From Square Meals to Voiceovers

If you can manage to get an hour or two away from the office next week I recommend you make your way down to Old Billingsgate market where the Square Meal ‘Venues and Events’ show is once again taking place. As well as the all-important silhouette artist stand (stand no M7 this year) you can find all manner of creative and useful ideas to help you organise anything from a small dinner party to a 3-day conference for a thousand delegates.

On our stand this year we will be showcasing our new silhouette badge machine. A new variation on an old art: your guests can have their profile cut freehand with scissors and instantly encapsulated in a badge. The badge can include details of your event if you wish. The machine is versatile and can turn our silhouettes not just into badges but fridge magnets and mirrors as well. The badges may be fun at many occasions, although we see them primarily working at conferences and other promotional events

A line up of silhouette badges cut from life. Can you spot which is me?

These will include the Venues and Events #hash tag at the event next week.

It’s hard to believe that a year has passed by since we last exhibited at Square Meal. This time last year we had just launched the first of two crowd-funding campaigns to raise funds for my film ‘Silhouette Secrets’. Since then we managed to put together a budget (albeit a meagre one), arrange a filming schedule and have travelled all over the UK and America shooting over 50 hours of footage - enough to make a full-length feature film should we be so inclined! We are now midway though the seemingly endless task of sifting the footage, deciding what should stay and what must go, then stitching it all together with a voice-over narrative.

Our travels began in London in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery, took us to the Regency Town House in Brighton and then on to a freezing cold dawn on Llandudno Pier, tracking down the lives of past silhouettists. We have shot footage in cars, on trains, in public streets and parks, even from a motorcycle sidecar! In America we went to new York, Boston, Philadelphia and - most notably - Houston, where I challenged the world record for speed-cutting silhouettes.

This week I’ll be back at Square Meal, together with my colleague Michael Herbert, offering our silhouettes to event organisers from all over the country. You’ll find us on the bridge, hope to see you there!

Secrets of speed cutting

The thing which most struck me after the "Off With Your Head!" contest was just how entertaining it had all been. With Cindi Rose and I cutting back-to-back, silhouettes began filling the room within minutes. Everybody went away with at least one portrait and most got two. Wherever I looked there were people laughing, joking and comparing profiles. I had approached the event with a certain dread, the numbers seemed so impossibly high. When clients ask how many silhouettes I can cut in one hour my usual answer is “about 30”, yet after cutting nearly 150 my main feeling was that I wanted another go! That got me wondering: could there be an application for this in the corporate events market?

The secret to such huge numbers is not simply in the cutting, but in the way the event is organised. Working as a mix-and-mingle entertainer most of my time is not spent creating silhouettes at all: for every minute spent cutting I may spend another two talking to guests, mounting silhouettes on card, posing for photographs and finding the next volunteer. This is not laziness on my part but an inevitable and integral part of the process. In Houston I stood at a table with a queue of willing subjects, a trained assistant whom I knew could keep up with me and an MC telling people to get in line. The result was that for every minute spent cutting I probably waited just 2 or 3 seconds for people to change places. 

Could such an arrangement work at a conference reception here in the UK? Even without trying to set any world records I now realise that two artists placed in the middle of a room, cutting 30-second one-line silhouettes, with a team of assistants to help in crowd control and mounting, can cut their way through 200-250 guests in a single hour - all done before the bell tolls for dinner! If this is something which might work at an event you are organising please do get in touch, it would be great to chat and talk through what's involved. It’s a radically different way to approach the art, yet who knows: we might even bring an unofficial world record to your next event…

Does 'One' in Houston mean 'Go'?

Filming for ‘Silhouette Secrets’ is now almost complete. Andi and I returned from a crowd-funded shoot in the USA just over a month ago. The main item on our agenda was a trip to Houston to meet the world’s fastest silhouette artist: Cindi Harwood Rose. Cindi has held this record for nearly 30 years, having cut 144 silhouettes in one hour at an event in the 1980’s, and the film will end with me going to Houston to challenge it. Cindi kindly arranged for a charity speed-cutting contest to take place in a local Audi showroom, rather alarmingly called “Off With Your Head!".

