Sound and vision blog

On 23 September the British Library played host to the Semantic Media Network for a one-day worksop, snappily entitled Semantic Media @ British Library. The Network has been established by Queen Mary University of London to "address the challenge of time-based navigation in large collections of media documents". Digital and digitised media archives have grown vast, and finding what they actually contain has become a huge challenges for broadcasters, archivists, researchers and some bright developers who are interested in a challenge.

It was those developers who were the main target of the workshop, which was based around the sound and moving image collections of the British Library. After an opening address by Mark Sandler (Head of School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary) we had four short presentation from projects which have received funding support from the Network.

Michael Bell (Newcastle University) introduced the Tawny Overtone music synthesis project; Tim Crawford (Goldsmiths University of London) spoke on semantic linking and early lute music, which made for a delighful combination of  the ancient and modern; Ryan Stables (Birmingham City University) discussed 'Large-scale Capture of Producer-Defined Musical Semantics' (defining music recordings by subjective terms such as humans like to use but machines struggle to comprehend); and David Newman (University of Southampton) on enriching news stories by semantic means, specifically enriching episodes of Question Time with contextual information taken from Twitter, Wikipedia etc (so themes raised in the programme are connected to online resources).

Next up came three speakers from the British Library, describing our audiovisual collections, the potential for opening up their research value by extracting meaningful information (which is what semantic media is all about), and describing some of the challenges involved. Richard Ranft (Head of Sound and Vision) describe the British Library Sound Archive collection, with its 8 million tracks requiring 66 years were you to listen to it all - by which time rather more than an additional 8 million tracks will have been acquired. How to manage and make available such information, let alone listen to it all? Of course there is a catalogue to guide you to the Library's sound holdings, but some much information that the audio files contain lies buried because so much of the media is not yet in digital form, or if it is then barriers such as copyright and limited catalogue records mean that too much of the collection remains largely undiscovered. Automated indexing and enrichment through such tools as melody matching,  score matching, speaker identification and speech-to-text have the potential radically to transform how researchers engage with such archives. But demand needs to come before tools. Ranft was disarmingly frank about the need for users to demand more. From demand will come new services - people just need to raise their expectations and think not simply of what can be found now, but what ought to be found.

Paul Wilson (Radio Curator) described a collection of over 200,000 hours of radio, access to which would be radically transformed by the application of searching tools such as speaker identification and speech recognition. He described the national radio archiving picture overall, revealing the alarming fact that of the 3 million of hours of radio broadcast in the UK each year, only 3% can be said to be archived properly in a form that will ensure its long-term preservation. There is so much in radio content that can benefit a huge range of research enquiries, yet before we devise ingenious means of discovering such archives, we have to ensure that we have the archives to discover in the first place.

I then spoke on the News collection at the British Library, by which is meant newspapers, television, radio and web. We are at different stages of development for each. We house the British Newspaper Library, with some 750 million pages from the 17th century to today. Our television and radio news service, Broadcast News, began recording programmes in May 2010 and has now passed the figure of 30,000 titles, with some 60 hours of new content added every day. Web news sites are to be a special focus of our UK web archiving activities, now that the non-print legal deposit legislation and regulations are in place, but we are still in the process of determining which sites to harvest on a daily or weekly basis. The great challenge for the British Library will be to start forging meaningful links between these different news media, because ultimately the news does not exist in any one medium, rather it is we who seek out the news from the multiplicity of news forms available who create what news actually is, in our heads. Thinking semantically will help bring the news media together to create a more meaningful and potentially very exciting future for researchers.

A panel session then followed, for which Mahendra Mahey of the BL Labs initiaitive joined us, a project similar to the Semantic Media Network in encouraging the development of new ides with small amounts of project funding. The debate turned away from the practicalities of semantic linking to the angst of archivists. There is so much to be discovered, so much that can be done, but is the demand always there? Do you wait for demand, or hope to encourage it through new tools and services? Do we capture everything, even if we can? Where is the place of audiovisual in a Library which still - for the most part - puts print first and foremost?

