The Old Times

Established 1967

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Welcome to The Old Times. Nick is a Second Year Digital Media Production Student at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. He is a retired HR Practitioner (DEI and Communication Specialist), Funeral Director and NHS Administrator. Coming late to university, Nick’s prefered proverb is: “Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid of standing still.”

  • What Does it Mean to be Happy: Week 4

    Nick Gellatly

    How economists think about happiness

    Boots

    On of the most useful things in this week’s session was not from an economist. It came from Nic Gibson in the chat, and it was Terry Pratchett.

    In Men at Arms, Sam Vimes works out why the rich are so rich. A good pair of leather boots costs fifty dollars and lasts ten years. Cheap boots cost ten dollars and are leaking by the autumn. So the man who can afford fifty dollars has dry feet for a decade, and the man who cannot has spent a hundred dollars over the same period and still has wet socks.

    It is a joke, and it is also the entire week in miniature. Poverty is expensive. Money buys more than things, it buys the ability to make the economical choice. Any account of happiness that treats income as simply a number has missed the mechanism.

    This week asked how economists think about happiness, which turns out to be a question about what we count, who does the counting, and what happens when the counting stops.

    What the economists did

    Dr Imko Meyenburg’s lecture traced a shift in method. Traditional economics inferred welfare from choices. It watched what people bought and how they worked, assumed they were maximising utility, and read happiness from what people were able to buy. The economics of happiness does something simpler and stranger: it asks people.

    Large surveys now collect self-reported life satisfaction and treat it as a proxy for welfare. It is a broader measure than consumption and a softer one, and the whole field lives in that trade-off.

    What the evidence says about money. Income matters, and it matters most where it relieves poverty and meets basic needs. Beyond that, the returns diminish, for two reasons this module has met before. Hedonic adaptation means we get used to improvements. Social comparison means satisfaction depends on where we stand relative to other people rather than on what we have in absolute terms.

    What else matters. Health, stable employment, secure relationships, freedom, trust and economic stability. Unemployment, inflation, divorce and insecurity all reduce wellbeing. None of these is a mood, and most of them are conditions rather than choices.

    The Easterlin paradox (also mentioned in the comments) sits at the centre of the field. Within a country at any given moment, richer people report greater life satisfaction. Over the long run, as a country’s average income rises substantially, its average happiness stays broadly flat. Easterlin observed this in the United States in 1974 and it has been argued about ever since.

    The leading explanation is social comparison. If everyone’s income rises together, nobody gains relative standing, so the collective gain is smaller than the individual one appeared to promise. Adaptation is the second explanation: the lift from extra money fades as the new standard becomes normal.

    It is worth being honest that this is contested rather than settled. Newer research does find that richer countries tend to be happier on average, and some economists think the long-run relationship is weaker or more complicated than Easterlin first claimed. What survives the argument is narrower and still important: growth does not automatically convert into wellbeing, and how growth is shared may matter as much as how much of it there is.

    I am glad I am not studying economics. It is more complicated than I expected, and rather more interesting.

    So how happy are we?

    The seminar asked how happy people are in your country, which sent me to the data afterwards.

    The Office for National Statistics has asked the same four questions since 2011, each scored from nought to ten. How satisfied are you with your life nowadays. To what extent do you feel the things you do are worthwhile. How happy did you feel yesterday. How anxious did you feel yesterday. The first three run the way you expect. Anxiety is scored so that lower is better, which catches people out.

    The last full annual release, for the year ending March 2023, reported life satisfaction at 7.45, worthwhile at 7.73, happiness yesterday at 7.39 and anxiety yesterday at 3.23. All four had moved in the wrong direction on the previous year and all four were below pre-pandemic levels. Nearly one adult in four, 23.4 per cent, reported high anxiety.

    What drives it is the part that matters for this module. The ONS regression puts self-reported health a long way ahead of everything else, then marital status, then employment and education. Disabled adults reported poor wellbeing at roughly five times the rate of non-disabled adults. The ONS is also admirably honest that its models explain only between 11 and 22 per cent of the variation between people, so most of what moves a life is not in the data at all.

