What is it about the soft saturated colours and slightly blurry image of Polaroid photographs that make them so endearing?

Is it the fact that they are each unique? Is it the arbitrary nature of the framing, due to squinty viewfinders?

Or something else?

When the Great Master Builder was building all the mountains and deserts he over ordered on the materials and had a lot of sand left over.

He was at a loss as to what to do with it all when his young assistant, Michael, suggested he could maybe sprinkle it round the edges of the countries so there would be somewhere for the children to play.

"Children?" asked the Great Master Builder.
"Ah, yes - you haven't got to that bit yet have you? Trust me it'll be good."

So, looking thoughtfully at Michael – who had come up with the whole mountain/desert idea in the first place – the Great Master Builder took up all the sand in his Great Master Builder hands and sprinkled it around all the countries where it lay un-noticed for thousands of years until someone invented buckets, spades and away-day train tickets.

YOUNG MAN
I love you, Honey Bunny.

And with that, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny grab their weapons, stand up and rob the restaurant. Pumpkin's robbery persona is that of the in-control professional. Honey Bunny's is that of the psychopathic, hair-triggered, loose cannon.

PUMPKIN
(yelling to all)
Everybody be cool this is a
robbery!

By all accounts everyone had a good time and my sneaky tricks produced a lot of good results.

More classes to follow in the autumn.

The latest short film, weighing in at around 17 minutes 50 seconds.

We at Bikeshed Digital Media have been working with some lost children in Leeds, improvising drama. At times it's been like herding cats - nervous, frightened, angry cats. But when the camera is on them it's amazing the concentration and focus [no pun intended] that the kids can muster.

thanks to these guys for making it possible:

The big pebble in question is the one in the river with the sunbeams falling on it. I guess it's really Big Rock - caillou can mean rock or stone or pebble. It was also called Post Office rock for reasons know only to a few, and subsequently lost in the mists of time [some of which can still be seen in this photo].

The water parts either side of the rock, as water does round rocks, and the resulting eddies and currents form one of the first rapids on the descent of the Ardèche gorge.

Rachel, having walked up Kilimanjaro last year, is currently choreographing a dance concerning dust, a daily companion on such an endeavour, and the peculiar way that the locals walk.

These images sit around on the hard drive, at the bottom of folders, in the creases, catching dust.

Later, revisiting the images, you keep coming back to an odd one lurking in the corner...

Dusty Rachel - just back from a trip up Kilimanjaro

That man was McFugger.

Rough shanty towns would spring up alongside rows of derelict cottages and rough men with rough hands would drink hard liquor long into the night in a vain attempt to wash the choking soot and dust of another lath and horsehair-plaster ceiling from their rasping throats.

First we experimented with jam spread on tinfoil, but these early jamtypes produced little by way of a result. We tried marmalade and honey in various consistencies with no success and the camera got in a frightful state.

Moving from the larder to the cupboard under the sink we used bleach and washing up liquid on a chopping board and were amazed by a crude, dark, outline of a cat that appeared on the surface after a few days. But we subsequently discovered that the grubby boy next-door, who comes in to fix the leaking chimney, had drawn it with his sooty finger.

My late grandmother was a stickler for cleanliness and she would polish the tea things until they shone. Her silver tea-tray was no exception and it was now to this that we turned for a flat surface to further our experiments.

Though it reflected our faces perfectly, we just couldn’t capture the image. Shining a torch on the tray with a variety of Quality Street wrappers in front of the lens proved fruitless and in a rare outburst of rage Daguerre threw the torch at me. It caught me only a glancing blow on the forehead, but sufficient to draw blood. As soon as Louis saw this he fell to remorse and fumbled about in the medicine cabinet for some Tincture of Iodine to dress my, albeit minor, blessure.

Leaving the Iodine bottle standing open, the better to tend my abrasion, Louis suddenly froze. I looked at him quizzically and gaining no recognition, followed his gaze. My eyes fell to the tray propped up behind the open bottle, a shaft of light, bent through the window pane, glanced upon it and there, before our startled faces, a faint image was forming.

The winter of 1835 was bitter and our draughty loft afforded scant defence against the cold. We soldiered on, in woollen mittens and thick scarves, frustrated by the faintness of the images we were producing and searching for a way to increase the contrast. Soot, burnt toast, boot polish, all served only to destroy the fragile image.

Daguerre came down with the influenza and in a fevered state broke his thermometer on the stove. The spilt mercury danced and hissed on the hot-plate above which we were drying a recently exposed traytype.

Imagine our surprise when, as the mercury vapour rose from the stove, the image on the tray began to darken and Louis whispered under his breath – “Daguerreotype”.

Boulevard du Temple, an early Daguerreotype

mind you not quite as exciting perhaps as sitting on a tea-tray and doing up to 120kph down a bobsleigh track

Amy Williams
photo Clive Mason