From Home – call for 3 minute videos

From Home is a unique cultural project for the Brighton Digital Festival, examining what life at home is like for us – and we need your help.

The concept of “home” has great significance in a year when we are spending so much time in our homes – perhaps more than we ever wanted or expected.

We would like you to send us videos of your stories and feelings responding to the theme of home. Stories can be filmed on a smartphone or any camera you have to hand. The 3 minutes is a guideline, as we can be flexible on this.

The videos will be shown as part of an installation at the Brighton Digital Festival, which could later tour, and an online archive and virtual storytelling experience will form a lasting record of these times. In the meantime, we’ll show highlights on our social media channels.

You can talk to camera, or tell your story through song, animation, drawing, painting, performance, readings, poetry. We’d love to see them all. When using other people’s material just bear in mind that we might not be able to use them if you don’t have copyright.

Pick any room or outside space. Tell us what home means to you. Are there objects you’ve collected, visitors you miss? Is there a message you’d like to send out from your home? How have you coped with spending more time inside this year? Is it a safe space or does it feel more like a prison? Has your sense of home, your experience or appreciation of it over the years, changed? What about the sounds, sights and senses of home?

You can send us your videos via wetransfer, as below. Not every video will be shown, but we’ll do our best to include them all. In the meantime, we’ll share some videos on our social media and on the website – if you only want your submission used for the installation, just let us know.

Go to wetransfer.com and send to fromhome@movingpicturestheatre.com

Please include your name, contact email, the town where you live and the space you’ve used in your home. Just send us an email if you have problems accessing wetransfer and we’ll work out another way to send.

This project is not for profit. Any payments, after expenses, will go to several charities including Acting for Others, which provides financial and emotional support to all theatre workers in times of need through 14 member charities.

Who We Are

Moving Pictures Theatre (MPT) was formed to create quality film productions using both traditional and innovative techniques, including 360 capture. The company has a focus on using interesting locations that inform the story.

Language Umbrella was formed with the aim of helping to tell stories and inspire learning, and since then has worked with prestigious clients, such as Oxford University Press, Pearson Education, Harper Collins and Santillana Publishing.

Tom Ottway, co-founder of Language Umbrella, and doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex in the School of Media, Film and Music on the subject of ‘Home and the Senses’ met MPT co-founders Lucy Nordberg and Marc Green at their sold-out event for the 2019 at Brighton Digital Festival, which explored MPT’s use of 360 filming. They decided to collaborate on several projects, including Tom’s exploration of the idea of home, which has been given an added significance by the current lockdown.