I went to my first Shoot Experience event on Saturday. I'd always been put off by the £50 entrance fee they require from each team, but Ade asked if I wanted to join his team, so I figured I might as well see what it was like.
Each team was given four random lines from a story which they then had to capture photographically in whichever way they saw fit. They weren't complete sentences, rather they were words or concepts. These were ours:
We were going to go to Postman's Park for "walled urban park", but after wandering 'round a little I was struck with the idea to go to St Dunstan's In The East instead, because it's a little further off the beaten track and a lot more picturesque. En route I popped into a Tesco Metro to buy some hundreds-and-thousands so that we could use them to spell out the word "thousands".
Stu had the bright idea of getting some blank paper and blu-tack to make empty thought-bubbles which we stuck on a wall for "they had completely forgotten".
The only one we really failed with was "they mistrusted", where we resorted to the rather obvious subject of CCTV. Initially we wanted to go to Whitehall to cover the double mistrust of CCTV and politicians, but because neither the Jubilee line nor the District line were working we didn't have time to get there. It didn't really matter; the photo Stu got was enough to suffice for the sake of the story.
Although it was a lot of fun watching all the photos illustrate the story in order at the end of the day, our team all agreed that it would have been more fun to have had more photo opportunities, with a list of clues or something. It was also annoying that once we'd chosen the four pictures we wanted to represent the clues, we had to delete all the other photos off that memory card, no matter if there were other good ones there. The organisers did suggest bringing extra cameras, and all three of us did, but it's easy to forget to take multiple shots of everything with more than one camera, especially if you've already taken several shots in order to make sure you got a good one.
To be honest, I'm still not sure what exactly we were paying for, and I don't really feel like it gave good enough value for the money they charged. One of the selling points had been prizes and all the beer you can drink after the shoot, but these were all sponsored — and the beer ran out. I suppose they probably have to pay a lot of money to use the Turbine Hall, but it's not like it was being used for anything else at the time — there aren't any installations in there at the moment. It was quite a fun day, but it definitely dragged a bit in the places (where we were just hanging around waiting for the organisers to get themselves sorted.
Having organised scavenger hunts myself, I know a lot of work goes into events like this, and I don't object to paying a fee to take part. However, I'm not sure I can easily recommend Shoot Experience for the price that they charge. Our team — Stu, Doug and myself (Ade couldn't make it due to a leg injury, unfortunately) — did enjoy ourselves, but agreed we could have had the same amount of fun just wandering around London without having to pay fifty quid for the privilege. So I recommend just doing that, instead, really, especially St Dunstan's In The East. It's been a favourite spot of mine for years and it's nice to see that it's still as peaceful as ever.
There's an exhibition of the photos at Host Gallery from May 23-30.
[strangely I thought this post had been published yesterday, when I wrote it, but it didn't for some reason.]
on May 21st, 2009 at 9:15 am
Well done. I wondered what that was all about as I was mournfully standing in a rather empty Turbine Hall on Saturday.
Just played through them all. Some absolutely inspired (I think 'crossed everything out' was one of my faves that sticks in mind), others rather weird. Some teams went to a lot of effort and further expense it seems. Shame there was so much repetition.
I agree the price seems too high, if all the teams had four that means about 135 teams = £6k – I can well believe that it cost approaching that to organise and stage the whole day in the way they did.
However, not convinced that way of organising is necessary. I'm sure something very similar could be done with a groups on facebook/flickr/other social media with much lower overheads. I guess there's a risk that the level of interest to participation ratio would be lower, therefore need some sort of entry fee to actually oblige people to take part.
on May 22nd, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Yeah, I saw your tweet about being in the Turbine Hall but you'd already gone by then. Some of the photos are really clever. Some are bit cheesy, but hey. You could definitely tell the people who'd done it before, because they'd all brought props (toys, masks etc).
I'm still unconvinced by the price although I understand the reasoning for charging something. But it is done on a much larger scale than we've ever done on Flickr — our largest scavenger hunt was 60 people, not 350, which is a huge difference in terms of the logistics of finding a place big enough for all of them. Plus we didn't use computers on scene to upload everyone's photos on the day, we let them do it by a specified deadline instead.
By the way, I hope you have/had a great a holiday!