Sunday, August 28, 2005

Swansea MAS Carnival 2005

Well, been a right royal busy couple of weeks. I won't bore you with most of it instead I'll give you some colourful pictures to enjoy from yesterday. I helped Nursey out with some video work. He was commissioned to make a short film of the Swansea MAS Carnival for the participants, and needed some extra camera work for which I was gainfully employed.

To be honest, I'd been dreading it for weeks, I don't enjoy working or being in crowds at the best of times, so was nervous as hell about it. Not to mention driving myself and Nursey to Swansea and back, which was a first Motorway trip for myself without Mrs Dio to scream at when I get panicked.

It didn't look good to be honest. It had pissed down the day before, and as we pulled into the theatre in Swansea that was the base for the carnival, the skies darkened and the heavens opened.

Undeterred we got our shit together and went in. Preparations were in full swing so we got our kit ready and before we knew it was under way. Mercifully, as we left the theatre it stopped raining. We took up our first position and awaited the Carnival procession.

I took my trusty little digital with me as I had the video camera on a tripod, I was able to get some stills as well. The best of them are below. From the sublime to the ridiculous, the skies cleared as the procession went on and turned blue and sweltering for the final bit of the parade and the live concert from Swansea's central square.

To be honest I ended up having a great but tiring time and thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being a professional camera man for the day. The day was only marred by losing my car keys, and being left in stuck away from home. Despite a tense hour of calling insurance people and Mrs Dio, even that turned out well when quite by chance someone mentioned a set had been handed over to one of the organizers and thank heavens they turned out to be ours.

But, that's just one day of busyness - in other news the web stuff has been mental as following the relative success of my crazy frog site and the model it - a modular template driven, search engine friendly design and user generated content editorial of the site (how very BBC) - I quickly got another site up with another fun and link building quiz attached. Office Annoyance is the second of these quick hitter sites.

Thanks to growing confidence in CSS I used my experiences on the previous to sites to build a blank site template - with lots of different elements and parts, all ready to quickly unpack (another trick I learnt from work) a blank site and customise it as required. And as its got a lot of CSS stuff attached, I can quickly alter the look of it.

I've got quite a major build on at the moment, then another major build, then the its back to the start to work on the stuff that needs updating and redoing - which is all my art related stuff and photo-galleries. To say it?s a mammoth task is an understatement, but given the way the financial side of it is starting to grow, I reckon by the time its done I should be able to earn a small extra income that will make impending redundancy less of a burden and allow me to work part-time whilst giving more time to creative activities and family life. That's the plan anyway... It'll either work or I'll die trying. More detail on the new sites when they're done.

The more astute of you may remember a few paragraphs back I promised you some photographs, then went on a tangent about plans and future plans. Well, thanks for staying with us, this turned into a long ramble. Here you go, the 2005 Swansea MAS Carnival. Hover for descriptions.

The survivors of the Swansea Royal Blue Paint Factory explosion.

Nursey waits for the Carnival to start.

Blue Devil Lady

Ghosts and a lady dressed as a ship, check out them grey skies

The Swansea Tequila worm looks on nonchantly

An army of tiny ladies make off with the cocktail umbrellas

Swansea Weight Watchers club on their annual outing

Feathered lady wonders where the rest of her flock are

Carnival goers observe lane control

Me bring sun, chase away grey

Gliding down that hill on wings of copper

That guy on the right is like totally checking out the girl in pink... Check them skies again.

Follow the arrows

The audience looks on...

Bored looking stewards wishing they bought earplugs

Some live Reggae, perfect for a hot summer Swansea Carnival afternoon

Posted by Dio Bach at 23:31

3 Comments:

Elise Tomlinson said...: Wow, that looks amazing Dio, how fun. I'm so jealous!; 6:15 AM
RR said...: Great images and well done on all the web development. CSS still has me baffled - one day I will sit down and learn how to create a CSS properly.; 9:46 PM
greg said...: Beautiful pics and great captions! Nice to find the car keys ... sounds like a great experience - and schlepping around video equip around an audience always is a sexy ego boost. What exactly are you celebrating there? Your one day of summer?

Sounds like you have a hopeful plan going there ... good luck!; 3:58 PM