The day finished with a lively 'speed-dating' session, in which we sat opposite another delegate, exchanged ideas for three minutes, then a bell rang and we all moved chairs to sit opposite someone else and started up the conversation once again. I came away with three business cards, so I can't have done too badly. The ultimate aim of the Network is just that - to be a network, because it is from casual meetings that ideas start to grow (Silicon Valley is built on that very principle).

The slides from most of the talks given on the day are available from the Semantic Media Network site. There will be a funding call from the Network before the end of this year, and hopefully some of the issues raised during the workshop will help inform the nature of that call or the responses that are made to it.

Many thanks are due to Sebastian Ewert and the team at Queen Mary for having put together such a productive and interesting event. If we put on another event like it, we'll want to bring in users and potential users to meet up with the developers. Combining need and opportunity so each feeds off the other - that's the way forward.

To celebrate World Listening Day, the World and Traditional Music section has made available, to listeners in British Library Reading Rooms, a collection of field recordings from five European villages, which form part of the World Soundscape Project Collection. These recordings can be located in the Sound and Moving Image catalogue between call numbers C1064/6 and C1064/42.

The World Soundscape Project (WSP) was a small group of researchers and composers dedicated to studying the acoustic environment. It was based at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and led by Raymond Murray Schafer (his birthday, July 18th, was chosen to celebrate World Listening Day). The WSP took an inter-disciplinary approach to the environment, integrating, amongst other things, acoustics, architecture, music theory, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and history. This allowed for analysis of the acoustic environment in all its complexity. The research became the basis of ‘Acoustic Ecology’, a discipline that R. Murray Schafer developed to further investigate ‘soundscapes’, which are understood as the sonic interface between living beings and their environment.

The WSP group in the churchyard, Dollar (Scotland), 1975. Left to right: R. M. Schafer, Jean Reed, Bruce Davis (standing), Peter Huse, Howard Broomfield.

The World Soundscape Project’s first fieldwork was carried out in the immediate surroundings of Vancouver and released in 1973 by Ensemble Productions Ltd. These recordings can be listened to in the British Library Reading Rooms on a two-disc publication entitled The Vancouver Soundscape  which was re-issued with additional tracks in 1996 by Cambridge Street Records .

Album cover of LP.

Shortly after recording the Vancouver soundscape, the group embarked on a cross-Canada tour to document their national soundscape. The recordings formed the basis of a radio series, Soundscapes of Canada, first presented on CBC-FM Ideas in 1974. They are also available in British Library Reading Rooms. These radio programmes had an educational slant to them, which reflects a strong concern of the WSP with raising awareness of the importance of listening. The programmes were designed to interest listeners in their immediate auditory environment with the ultimate hope of involving them as active participants in building a more balanced soundscape.

In 1975, members of the World Soundscape Project (Peter Huse, Jean Reed, Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davis, and R. Murray Schafer), travelled through Northern Europe by Volkswagen bus with the initial idea of comparing the soundscape of Canada with those of selected European villages. They wanted to document the sonic patterns of village life and so they chose villages with the following criteria in mind: “First of all, we hoped it would be off a main road, that it would be self-contained and not contiguous with other settlements, that its buildings would be fairly closely grouped so that the sound making activities of the village would constitute the largest events in the quiet countryside beyond, that the village would have a strong and cohesive social life – but not so cohesive as to resist curious intruders like ourselves – that it would have a few acoustic signals of distinction, a few unusual vernacular sounds, some good ambiances to record in, and a native speaker who knew both the regional dialect and spoke fluent English” (Five Village Soundscapes, 1977, p. 2, DOC0002179). Speaking a common language with local residents allowed the WSP’s members to conduct interviews with them about their experiences of the soundscape, and to then contrast these subjective experiences with the ‘objective’ measurements they were making. These measurements were not only in the form of sound recordings: isobel maps, morphology charts, and maps notating pitches and source of predominant hums, to name a few, were also used as a means of analyzing the soundscape. These records, along with further research on each village, can be found in a book entitled Five Village Soundscapes, also available at the British Library. This publication reveals the pioneering methodologies being used in fieldwork by the WSP.

