PowerLab

About

Between September 2008 and July 2009, B3 Media produced PowerLab, an innovative creative development lab designed for leaders across the arts and media sector. PowerLab has been delivered in partnership with the ACE Cultural Leadership Programme, Film4, National Theatre, Tate Modern and Young Vic.

PowerLab builds on Blank Slate, B3’s short film programme for emerging talent, and Feature Lab, a programme aimed at nurturing highly creative professionals drawn from the theatre, film and television, visual arts, radio, and digital media fields, who want to make the transition to developing their first feature film. PowerLab aims to put mid-career and established creative entrepreneurs experimenting with digital media in a variety of art form contexts, on to the fast track for career development purposes.

B3 Media has made its name by “connecting the know how with the know who” and PowerLab shows how we do this. The value of this programme lies in the innovative partnerships we have engineered  with leading creative and cultural organisations, linking cultural and business networks and enabling participants to take risks in developing groundbreaking projects and promoting pioneering creative work in order to showcase urban cultural diversity.

The 2009 Creative Entrepeneurs

Akua Obeng Frimpong

Akua Obeng-Frimpong is Administrative Director at Kazzum, an established theatre company with over 19 years of experience producing theatre for children and young people. She joined PowerLab to deepen her managerial skill set, develop her own creative projects and acquire knowledge and skills across art forms.

The Project
Beginning with Blobs - A theatre production that illustrates Darwin’s evolutionary theory for children aged 4-8. This collaborative project bridges the worlds of theatre, science and education and aims to engage children’s interest in science through creative experience. The production goes on tour across Southern England in October 2009.

Francesca Beard

Francesca Beard is a highly successful performance poet. She has worked with Apples and Snakes, England’s leading agency for performance poetry, the British Council, the UK’s international organisation for educational and cultural relations, the BBC, and the National Theatre. She recently received a grant from Arts Council England to support the continued development of her practice. As an established and successful artist, Francesca needed fresh perspectives and new challenges in order to help her to enter the next phase of her career. Francesca joined PowerLab to develop skills beyond performance poetry, to expand her networks in the cultural and creative sector and to set a clear direction for her career development over the next ten years.

The Project
London Tales, a community art project, is inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and designed to question the distinction between artist and audience and between different creative disciplines. London Tales is a multi-platform project, reaching new audiences through live theatre, graphic poems, digital and open-source media platforms.

Lab Ky Mo

Lab graduated from Central St. Martin’s College  of Art in London with a degree in fine art, before winning the prestigious Carl Foreman Screenwriting Fellowship to California, in conjunction with BAFTA.  

After shooting award-winning short films in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and the UK, he made his debut feature film - Nine Dead Gay Guys.  The film starring Steven Berkoff, Michael Praed, and Vas Blackwood, was hailed by the Observer as “The most shocking film at the Cannes Film Festival” and reviewed by one Sunday Express critic as “the most outrageous and original British film of the year.”  Having caused such a stir at Cannes, it then went on to win the Audience Award at the Montreal International Comedy Film Festival as well as the Best Film award at the Dublin L&G Film Festival, and has been released in both the UK and the US.

In between feature films, Lab has also been directing television commercials, primarily for Godman and Agile Films.  He has subsequently won two Golds at the Roses Advertising Awards with a risqué viral for Scruffs Workwear, and his MTV idents were short-listed for the “Best Branding” award in Promax UK.

Recently, Lab has also been expanding his writing and directing experience into the theatre.  His last play Five Tanks performed at the Hackney Empire in London to critical acclaim for three weeks. Lab is in advanced development with his second feature film, Goldfishing which is to be shot in Thailand.  He is also currently working with B3 Media shooting and developing both short and feature films.  Last year, he made Granny’s Ghost with B3 Media ‒ this film played at both Encounters and Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festivals.  Currently Lab is collaborating with B3 to produce another short called My Dad the Communist.

When not on shoots, Lab is a visiting lecturer in film directing and screenwriting at the London College of Communication, and Westminster Adult Education Service, where he has thoroughly enjoyed teaching students for the past 3 years.

The Project
The Bruce Lee Bus is a coming of age story about a Belfast-born chinese boy, who idolises Bruce Lee.  When his father, a chinese restaurant owning, kung fu champion, dies, Dougie decides to run away to the Bruce Lee Convention.  On the way he teams up with Benny, a lanky black teenager with a huge afro - and the two boys learn the truth about friendship ‒ and Bruce Lee.     

Robert Samuels

Robert Samuels is a creative director at Red Bee Media, formerly BBC Broadcast. He has directed several award winning shorts  - including Zoltan the Great, (funded and produced by B3 Media’s Blank Slate and the UK Film Council) which won Best International Short Film at the HD Fest, Los Angeles. Rob is an illustration and film graduate from Central St Martins and Edinburgh College of Art. He was recently selected as one of only twenty international writers and directors for the Toronto Talent Lab, part of the Toronto International Film Festival. Rob joined PowerLab to develop a feature length film project and gain entrepreneurial skills.

