with it, but it has its advantages, such as in this case.