Pitches of predominant hums heard in Skruv, originating from the factories and the shopping centre.

Here is an excerpt from 'Skruv, Sweden Feb 18/75' (C1064/8) in which you can hear a conversation with residents in Skruv, the first European village the WSP visited:

025A-C1064X0008XX-0001A0

Also recorded in Sweden are these church bells ringing in the old town of Stockholm to announce the beginning of Sunday service at Storkyrkan on 16 February 1975 (extracted from 'Stockholm, Sweden Feb 14, 16/75', C1064/7). You can hear the sound recordist move into the reverberant atmosphere of the church where the tolling of the bells remains audible.

025A-C1064X0007XX-0001A0

During their time in Europe, the World Soundscape Project members were asked by R. Murray Schafer to keep a sound diary. This was yet another way of creating a record of their impressions of the sound events they were experiencing: “A sound diary has no ending for listening continues throughout life, perhaps more vigilantly for the experience of writing about it” (The European Sound Diary, 1977, p. 79, DOC 0002178). This published selection of their diary entries is also available in the British Library’s Reading Rooms. In it you can also read 'London Soundwalk', which maps out a walk through sonically interesting environments in London. The soundwalk begins close to the British Library, at the Friends House on Euston Road, inviting listeners to experience the importance of silence in Quaker worship.

Another complement to the sound recordings is the metadata: the description of each recording, which you can read in the catalogue entries. It was created by the recordists whilst in the field and prepared as a catalogue by Hildegard Westerkamp and Bruce Davis for the World Soundscape Project Tape Library at Simon Fraser University where the original reel-to-reel tapes are archived. The British Library’s catalogue entries are transcriptions of this catalogue and they provide important contextual information about the recordings whilst also conveying the recordists’ attitudes towards the sound events. These descriptions have a sonority of their own and add an important layer of meaning to the recordings. R. Murray Schafer asks: “Can descriptions of sounds ever be adequate to their original stimulations? Probably not, although with a great writer they may serve to evoke reverberations in the imagination” (The European Sound Diary, 1977, p. 81, DOC 0002178).

After visiting Skruv in southern Sweden, they travelled to Bissingen in southern Germany, an agricultural village moving towards industrial life. This extract from 'Bissingen, Germany March 6/75' (C1064/15) allows us to hear the rhythmic qualities of a blacksmith labouring.

025A-C1064X0015XX-0001A0

Further ahead in this recording, you can hear the blacksmith speaking about the sound of horse and ox carts leaving every morning for the fields. This is a sound that disappeared around the late 1950s when farmers began using motor vehicles. This quote from Jean Reed’s diary points towards how memory can preserve sounds: “Today the buoy at Le Ster is moaning constantly. I wonder how the people here like it. I find it strangely comforting. It has nothing to do with me, but I find myself listening to it and trying to store up its haunting sound in my memory forever” (The European Sound Diary, 1977, p. 58, DOC 0002178). The buoy she writes about is located in the small fishing village of Lesconil, France, where the fish auction you can hear in an extract from 'Nogent-Le-Retrou, France April 10/75' (C1064/31) took place in April 1975.

025A-C1064X0031XX-0001A0

The WSP acknowledged the importance of documenting ‘disappearing’ or ‘antique’ sounds without disregarding the new sounds in their contemporary soundscape. Moozak, electricity hums, ring and telephone tones, radio and PA systems are heavily featured in the recordings. R. Murray Schafer conceptualized the splitting of sound from source, made possible by modern technology, with the term ‘schizophonia’. The following quote, describing the soundscape of the medieval village of Cembra, Italy, relates to this idea: “The windows of an Italian village seem always to be open. They are like a radio, tuning in on the happenings of the world, eavesdropping in the literal sense. They are like telephones, for often one hears women talking across the roofs of the town between airing bedding, shaking mops, and supervising children playing in the streets” (Five Village Soundscapes, 1977, p. 17, DOC 0002179).

