September 11, 2024 by katie
BOOK LAUNCH!
‘A Rainbow for Amala’ by Sudha Bhuchar, Katie Day and John Sear for The Other Way Works
Join us to celebrate the launch of our new interactive storybook for kids.
Meet the writer and creators, hear extracts of the story, solve puzzles and crack codes at this fun workshop for kids aged 8-11 and their families.
Bear Bookshop, Bearwood, Birmingham
11am-12pm
Saturday 21st September
Book your free tickets online here
How Brave is the Wren, Kings Heath, Birmingham
11am-12pm
Sunday 22nd September
Free, just turn up!
Tickets for children and accompanying parents/guardians/siblings are free.
Copies of the book will be available to purchase on the day (£7.99).
Nafeesa cares about the earth and wishes that everyone else did too. But it’s hard being an environmental activist when even your best friend keeps forgetting about his pledges to walk to school and pick up litter.
Join Nafeesa and her best friend Karim as they set out on a quest to befriend the quiet new girl Amala. What will give her back her smile? Use your phone or tablet to listen to their conversations, help them solve puzzles, crack codes and become part of their journey to uncover the truth.
A Rainbow for Amala was created with input from children at Regents Park Community Primary School in Small Heath, Birmingham.
A Rainbow for Amala is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Also funded by the Foyle Foundation, the Sir Barry Jackson Trust, and the Sir Robert McAlpine Strong Foundations Fund.
by katie
We were honoured to be invited to Year 6’s graduation assembly in July at Regents Park Community Primary School to present a finished printed book of A Rainbow for Amala to each of the pupils.
Sudha, John and I (Katie) have been lucky enough to work with the whole of year 6 over several months this spring and summer to help us develop and test A Rainbow for Amala, and we just could not have made the book without them. From inspiring us with their love of forest school, to providing our characters with lively dialogue, and even coming up with illustration ideas and designs, the children have always given us their honest opinion about what we created.
We hope they enjoy reading and playing the book, and feel proud of being part of making it a reality.
March 16, 2024 by Rachael Burton
The Other Way Works are recruiting for two new roles to help us create our climate emergency-themed interactive story book for kids ‘A Rainbow for Amala’.
Deadline for applications: Friday 5 April, 5pm
Freelance Illustrator
The illustrator will collaborate with the creative team to develop a visual style for the project and illustrate the final book and digital assets. We need black and white line drawings, and a full colour cover. The main characters are a British Bangladeshi family living in inner city Birmingham.
Illustrator fee: £2,200
Read the full illustrator brief and how to apply here.
Freelance Animator
The animator will collaborate with the creative team to develop animated digital assets that are accessed by readers via QR codes in a printed book. The video assets will bring to life the action in the story.
Animator fee: £1,400
Read the full animator brief and how to apply here.
We are open to both roles being done by the same person if they have the relevant skills and experience.
January 10, 2024 by katie
The Other Way Works are recruiting a Project Producer to help us create our climate emergency themed interactive story book for kids ‘A Rainbow for Amala’.
It’s a fast turnaround – the deadline for applications is next week – 5pm on Wednesday 17th January 2024!
View the brief here – Producer Brief
All the info about the role and the process of applying is in the PDF.
April 26, 2023 by katie
A Moment of Madness: On Demand is enjoying fabulous feedback from its immersive audience, so we asked Katie to tell us what inspired the interactive spy thriller and to give those audiences who are yet to experience the game an idea about what they might expect…
Q. How did you create the initial idea for A Moment of Madness, and how did it evolve?
So, the initial idea was that we would make this interactive box of documents and a simple phone, like an old Nokia phone, that we would use text messages and voicemails, and written documents, and ephemera to tell a story. And initially, we used the story world from Black Tonic, a previous project, as a foundation to experiment upon, but then we brought onboard a writer, Tim Wright. Together John, Tim and I went through a process of coming up with ideas for different story worlds to use for this kind of storytelling mechanism that we wanted to explore; we had several different ideas but the one that we decided to go with was this idea about political corruption, espionage, personal scandal in the political sphere. So the initial idea was born from that kind of brainstorming. Tim, the writer, used to work on a news desk and he just has an encyclopedic knowledge of politicians and their personal scandals.
Q. How long has A Moment of Madness been in the making?
We started with the initial concept in around 2014, so it’s a very long time. We started making the actual original production in about 2017. I then went on maternity leave for 10 months. And then we came back and went into full production phase ready to launch it. It premiered in May 2019 and then toured that year around the country. We then planned to do further in-person, real world touring, and then obviously the pandemic happened, so we decided to adapt what we had to an online Zoom format, which was released in May 2021. A Moment of Madness On Demand came from there.