The rules of the contest were fairly simple. We each had a table to work at and one assistant to help us mount the silhouettes and hand them out. My daughter Taz (herself a promising silhouettist) flew with us to Houston to act as my assistant. Guests at the event collected pink and blue tickets and were asked to drop blue tickets into a bowl on my table and pink ones into a bowl on Cindi’s; at the end of the evening the tickets would be counted to determine the outcome.

There were a number of craft stalls (including a paper cutter and an origami artist), a silhouette historian, a food buffet and a bar at the event. Some 200 guests and a contingent of local press arrived. On my table I had a pile of printed cards - bearing the logo of the local cancer charity for whom the event was being staged - and my usual squares of black and white paper, each stamped with a number to help me tell how fast I was cutting.

Cindi and I took our positions and a large queue immediately formed at both tables. The contest got off to a shaky start for me, as the MC announced:

“The competition is about to start: Three - Two - ONE!”

which caused me to hesitate for a vital few seconds, slightly confused. Should I start cutting? Does ‘One’ in Houston mean ’Go’?

Once over this unpromising start I soon warmed to the task in hand and began to enjoy myself. It was a luxury to be assisted by Taz and to have an MC directing the traffic. I even found time to laugh and joke with a few of the guests - who all did exactly as they had been told: standing on the ‘X’ and looking straight ahead.

Twenty minutes - and some 50 silhouettes - later the pressure began to tell and I found it harder to keep up the relentless pace. My mouth became dry and the scissors began to feel heavy as lead. Mark, the cameraman, asked me to speak a few words about how I was feeling but my reply was sadly incoherent. Taz helped by feeding me mouthfuls of water as I cut, after a while the feeling passed and I entered a kind of ‘second wind’.

The final twenty minutes were a real joy. I found myself cutting faster than I ever have before, my hands began to feel better and the numbers indicated I was on track to achieve my target. To say the silhouettes were flying off the scissors is perhaps an exaggeration but as I passed the one-hundred mark that is really how I felt.

A selection of 24-second speed-cut silhouettes made during the final twenty minutes of "Off With Your Head!"

The end of the contest brought a brief period of excitement as my silhouette numbers indicated I might actually have broken the record! Rather embarrassingly I even sent out an ill-advised tweet or two to this effect, which had to be hurriedly retracted some time later when the official ticket count became available. Andi, with typical humour, posted a Facebook update asking “Will we get out of Texas alive?”.

The official result was slightly disappointing as it seems neither Cindi or I equalled her existing record, although we both came very close: the final score was 141 to Cindi and 139 to me, leaving Cindi's 30-year-old record untouched. Although I didn’t beat the record I came to understand how it is possible to cut such huge numbers, and how I might go about beating this record in future. I had to remind myself that the result was less important than filming the event, which was a huge success and will make an interesting sequence in ’Silhouette Secrets’.

Here are some photos of the event:

Being interviewed by Houston Chinese TV before the start

Two guests holding silhouettes by both Cindi and I (mine are the smaller)

Cindi silhouetting a less-than-cooperative child

Speaking after the event

Silhouette Secrets Twitter day.

As our Indiegogo campaign enters it’s final week I’m posting the promised update... and a request for a tweet!

Tomorrow will be Silhouette Secrets' Twitter day. Crowd-funded projects gain more visibility the more people mention them online within a certain timeframe. Therefore I’ve been writing to everybody I know and asking them to send a tweet at lunchtime, sometime around 1pm UK time, on Thursday 20th February. I’m told the more noise we can make in a short space of time the better our campaign will perform!