In the following extract, from 'Cembra, Italy April 1,2/75' (C1064/28) you can hear a vehicle driving through Cembra with an attached P.A. system through which it announces laundry services:

025A-C1064X0028XX-0001A0

Cembra, Italy (1975).

The World Soundscape Project carried out an exhaustive aural interpretation of five European villages and several cities where R. Murray Schafer had been invited to lecture at music schools and academies. He encouraged students and teachers to listen to their surroundings and asked them to reflect on how the soundscape might influence modern music. The WSP also met up with composers such as Leo Nilsson and Otto Laske and discussed the relationship between their music and the soundscape in which they were living. These frogs recorded in a pond at the rear of a hotel where the WSP group was staying ('Rennes / Montreuil, France April 18/75', C1064/30) are described by the recordist as sounding like a Gamelan, and possibly even resemble electronic music from the 1970s.

025A-C1064X0030XX-0002A0

In R. Murray Schafer's seminal book The Tuning of the World,  he writes: 'Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!' (The Tuning of the World, 1977, p.5). World Listening Day 2013 reminds us to open our ears and listen to the musicality of the sonic universe.

Bruce Davis blowing his horn by Hadrian's wall (1975).

For further information on the World Soundscape Project, please visit www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio. You can also gain access to the World Soundscape Project Tape Collection, including the soundfiles, by contacting Barry Truax ([email protected]) and requesting a guest username and password. All sound files and images have been used with the kind permission of the World Soundscape Project, Simon Fraser University.

On 15th-16th February the British Library will be holding a two day symposium that seeks to open up and explore the practice, art and craft of field recording through a series of panel presentations, listening sessions and screenings. Starting from the early days of field recording, 'In the Field' aims to relate the multitude of contemporary field recording practices to their historical precedents and investigate issues in contemporary practices. These include: How field recordings are distributed to and heard by an audience; Recording the unheard; Mapping the urban; and questioning the extended nature of the field in a digital networked landscape. Participants include:

Chris Watson (http://www.chriswatson.net/)

Jana Winderen (http://www.janawinderen.com/)

Des Coulam (http://soundlandscapes.wordpress.com/)

David Velez (http://davidvelezr.tumblr.com/)

Felicity Ford (http://www.thedomesticsoundscape.com/)

Mark Peter Wright (http://mpwright.wordpress.com/)

Udo Noll (http://aporee.org/)

Christina Kubisch (http://www.christinakubisch.de/index_en.htm)

This is a joint venture between the wildlife sound section of the British Library and CRiSAP (part of the London College of Communication, University of the Arts) and is part of the Sounds of Europe project.

Tickets are priced at £25/£15 conc for the full two days and £15/£10 for one day. Everyone with an interest in field recording, whether professional or personal, is welcome to attend. Full details can be found here.

Cheryl Tipp, Natural Sounds Curator writes:

On Tuesday 13th November a mixed bunch of recordists, artists, curators, students and members of the public gathered at the British Library for the first Kinokophonograhy listening evening to be held in London. These evenings allow individuals with an interest in sound to come together, share their recordings and enjoy the experience of communal listening. The theme of this event was inspired by the Library's current exhibition Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire, and recordists were invited to submit recordings that, to them, signified beauty. 13 recordings were selected and together formed the first session that included birdsong, soundscapes, a laughing baby, the sounds of a crumpled duvet and gym members trying to achieve the body beautiful.

The second session featured recordings that were submitted in response to an open call and thus did not revolve around a particular theme. This session gave contributors the chance to share those special treasures that every recordist has in their personal archive and the results were wonderful.

Kinokophone collective member, Amanda Belantara, led the event perfectly and created a memorable evening for all. We would like to thank both Amanda and Michael for their efforts and hope to welcome them back for another Kinokophonography event in 2013.