Q. What was the inspiration to create a production that fuses theatre and gameplay?
The Other Way Works has been making interactive and immersive theatre productions, working in site based locations, for nearly 20 years. I’ve always been interested in how to create a lot of agency for audiences, making space for them to be really active in the experience. When I started learning a bit more about real world gaming, using those ideas and integrating them with immersive theatre it felt like the genre could be a really good solution for giving audiences more agency in the experience, and make something more playable. It’s about creating an experience for audiences that is just really exciting, really immersive, where they feel like they’re integral to it actually happening, and it goes beyond just walking through a space and looking at stuff. So that’s what I’m really aspiring to in the work that I make. And obviously, collaborating with John Sear meant that I had access to a lot of the theory and the practice of actually creating games and implementing them.
Q. What was the inspiration behind the main narrative thread, and how did you develop this?
Our inspiration was the cascade of politicians and their personal scandals over the years. There’s just so many bizarre scandals that politicians have been involved with, we just kind of made amalgams based on these to inform our characters. As we’ve been developing this new version there have been a lot of discussions about how when we wrote this in 2017/18 this was representative of how British politicians went about things. There are these scandals, but then if they were discovered the people were forced to face up to them. People resigned. And we look on in a kind of shocked amazement that that’s changed so much between 2017 and 2023, where politicians will just blast over the fact that these scandals are coming out and just don’t really care anymore, don’t think they should resign, don’t think that they have to be holding themselves to a moral standard. Which is quite shocking in only a five to six year period.
Q. What does the at home element bring to the production and the overall experience?
What the at home element brings is accessibility. We were excited about the idea of making this story experience accessible to people whenever they wanted to play it, so the at home experience just allows us to offer it to people in a much broader way than we have been able to before. Often our productions are very resource intensive to present and that means that our tours and audience numbers can be quite limited because the costs of mounting the productions are higher than the amount that we can make through performing them. So, this allows us to use all this huge amount of work that we’ve done in making this story world and this production and allows us to slightly condense it into something that people can play whenever they like. We really hope that we can reach more audiences, broader audiences.
Q. How did you decide what parts of the story are determined by the audience?
We haven’t really made a ‘choose your own adventure’ experience. Stylistically my preference is to come up with a guided route through a narrative. I see it as my role to tell a story to an audience. And so, it isn’t a free exploration of a narrative environment. It is a guided telling of this story, and we hope that we do that in a way that has a recognition of pace and surprises, twists and turns, and gradual revelation. It gives people an opportunity to push the edges of the experience, do the research, put in the work, but they don’t particularly define what happens. It’s about how they engage with the story world, where their interests lead them, which doors they push on, to inform the nuance of the storytelling. The main decision that they make is at the end of the production, where they get to decide the fate of the main character.
To play A Moment of Madness: On Demand for yourself click here
March 3, 2023 by katie
‘A Moment of Madness: On Demand’ launched today and is now available online for you to play whenever you choose.
The experience will be available to play for FREE for a limited period.
For more information about how to play, click the button below:
A Moment of Madness: On Demand is supported by The Space and Arts Council England with funding from the National Lottery, and by The Foyle Foundation.
December 8, 2022 by katie
We are delighted announce that The Space has commissioned a new iteration of A Moment of Madness which will be available on demand. We are deep into building this now with our brilliant collaborators and look forward to emerging in early 2023 with an update on when it will be available to play.
Enjoy our teaser trailer above to whet your appetite!
A Moment of Madness: On Demand is supported by The Space and Arts Council England with funding from the National Lottery, and by The Foyle Foundation.
September 8, 2022 by Rosie Gunn
The Other Way Works is recruiting new Trustees to join its Board of Directors.
This is a great opportunity for your skills and experience to make a real difference to the development of an energetic and distinctive charitable arts organisation. We’re looking for people with a passion for theatre, the arts, and innovation, who will help steer, support and advocate for the company.
Brief expressions of interest should be sent by email to Rosie Gunn, Administrator at rosie@theotherwayworks.co.uk
Click here to download more information about the role.
If you’d like some more info, have any questions, or would like to have an informal chat with Katie Day (Artistic Director) or Dan Brown (Chair of the Board) about the opportunity, please get in touch with Rosie via email in the first instance.
March 21, 2022 by katie
We are excited to share a short prototype extract of ‘A Rainbow for Amala’ – our interactive storybook developed as part of our Green Shoots project.
The experience is aimed at children aged 8-11 (Year 4,5 & 6 of Primary School) to read and play together with a grandparent or adult carer.
You can download the PDF of the book here.
You’ll need a smartphone with internet access and a QR scanner (most phones have these built into the camera these days) to play the experience.
As this is very much in development, we would love to hear your feedback on your experience of reading and playing ‘A Rainbow for Amala’. Please email info@theotherwayworks.co.uk with your responses, comments and questions.
February 4, 2022 by TOWW
We caught up with three members of the creative team from Green Shoots – director Katie Day, writer Sudha Bhuchar, and John Sear, game designer & software developer – to ask them about their roles in the project, what they have learned while working on it, and its potential legacy.