If you can’t manage tweets, a mention on Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other networking platform will have the same effect. The important thing is that it should be tomorrow, and that it should contain the following link:

www.indiegogo.com/projects/583568/emal/5309929

You can write whatever you like in your tweet. Comments such as:

“No chance - this guy simply doesn’t know when to give up”

are just as effective as:

"Take a look at the skill of this man with the magical scissors"

or

"Who would have thought that shadows actually have a history?”

My own favourites are:

“Let’s get this shady silhouette character out of the shadows”

Or (conversely):

“We’re doing our best to keep him in the shadows where he belongs”

“Whoever heard of a digital silhouette?”

Be creative! I’ll be looking out for your tweets and have a few silhouette gift vouchers to send to authors of the most imaginative comments. And if you really get the bug there’s no reason to limit yourself to just one tweet - feel free to tweet away!

The outcome is important (for me at any rate) filming is now underway, a challenge has been laid and the date is set: I am to challenge the world silhouette speed-cutting record, in Houston, Texas, on 25th March 2014 - just over a month away. Your tweets will help me get there!

Silhouette Secrets: Free silhouettes and other silly ideas

I begin this year in a state of high excitement as we have finally started filming “Silhouette Secrets”.  This is my first foray into the world of TV and film making (apart from occasional TV appearances: Blue Peter, Tales of Tools, etc) and I’m thoroughly enjoying the experience. The film is a 50-minute ‘indie’ TV documentary, on the art and history of silhouette portraits, being produced by Andi Reiss and myself on something of a shoe-string budget.

So far we have hosted a christmas dinner in a barn, filmed in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery, and are about to take a train journey to Llandudno to have my silhouette cut on the pier! The idea is to look at the work of successive generations of silhouettists, the times in which they worked and some of the Heath-Robinson-like machines they used. We hope to do this in a quirky and entertaining manner, filling the film with unexpected shadows and silhouettes. We are looking for help with various aspects of the film, hence this email.

Our Indiegogo Campaign:

The film does have a basic budget, however we are becoming increasingly aware of the need to include a trip to America - where silhouettes have a wider following than they do in the UK. We have therefore just launched a last-minute one-month crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo, and are now looking for backers. There are generous ‘perks’ on offer from silhouette postcards and digital copies of the film to tickets for the opening night (we’ll roll out the red carpet for you - or perhaps it will be a black one?) The campaign will run until and end of February, just in time for us to buy some tickets and head across the pond later in March.

The “speed cutting” silhouette world record:

One of the reasons we really do need to get to America is to meet my friend Cindi Rose. Cindi is a silhouette artist based in Texas and current holder of the unofficial silhouettist’s speed-cutting record, which (unbelievably) stands at 144 silhouettes cut in just one hour!  Cindi has offered to host a charity fund-raising event in Houston at which I will have the opportunity to challenge this record. I have no idea if I can actually do this! Whether or not I succeed the event will be a lot of fun and will provide a suitable finale (what Andi calls a moment of jeopardy) at the end of the film.

Speed cutting: 50 rather rough silhouettes cut in 20 mins & 21 secs as a rehearal for the finale of Silhouette Secrets

Free Silhouettes and other silly ideas:

Are you planning an event in February? We are looking for a variety of suitable events to feature in the film and illustrate silhouette cutting in action. To this end I am happy to offer my services FOC at an event or two, provided I can bring a small camera crew with me. They might just film me doing what I do, or we might perhaps use the event as a live rehearsal for the world-record attempt! If you are planning an event in the near future (or suddenly feel like throwing an impromptu party to take advantage of this offer) please do get in touch so we can discuss. Suitable events can be anything from a private dinner party to a large corporate event.

If you are planning an event, but would rather not have a camera crew present, then of course I remain available to attend at my usual terms ;-)

Please help us by posting links to the Indiegogo campaign on your favourite social media. You can follow our progress over the next few months on our Silhouette Secrets Facebook page: www.facebook.com/silhouettesecrets