Pandaemonium is the Palace of All the Devils. Its building began c.1660. It will never be finished – it has to be transformed into Jerusalem. The building of Pandaemonium is the real history of Britain for the last three hundred years.

Frank Cottrell Boyce, the writer behind ‘Isles of Wonder', the extraordinary and widely acclaimed opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games, has revealed in a Guardian article that a major inspiration for the work was Humphrey Jennings’ Pandaemonium.  Of the creative process with director Danny Boyle he writes:

We shared the things we loved about Britain – the Industrial Revolution, the digital revolution, the NHS, pop music, children's literature, genius engineers. I bought Danny a copy of Humphrey Jennings's astonishing book Pandemonium for Christmas and soon everyone seemed to have it. The show's opening section ended up named "Pandemonium".

'Pandaemonium', as the BBC commentary noted on the night, was the name that John Milton gave to the capital of Hell in his epic poem 'Paradise Lost'. It is also the title of Humphrey Jennings’ posthumously published book which is a collection of nearly 400 contemporary texts dating 1660-1886 that, as the book’s subtitle puts it, illustrate ‘the coming of the machine as seen by contemporary observers’.

Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950) is generally recognised to be among the greatest of all British documentary filmmakers. In films such as London Can Take It! (1940, co-directed with Harry Watt), Listen to Britain (1942, co-directed with Stewart McAllister), Fires Were Started (1943) and A Diary for Timothy (1946), Jennings documented the relevance of the British experience of war to history, art, society and culture. Often described as a poet among filmmakers, he applied a poet’s synthetic vision to the British condition at a time of national crisis. If you have not knowingly seen one of his films, you will have undoubtedly come across sequences from them, because they have been ceaselessly plundered by television for footage illustrating the impact of the war on Britain. For example, Andrew Marr’s piece on the history of London that featured as part of the BBC’s build-up programme ahead of the opening ceremony used several shots from London Can Take It!

That poet’s synthetic vision was also applied to Pandaemonium, a collection of texts (or Images, as Jennings described them) which he worked on between 1937 and his accidental death in 1950, without ever shaping the material into a finished manuscript or finding a publisher. It was not until 1985 that his daughter Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge (like Jennings a co-founder of the social investigation organisation Mass-Observation) edited a version of the work that was close as could be hoped to Jennings’ conception.

Pandaemonium comprises texts from poets, diarists, scientists, industrialists, politicians, novelists and social commentators who wittingly or unwittingly document the great changes wrought in British society by the industrial revolution. It begins with Milton’s description (written c.1660) of the building of Pandaemonium, and anyone who saw Boyle and Boyce’ vision of Glastonbury Tor, from which burst forth fire as the tree at its top was uprooted, ushering in the industrial revolution will recognise its inspiration in Milton’s opening words:

There stood a Hill not far whose grisly top
Belch’d fire and rowling smoak; the rest entire
Shon with a glossie scurff, undoubted sign
That in his womb was hid metallic Ore,
The work of Sulphur. Thither wing’d with speed
A numerous Brigad hastens. As when bands
Of Pioners with Spade and Pickaxe arm’d
Forerun the Royal Camp, to trench a Field,
Or cast a Rampart. Mammon led them on,
Mammon, the least erectd Spirit that fell
From heav’n, for eve’n his looks and thoughts
Were always downwards bent, admiring ore
The riches of Heav’ns pavements, trod’n Gold ...

The quotation at the head of this post comes from notes Jennings wrote for an introduction to the work, and it confirms the influence Pandaemonium had on Danny Boyle and his creative team (not least in their sly critique of the corporately-sponsored Olympics themselves, with the Olympic rings being forged in the furnaces of the dark Satanic mills). Pandaemonium has been built, and continues to be built – the task is to transform it into Jerusalem. So Boyle and Boyce do not look for a return to that green and pleasant land portrayed at the start of ‘Isles of Wonder’. Instead they look with hopes toward what has and can still be built out of it, to fulfil the vision expressed in William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.

