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Pioneering filmmaker May Miles Thomas - long tracked on Netribution - whose microubudget One Life Stand was one of the first digital films has been awarded the Scottish Arts Council's Creative Scotland Award.
The £30,000 award, established to reward the achievements of Scotland's creative talent, will help May to realise The Devil's Plantation, an ambitious multi-media project tracing Glasgow's secret geometry. "It's about finding the magic in ordinary places, not grand monuments," says May, "It's a great opportunity for me to explore a different kind of storytelling." Using video, photography, graphics, sound design and animation, The
Devil's Plantation will unravel the myths of Glasgow's prehistoric
sites to discover ancient and occult patterns in the landscape. The
project will be launched as a website in 2008.
"Glasgow we think of as this great industrial city but it is such an
old city. This will look into the hidden secrets about its history, the
hidden tracks that lie across it: it will be like a Da Vinci Code for
Glaswegians," she told The Herald. "I have been looking at the idea of ley lines and have read
accounts that the city is laid out along them in a geometric pattern.
There is another idea that its layout reflects in some way the seasons
of the moon. That idea stems from pre-Iron Age Glasgow, so I will be
investigating all these ideas, how the city was built and re-built, and
finding the extraordinary in the ordinary."
"This is more than a prize," says May. "It's an investment of faith
in a piece of work that would otherwise fall through the cracks of less
adventurous arts funding. It's the best thank you I can think of."
A
graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, May Miles Thomas is a pioneer of
digital cinema and the writer/director of the acclaimed feature films
One Life Stand and Solid Air. Her previous awards include the Scottish
Screen Outstanding Achievement Award and a NESTA Fellowship. In 2003
she was honoured by H.M. Queen Elizabeth II as a Pioneer to the Life of
the Nation for her services to British cinema.
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