    And then the thing I did not expect.

    That release is from November 2023. There has not been another one.

    In October 2024 statistics from the Annual Population Survey lost their accredited status because of problems with response rates, and the ONS paused the Personal Well-being in the UK publication. Quarterly headline estimates continue, but the detailed annual picture, with all the breakdowns by characteristic, has not appeared for nearly three years. The What Works Centre for Wellbeing, which existed to turn this evidence into policy, closed in April 2024 because nobody would fund it.

    So the honest answer to how happy people are in the UK is that we used to know, roughly, and we have rather stopped checking. For a module about what happiness means, that is not a footnote. It is the story.

    Which country, though

    The seminar discussion turned on country of origin, which made me set out a position I usually leave vague. I am an Anglo-Scot. Born in Scotland to a Scottish father and an English mother, educated in Edinburgh, living in Cambridgeshire, with the family home still in Edinburgh. When someone asks how happy people are in my country, so I looked at both.

    The scores are almost the same. Scotland tracks the UK closely on the ONS measures, and the differences between the four nations are small and mostly not statistically significant. In the last full year wellbeing fell in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and rose slightly in Scotland, but only England’s change was statistically significant, and the devolved nations have smaller samples and wider uncertainty. Anyone telling you Scotland is measurably happier than England is overreading the evidence, and I say that as someone who would quite like it to be true.

    The frameworks are not the same at all. Scotland has had a National Performance Framework since 2007, aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, with national outcomes rather than growth targets as the stated purpose of government. It is a founding member of the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership alongside Iceland, New Zealand, Finland and Wales, and it publishes a Wellbeing Economy Monitor. On paper it is one of the more serious attempts anywhere to govern by something other than GDP.

    And then the gap. The promised Wellbeing and Sustainable Development Bill was in the Scottish Government’s 2021-22 programme, consulted on in 2024, and not brought forward. It eventually reached Parliament in March 2025 as a member’s bill from Sarah Boyack MSP, creating a duty on public bodies to have due regard for wellbeing and sustainable development, and establishing a Future Generations Commissioner. WEAll Scotland’s own assessment is that progress has stalled and that Scotland risks falling behind an agenda it helped start.

    The comparison is useful because it flatters nobody. Scotland has the better framework and roughly the same outcomes. Either frameworks do not do very much, or this one was never given teeth. I suspect the second, and the difference between due regard and a duty to deliver is exactly where it was lost.

    Wales, meanwhile, has had the statutory duty and the Commissioner since 2015, and is the only part of these islands where the question has an answer with legal force behind it.

    The people who are not in the data

    The third comparison I wanted was LGBTQ+ wellbeing against the general population. What I found was mostly an absence.

    The ONS first broke wellbeing down by sexual identity in 2017, using three years of data. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people rated themselves lower than heterosexual people on life satisfaction, worthwhile and happiness, and higher on anxiety. Bisexual people had the widest gap, with around 30 per cent reporting high anxiety against 19.5 per cent of heterosexual people. People who answered “other”, or declined to answer, also reported lower wellbeing than average. A later meta-analysis of twelve UK population health surveys found the same pattern, and research here at ARU found older LGB people reporting lower quality of life than their heterosexual peers even after adjusting for other factors.

    That 2017 article is nine years old. There is no equivalent series that has been kept up. The 2018 National LGBT Survey, with 108,000 responses, has not been repeated. Trans people appear in almost no official wellbeing statistics at all, because sample sizes in general population surveys are too small, which means the evidence base is charity research rather than official data. And the ONS release that would carry these breakdowns is the one currently paused.

