Rob Brown

Director Rob won funding from us when we were running the Big Ideas fund. His short film Rough Sleepers is developed from discussions with homeless people in Derby. Filming is getting underway in Lewisham and the team has managed to pull a number of smart moves that promise to make it a success. Kodak have donated £1,000 of 35mm stock and actor Gary Cargill, who recently featured in Ken Loach's film Route Irish, is in the lead role. 

Chris Collins

Photographer Chris’s collaborative project with Simon Hayward, titled My Car is a Rolls Royce, looks at the condition of small-town Britain, and what happens to an industrial region when industry breaks down. We also love Chris’s other work – his project on night-shift workers is beautiful. Chris and Simon have made a book and you can buy it on blurb.com. In other news, look at this other picture by Chris (above) wow Shetland ponies are amazing.

 

NSDF’s The Wind in the Willows

The National Student Drama Festival and Theatre 503 present Wind in the Willows for London’s festive season. The production was originally shown at Latitude festival in the summer and went down a storm. There are plenty of IdeasTap members involved: Tom Colley plays Badger, Emma Waslin and Sarah Louise Davies are weasels and Matthew Johnson is Ratty. Get tickets, you won’t be disappointed and we have a ticket deal.

OperaUpClose – Madame Butterfly

Ben Cooper, a producer for OperaUpClose, (probably) the UK’s smallest opera house at The King’s Head Theatre in London, is campaigning to fund a production of Madame Butterfly through new funding scheme WeFund. WeFund enables the public to donate money to the production, however much they see fit, but the money won’t be taken until the show reaches its required amount. Good on him we say – we can’t think of a better investment for our paper round money.
 

Aaron Guy

Aaron Guy was in the Armed Forces, then he worked in oil and then he was a coal miner. He’s currently working on the absolutely mammoth task of curating the mining institute archive into an accessible research resource. At the moment he’s in the cataloging, scanning, dating and preserving phase. Have a look at his blog – it’s pretty spectacular.

Think you should be in December's round-up? Send your work to hattie@ideastap.com