The Project
The Amazing Labours of Arthur Glass is Rob’s unique and surreal comedy/adventure feature now in development with Film Four and B3 Media.  

Karen Palmer

Karen Palmer describes herself as a female filmmaker and free-runner whose unique brand of film-making fuses her passions and expertise in documentary, music video, parkour and film with a strong social and cultural edge. She also has extensive experience in production, creative direction and photography. She has been commissioned by Channel 4 and participated in a development scheme sponsored by the UK Film Council. Her work was recently short listed for the Jerwood Moving Image Prize. Karen joined PowerLab to extend her creative talents and to develop a concept ready for film finance and production.

The Project
The Way is an interactive video installation which portrays the journey of a parkour free-runner and is inspired by Palmer’s personal experience as a free-runner. The Way  recreates the unique and personal experience of being a free-runner while enabling participants to interact with the free-runner’s journey, navigating through increasingly challenging obstacles to be found within the city environment.

Susan Pui San Lok

Dr Susan Pui San Lok is an artist, writer and Research Fellow in Visual Culture at Middlesex
University, London. Her work explores notions of place, translation, nostalgia, migration, and
Diaspora. As an artist and writer working across moving image, sound, installation, performance
and text, she has exhibited and published nationally and internationally since the 1990s. Recent exhibition projects include Faster, Higher (2008), a five screen work co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and BFI Southbank Gallery, and DIY Ballroom/Live (2007-08), a public screen participatory work commissioned by Cornerhouse for the Bigger Picture National Touring Programme. Publications include two artist books, NEWS (2005), Golden (Notes) (2007), and a forthcoming monograph, Faster, Higher (2009). She joined PowerLab to enhance her project development skills, with the aim of sourcing development and production funding to support
her new project, Mytopia.

The Project
Susan’s PowerLab submission, Mytopia is an experimental documentary moving image project, a single-screen work conceived as an abstract, ambiguous, intimate and partial exploration of the rich and quotidian experiences of Diaspora. Focusing on the personal, cultural, and architectural gestures and histories that shape a small suburban Chinese Community Centre in Harlow, West Essex,  the work will take the form of 8 movements, 8 minutes and 8 seconds in length. Playing on ideas of memory, history, folklore, language, translation, and authenticity, Mytopia aims to interrupt a seemingly familiar scene: to construct an alternative fragmented, complex narrative of Diaspora in Britain.  A tale from the Chinese suburbs of unexpected gestures, Mytopia shifts notions of ‘Chineseness’ (and by implication ‘Britishness’) out of the zone of consumption and spectacle ‒ out of sight, yet closer, into contact.

Paul Gladstone Reid

Paul Gladstone Reid MBE, is an award-winning composer, musician, performer and producer, whose work has covered the genres of film, television, theatre, opera, ballet, classical, jazz, world music, gospel, pop and urban contemporary music. He has been passionate about hip hop since his early teens when he was a b-boy dancer in an award-winning breakdancing crew. Paul has worked with hip hop legends including The Last Poets and London’s Hip Hop/ Grime Talents. Paul came to PowerLab in order to develop his skills as an executive producer and media entrepreneur to aid him in developing a plan to produce an international hip hop festival.

The Project
Paul’s project, Hip Hop Evolution, is an international festival of hip hop arts, music, culture and media entertainment; the first of its kind. Hip Hop Evolution aims to be a world class platform for celebrating the global evolution of hip hop over the past thirty years, whilst celebrating the most innovative, diverse, creative and socially uplifting hip hop of our time. It also aims to use social media to create a catalyst for positive cultural activism within the global hip hop movement. The Hip Hop Evolution festival will include new commissions involving cross-arts experimentation, international exchange, digital culture and original collaborations covering music, dance, visual arts and theatre.

Ade Solanke

Ade Solanke is a playwright and screenwriter. Her passion is for great stories, well told. Her recent plays have been performed in two leading festivals of contemporary writing: Talawa’s Unzipped at the Young Vic and Tiata Fahozdi’s Tiata Delights at the Almeida. She has also written for the award-winning BBC radio soap, Westway. Her screenplay, The Family Legacy, a Nollywood-style short film about a family coping with Sickle-Cell Anaemia, was commissioned and distributed nationally by the NHS. Ade has been the British Film Institute’s Writer-in-Residence, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and a Hawthornden Fellow. As a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Southern California (USC) Film School in Los Angeles, she gained an MFA in Screenwriting and later worked in the story departments of Disney, Sundance and New Line in LA. She also holds a post-graduate diploma in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths College, London, as well as an Honours degree in English Literature from the University of Sheffield. She is a Visiting Lecturer at Goldsmiths, where she teaches scriptwriting. Formerly an arts journalist, she has written for BBC Radio 4, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Royal Television Society Journal, The Voice, West Africa, Art Monthly and many other publications. Earlier in her career, she was voted London’s Top Youth Entrepreneur by Nat West Bank and Shell UK for her writing and communications business.

