RESEARCH
Let´s welcome the summer, let´s cover the first Beltane Fire Festival created in 1988 and with a media of 12.000 people attending every year. BBC, STV, The Times and Getty Images, as well as The Scotsman, The Herald and Edinburgh Evening News.
Beltane show members of communities come together to celebrate the return of the summer. Is characterised by a celebration of the return of the fertility of the land, and would have been a time when livestock would have been put out to pasture. Blazing pyrotechnics, immersive theatre and people having fun are some of the entertainments of this day.
Creatures will descend on Calton Hill to mark the turn of the wheel. When the drums start to thunder, the May Queen awakens and leads the Green Man and their followers on a transformative journey through the night.
WHEN? Thursday 30th April, starting at 8.00pm (sundown) and finishing with the ritual lighting of the Neid fire. The event will close around midnight.
RADIO SCOTLAND AND OUR MAGAZINE “SCOTTISH ENTERTAINMENT”
As it is an Scottish tradition I think it will perfectly fit in their target audience. Edinburgh has one of the main events for Beltane but it is not the one, so it could even be good for them to do different reports and do a special show to put them all as a package.
The main reason I selected to cover it is because I think it is a big event and it fits perfectly in the whole magazine idea. This festival attract the attention of journalists and media from across the world, from bloggers to headline news reporters. I personally went last year and I found it quite interesting and inspiring.
The aim of the documentary wil be to inform and entertain and as the BBC usually does, to advance the education of the general public bringing them how the traditions of the Celtic lunar calendar fire festivals and their relevance to contemporary culture.
Also, I think it will be good to promote participation in the Scottish traditions of street theatre, music and pageantry and to advance the performing arts through the development of skills in professional performance and production within a cooperative and collaborative environment.
INTERVIWEES
The idea is to make some of the interviews before this event wil happen, during the preparation and also take sounds the day of the event.
•Event Coordinator
•Green Man. The festival tells the story of the transition from winter to summer, which can only happen when the Green Man – an archetypal figure in folklore all over the UK – dies and is reborn again
•Members of different groups. Beltane Fire Society is entirely run by volunteers, festival performers and members of production groups also take part on a voluntary basis so I think these people will be happy to talk about whay they participate on it and tell us more about it.
•Vox pops of people attending to the event.
HOW I WILL DO IT
As the event has a chonological order, I will follow it as I present the doc.
It is a procession, which starts at the National Monument (know to Beltaners as the Acropolis) and proceeds anti-clockwise around the path meeting various groups along the way. The procession is driven by the beat of drums.
Beginning, mixing different sounds of how the show start and after it start introducing what´s this event explained by the people that organice it and the participants.
End up. Celebration sounds to welcome the summer. Finishing with the drums and the multiple sounds they make to celebrate the welcome of summer.
The main goal is to make a documentary upbeat, diverse and attractive that will make that the potential listeners could be able to teleport theirselfs to the event. For that I´ll focus on doing a good variety of interviews, use music and effects, as well as location recordings. The presenter style will be informal but not rude, using rich vbut undernstandable vocabulary.
ON AIR FROM THE CLOUD 