Vision is the operative word. In his introduction (as reconstructed by Charles Madge), Jennings says that his Images, whose construction he likens to 'an unrolling film', illustrate ‘the Means of Vision and the Means of Production’. The Industrial Revolution he sees as the victory of Production over Vision, of materialism over poetry, which has failed to keep up with, or to master, the changes brought about by industrialisation:

It would take a large work on its own to show, in the great period of English poets 1570-1750, the desperate struggle that poets had to keep poetry’s head into the wind: to keep it facing life. But by 1750 the struggle – like that of the peasants – was over. In other words poetry has been expropriated.

Boyle and Boyce were inspired by Jennings, but they also sought to show how the argument has moved on since Jennings’ time, to show that there could be a greater balance between production and vision. ‘Isles of Wonder’ was divided into three main sections (with comic interludes featuring the Queen and Mr Bean). The first, 'Pandaemonium', showed the march of industrial society over the green and pleasant land, but also the changes in society that the process unwittingly led to – women’s suffrage, Jarrow marchers, the Empire Windrush, the Beatles. The second, ‘Second Star on the Right and Straight on Till Morning’ took children’s literature as its theme, pitting its villains (Cruella De Vil, Lord Voldemort) again the forces of collective good, represented by the NHS and a host of Mary Poppinses. It can also be seen as representing the revival of poetic sensibility and responsibility, the human urge towards the greater good, defeating the forces of Mammon. From thesis to antithesis to synthesis, and the third part, 'Frankie & June say …Thanks Tim' finds great hope in another revolution, the digital revolution (Tim being Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web). Here an interconnected society, themes from which we had seen prefigured in the earlier parts, overrides the forces that have divided it in the past, moving forward to – perhaps – Jerusalem.

Extract from Listen to Britain

Humphrey Jennings could never have conceived of such a spectacle as ‘Isles of Wonder’, but he might have understood the technique, not least with reference to his own documentary films. Listen to Britain (which could almost have been a subtitle for ‘Isles of Wonder’) is a portrait of national unity illustrated through the songs and sounds of a country at war. There is no narration, only images of the different corners of the land and different strata of society, bound together by effort and by sound (factories, Myra Hess playing piano at the National Gallery, variety entertainers Flanagan and Allen). Spare Time (1939), a film closest in conception to Jennings’ brief involvement with Mass-Observation, shows how Britain’s working class enjoys its leisure time, from pubs to wrestling matches, from allotments to marching kazoo bands. Such films succeed through a subtle association of ideas, one image illuminating the next by association. As with his films, so it was with the unrolling film of Images in Pandaemonium, and now with ‘Isles of Wonder’

If you're trying to celebrate a nation's identity, you have to take things that are familiar parts of the landscape and make them wonderful.

So writes Frank Cotterell Boyce, and they are words to explain the art of Humphrey Jennings as well. It is what a great documentary filmmaker can do: capture images of common stuff, and transmute them into something wonderful. To do so, it is necessary not just to photograph your subject well, or to edit with a satisfying rhythm. You must have a governing idea to give those images meaning. Humphrey Jennings wanted to see Jerusalem built once more; Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce have encouraged us all to dream of the same.

‘Isles of Wonder’ and the full  London 2012 opening ceremony were recorded by the British Library as part of its off-air television news service, Broadcast News, which we are planning to make available to onsite Library users from the end of September 2012. More news of this, and other moving image and sound services currently in development, will follow soon.

More filmy things going on at the British Library in September, with this event taking place in our business and IP Centre:

Film, copyright and the internet: a guide for producers

Wed 07 September 2011, 14.00 - 16.30

Who should attend? Film and TV makers
Place: British Library Business & IP Centre
Cost: £25.00 + VAT
How to Book: Book your place online

As a film maker, you need to understand how copyright works: who owns the rights, what forms of protection against infringement are given and how the rights are transferred and traded. Copyright law has to a large extent been harmonised around the world, but variations still exist, particularly on dealing with infringement.