SUDHA BHUCHAR: WRITER
Tell me a bit about your role within the Green Shoots creative team.
I was brought on by Katie [Day] and John [Sear]. They were looking for a writer to collaborate with on the Green Shoots project, so I had to apply and then was interviewed and was delighted to get the job. I knew it was going to be an incremental thing that they built, so I was very intrigued and thrilled to be asked to be part of it.
What made you interested in being part of the project?
I looked up the work [The Other Way Works] had done and I was very intrigued in that whole thing of experiential theatre, not theatre in a conventional way, and having an experience that will remain with you because you’ve felt it more deeply than just sat in the audience. I was intrigued with that, and the subject of climate change issues as well as working with kids – making work from being out and doing a residency with kids and getting their opinions. A lot of my work is from research, and interacting with people, verbatim, recordings, reflecting back stories from the field as it were, so I was interested in being able to apply that collaboratively to this project.
What do you think is new or interesting about this project?
Obviously young people and kids of that age are really interested in climate change, they see it as something that is deeply already affecting them – their whole futures are shaped by the unknown around the earth, as we found with the primary schools we went too. That’s one part of it. What children think and what they think their future is, is of great interest to me. I have kids but they’re older, but I have nieces and nephews of that age. Also the whole process of making it, it’s unlike anything I’ve done before, where you’re building it from prototypes, integrating, playing games, with a grandparent and a child experiencing it together, playing a game. From that they’re having an inter-generational conversation about climate change. I just find it all very organic and interesting.
In terms of the creative process do you think you’ve learnt anything from this that might change the way you work on future projects?
It is very iterative. I have worked in that way before but not exactly the same; mostly I’m used to delving into the unknown and just trusting a process. For instance, I’ve just done a project called Final Farewell at Tara Arts which was an audio walk; I’ve never done something like that before but when you have collaborators, everybody brings different things to the table. What I’ve found with this project is I can bring my practice to the table and learn from John and Katie and how they work. What I loved is that Katie and John and us saying ‘we don’t know’ – and we actually don’t know! We remind ourselves that we collectively don’t know, so then you’re building the story from fragments as you pick them up. Going into the schools has been incredible, and there’s so much material that comes from the mouths of children, watching them play games. I’m very much about taking anything that shines and trying to use it. At the end of the day there’s not going to be huge text in this project, so how do I bring the best of myself – the performative side of it. What’s been really lovely is in the prototype we’re doing right now there are conversations between the kids that could be in the theatre piece, but you have to scan a QR code and then you find it. It feels like you can integrate things and it comes out differently to any of us individually. I am a writer that goes into the field, but I also write alone as well, but I’m not the main artist in the room, there isn’t a main artist in the room which is lovely as well. If anything, it’s the voices of the kids, the characters we created, and the grandmother. It’s quite inspiring. But we still don’t know what it is yet.
Is there anything as part of the creative process that has been particularly memorable or moving or surprising?
It’s hard to pick. I just think the combination of the three of us, also Fateha who’s been doing the workshops, how brilliant she is at eliciting the most amazing conversations from the children. The kids have been memorable, and I can see that they’re directly feeding into the work. Katie and John have been great to work with, I’ve never worked with somebody who makes games or makes experiences in that way.
Is there anything you’d like to tell fellow creatives?
We were at SOAS University and a student said “at least if you’re searching you know you’re lost”. A lot of people don’t acknowledge that they’re lost. That quote came back to me because I have come into this project feeling lost. We jokingly say to Katie ‘come on you need to sack me because I don’t know what I’m doing’ and she’ll say ‘no you can’t go, because none of us know what we’re doing’. I love the idea that we’re searching together, and then you’ll find a clearing, or you’ll find something, and then to see it coming into focus. We started with the colouring in of certain numbers and now the picture is starting to emerge.
How does it feel to work on something with a legacy beyond a performance, or beyond a moment in time where a play is performed?
It’s really exciting! At the moment we’re doing the “micro bits”, but you can already see the people we’ve created, and then seeing them illustrated, it feels like a world is building which was totally inspired by real kids. I love to work like that; reflecting back to people with their stories transformed. And to be able to, on a basic level, have some live interactions during Covid! To be able to go into a school and see 100 kids in one day and hear their voices. It’s such a diverse school too and it’s great for the global majority to be the majority in Britain in that environment. It’s very moving to hear some of their own stories from those kids who have been climate migrants, and it’s heart-breaking to hear their hopes clouded by what their fears are, but there is so much hope.
What do you hope the legacy will be from this project?
I think it would be totally insane to say we’ll end climate change, but to be able to capture those conversations, to capture fear and make it into hope, to have something tangible that generations can play together and talk about together. I don’t even think a lot of those conversations are reaching that family level. To not feel like it’s too big that you can’t do something.
