Whether it's stewarding at a festival, writing for a magazine, or producing works of art, volunteering for creative projects is bound to get those juices flowing.

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Monday Dec 01, 2008

You might call it a Towering Achievement... oh dear....

So here was the day we had been waiting for. Having arrived at the Tower a bundle of nerves and excitement, we were lucky enough to get a free tour and see the crown jewels - which really looked fake to me! We also got to see the grisly areas where Henry VIII wives were beheaded (and then had their heads sewn back on to be buried - which seemed a bit of an empty gesture!) and also where the young princes were thought to have been killed by Richard III. It was amazing to film in a place that had so much history and such importance. The young people were eager to get started, initially we debated the different possibilities for a dramatic entry and had to quickly veto the idea of throwing a rope over the wall and climbing up it ...  as sadly we didn’t quite have the funding (or the stunt people!) to hand… so we began by filming each of them stealthily trying to infiltrate the tower ninja style. This resulted in some funny looks from the general public...

Daniel was the educational officer who showed us around, and told us where we could and could not film. He suggested a great location which had been a dungeon where monks had been imprisoned at one time. It definitely had an eerie atmosphere and came across well on camera. The ‘freedom not boredom’ t-shirts I had carefully crafted were deemed not cool enough by the girls – which brought back memories of my own ‘quest for cool’ teenage years! But the boys gallantly offered to wear theirs.

The young people took it in turns directing, working on sound, filming and being filmed. When they weren’t involved in the main project we kept them busy filming a ‘behind the scenes’, which involved interviewing the participants. Everyone got very into this, honing their interviewing skills and taking it rather seriously... MTV stars of the future I think!

Posted by Rhiannon ( 12:00 AM )
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