The Project
Ade’s project Spora Stories is inspired by the global impact of Nollywood. The Nigerian film business is the third largest in the world and has whetted the appetite for popular African drama in Africa, among African Diaspora audiences in the Caribbean, Europe and America and in other communities worldwide. Ade is writing and producing entertaining and high-quality plays and film scripts  to feed this growing demand. As a Londoner, a second-generation Nigerian, and a one-time honorary ‘Angeleno’ (having studied and lived in LA), she’s keen to add the Diaspora dimension to Nollywood and - as importantly - to bring the Nollywood experience to new audiences outside the African world. Her mission is to entertain audiences in theatres and front rooms across London, Lagos and LA; to create and share fresh stories, to bring new audiences to theatre and cinema and to connect audiences in different parts of the world through digital media.

Ursula Rani Sarma

Ursula Rani Sarma is a writer/director from the west of Ireland, of Irish/Indian descent. Her award-winning plays have been translated and performed extensively, both at home and abroad. Some of her previous work for the stage includes Touched, Blue, Orpheus Road, When the War Came, The Spidermen, The Magic Tree and The Exchange. Ursula is also Artistic Director of Djinn Theatre Company, which she founded in 1999.

The Project
Breaking into Houses and Stealing Things is a screenplay which Ursula has been developing over the past year with B3 Media. Having directed for the theatre for many years, Ursula’s  project for PowerLab was to direct sample scenes from the film, in order to create a pilot for the project and a showreel of her work as a film director.  Ursula has also used this experience as an opportunity to experiment with style and form in an effort to blur the lines of distinction between traditional theatre and film.

Rukhsana Admad

Rukhsana Ahmad was born in Karachi and studied English Literature, then Linguistics at Karachi University, where she also taught briefly. After settling in Britain she resumed her study of English Literature at Reading University. She has been a freelance writer since 1985 working across several genres but campaigning consistently for Asian writers
especially in her role as artistic director of Kali Theatre Company (1994 to 2002). Rukhsana joined PowerLab to extend her experience as a writer and director into the genre of film. She hoped “to learn some of the skills needed to be able to direct a feature, to develop a film treatment and script along the way and to understand the film business in more
depth”.

The Project
Rukhsana’s project, The Hope Chest is a screen adaptation of her own novel, The Hope Chest. In a story that intersperses dream and reality, memory and magic, Rani and Ruth are prematurely ushered into adulthood by their mothers, to find a surreal and unequal world.

Franklyn Rodgers

As a photographer, Franklyn Rodgers, has established himself as an artist best known for his unique and distinctive portraits.  These have made a significant contribution to redefining the notion of representation within Britain’s cross-cultural Diaspora, creating iconic images that traverse the perception between identity, modernity and the new frontiers that define our time. Recently awarded a NESTA Fellowship, Franklyn’s innovative approach has also enabled him to apply creative solutions in commercial and corporate contexts, leading to engagements by clients such as Observer Magazine, Telegraph Magazine, Barclays Bank, KPMG, Aviva, Lehman Brothers, IKEA, Google and National Geographic.

The Project
Franklyn’s project The Elders is a community history project that uses photography, digital media and social networks to document the first generation of West Indians who settled in Britain in the early 1960s and their connection to the global African Diaspora. The project blurs the distinction between virtual and physical experiences of creative work in order to allow audiences to engage critically with and to develop the work directly themselves, as an on-line resource for communities, families and individuals worldwide.

Amit Kamboj

Amit Kamboj is a Slough-based music artist, DJ and producer. After the release of his critically acclaimed debut album‘Never Ending’, Amit was credited with creating a new and innovative genre of Drum and Bass and has worked with a number of pioneers in Drum and Bass such as Goldie. In his work, Amit draws on a range of different musical influences including dub, techno, rave, and traditional music from India and Arabia. Amit also teaches music technology, composes film scores and plays live shows at home and internationally. His passion is to expand and explore the boundaries of music genres in order to create new musical forms.

The Project
Drum and Bass Orchestra is a groundbreaking concept and a perfect example of Amit’s desire to experiment with two disparate musical genres ‒ electronic and classical music. Amit has musically ‘translated’ one of his tracks entitled Pirates from its previous existence as a piece of electronic music into a conventional score which can be played by an orchestra. Pirates is the first in a series of ‘translations’ and will feature on Amit’s upcoming album. In the future, Amit hopes to create an entire album of orchestral electronic music.