A 6 minute short, part of a series of silent film projects commissoned for outdoor projections by Statement Media Arts Development.
Developed over a series of adult education workshops with Deaf adults with additional needs who are clients of RNID Outreach.

This project is the result of 10 intensive workshop sessions which involved training and skill sharing in Video Camera techniques, Film Editing, Special Effects and Creative Film Making.
The film was originally commissioned to be projected outside, and so has been made to maximise its visual impact through the use of "tromp l'eoil" effects, discussed throughout the workshop sessions.

It is based on personal interaction and improvisations created over those sessions, during which the group was also engage in developing a different performance-based work with ESHODA.

Familiarity with working in front of and behind the camera was essential, and over the weeks more humour, slapstick, and visuals were created as edited video from the previous sesions was brought back into the workshop sessions for discussion, and to develop new work from.
Because we were working on a film to be projected onto Architecture, rather than in a cinema, we used a black background technique that would make invisible the "frame of the film, and make the people and characters appear on the building without being inside a conventional (rectangular) film frame.

m.d. 2003
reflections on the making of Signs of Life :-)