The Internet has dramatically changed the way in which films are viewed or purchased and has expanded the market, not just for new films but back-catalogue movies and TV shows which formerly disappeared at the end of their DVD life. However, the problem of Internet piracy undermines the normal system of film distribution, and the borderless nature of the Internet confounds copyright law and frequently makes it impossible for film-makers to control the exploitation of their films.

What about the wider impact on creativity? Copyright law developed to enable the creator of a work to benefit financially from its exploitation, and thereby to encourage creative endeavour in general. Does the Internet undermine this basic principle? When a producer sees the potential box office revenues diminished significantly because their film has been leaked onto the Internet prior to its theatrical release, will they go to the same lengths a second time to get a film produced?

In this workshop we will analyse the impact of Internet piracy on the film world and discuss whether anything effective is being done to address the problem.

The event will cover:

• General background on copyright in the UK, including what constitutes infringement of copyright and the remedies available to copyright owners.
• General background on the film industry and how copyright relates to filmed entertainment.
• The impact of the Internet on the film industry, with case studies of Internet piracy.
• Reaction to the problem of Internet piracy from both industry and government, both internationally and in the UK.

It's been a little on the quiet side here at the Moving Image blog of late, but that's not to say that things are quiet at the British Library. Our moving image plans are pressing ahead in all sorts of interesting ways, which I hope to be able to report on soon, as this blog creeps back into life a little more.

Meanwhile, we have other stuff happening in September, with three film-related events which you might like to take note of. Here's the first of them:

Sheffield Doc/Fest Meet-up

Mon 05 September 2011, 16.00 - 18.00

Who should attend? Documentary film makers
Place: British Library Business & IP Centre
Cost: Free
How to Book: View our events calendar and book online

Come along to the British Library in London to carry on your conversations from this year’s Doc/Fest in June, meet new people and learn more about the free resources available to documentary makers and digital media practitioners in the Business & IP Centre.

Join us for drinks at this great networking opportunity for documentary lovers, Doc/Fest veterans, and those completely new to Doc/Fest and curious about the industry. Find out how the British Library can help you realise projects, assist in research and how you can access their world-renowned resources.

Charlie Phillips, Doc/Fest’s Marketplace Director will also be in attendance to advise on documentary project financing and development.

About Sheffield Doc/Fest

Sheffield Doc/Fest brings the international documentary family together to celebrate the art and business of documentary making for five intense days in June every year. Find out more at http://sheffdocfest.com 

On Wednesday 24 February the British Library is hosting Curiouser and curiouser: The genius of Alice In Wonderland, an event celebrating celebrating Alice in words, conversation, film and more. The Library is the home of the first written version of Alice in Wonderland, hand penned and illustrated by Lewis Carroll in 1864, but this year also sees the latest screen interpretation of Carroll's tale, directed for Disney by Tim Burton.

There will be readings from Alice by film cast members Christopher Lee, Matt Lucas and Michael Sheen; an appreciation of the Alice tales by writer Will Self; discussion with producer Richard Zanuck and co-producer Joe Roth of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, and a screening of the earliest film version of the work from 1903, directed by British film pioneer Cecil Hepworth and recently restored by the BFI. It will be shown with a live piano accompaniment.

The event is hosted by Mark Salisbury, who has chronicled the life and films of Tim Burton extensively. He is the editor of the definitive Tim Burton interview book Burton on Burton and the author of the visual companions for Burton's Alice in Wonderland and other films.

Prior to the event there will be a chance to visit a new display of ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’ together with related highlights from The British Library collection, as well as unique original costume designs for the new Tim Burton film by two-time Academy Award winning designer Colleen Atwood. This will be open on the night until 18.00 and during all standard Library opening hours.

View the extraordinary trailer for the Tim Burton film here: www.disneymovies.co.uk/Alice.