    The context has not stood still while the measuring did. Police recorded 19,127 sexual orientation hate crimes and 3,809 transgender identity hate crimes in England and Wales in the year ending March 2025, down 2 and 11 per cent on the year before. Those falls are harder to celebrate than they look. The Government’s own National LGBT Survey found that fewer than one in ten LGBTQ+ people report hate crimes, and Stonewall argues that falling reports partly reflect falling trust in the police rather than falling hatred. The figures also predate the April 2025 Supreme Court judgment, and Stonewall reports a rise in fear in the period after it. In February 2026 the Government tabled an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to make anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime an aggravated offence.

    So: we know LGBTQ+ people report lower wellbeing. We do not know by how much today, because nobody is checking. A group whose wellbeing gap is attributed to discrimination, and whose data collection then quietly lapses, is a worked example of the question this module keeps returning to. Whose happiness counts? Apparently the happiness of people we are still counting.

    Who decides what counts as progress

    The group activity asked who decides what counts as progress, and whether happiness is political. Four weeks ago I would have said the first was a technical question. It is not.

    Statisticians decide what is measured. The four ONS questions were a choice. They capture how life feels from the inside, which means they cannot see what Sen and Nussbaum call capabilities, what a person is actually able to do and be. They also cannot see adaptation. Somebody who has lowered their expectations may report contentment with a life that is objectively constrained, which is Felicity from Week 2 turning up in a dataset.

    Statisticians also decide what stops being measured, and that is the quieter power. The LGB breakdown has not been refreshed since 2017. The annual release is paused. The What Works Centre is gone. Each decision was defensible on its own terms. Together they are a choice about which inequalities stay visible.

    Governments decide what the numbers are for. New Labour said in 1998 that wellbeing would steer policy. David Cameron launched the ONS programme in 2010. But a measure with no duty attached is a dashboard, not a lever. Wales has the duty. Scotland has the framework. Westminster has neither.

    International bodies decide the league table. The World Happiness Report, published under UN auspices since 2012, ranks countries on a single life-evaluation question. It made wellbeing globally legible and simultaneously made it competitive, which is a strange thing to do to an emotion. As Seymour pointed out in last week’s reading, an idea inspired by Buddhist Bhutan arrived wearing the measurement culture it was meant to replace.

    Media and platforms decide what registers as a problem. A ranking is a story. A pause in a statistical series is not. Which is why you have heard about one and not the other.

    And the people being measured decide almost nothing. Carnegie UK made exactly this criticism of Scotland’s framework: people have not been asked what wellbeing means to them, or what they think should be counted.

    Is happiness political? Unarguably, and the history settles it. Seymour’s chapter traces happiness from providential gift to political project, written into the American Declaration and the French Revolution, then claimed in turn by liberalism, communism and fascism, each with its own account of how human beings ought to flourish. Under Stalin, failing to notice the happiness conferred by Soviet citizenship became effectively a political crime. Mussolini and the Nazis both organised leisure in the service of the state. The idea that happiness is a private matter is itself a political position, and a recent one.

    The current framings line up roughly like this. Neoliberalism treats happiness as individual and best served by growth and free choice, which critics such as Davies, Cabanas and Illouz argue converts structural problems into personal failings. Environmentalism treats it as capped by planetary limits, which raises the question of who bears the cost of staying inside them. Nationalism treats it as belonging and continuity, which takes social connection more seriously than most and is also the framing most prone to deciding that some people’s belonging requires other people’s exclusion. Populism treats it as something stolen by an elite, which names real losses of control and status and rarely addresses their causes.

    Edoardo. In the breakout room I talked with Edoardo, an Italian student here at ARU. He said he feels welcome in this country and is frightened of Reform.

    So am I.

    That is the conversation I keep thinking about, because it will not appear in any dataset. Two people, from different countries and possibly different generations, describing the same concern. The ONS can tell you that anxiety is running at 23.4 per cent. It cannot tell you that a cheerful Italian student and a late-career Anglo-Scot sat in a Teams breakout room and recognised each other’s fear immediately.

    I want to be careful about the question of people supporting policies against their own interests, because the phrase assumes I know someone’s interests better than they do. The research offers a few answers: status threat predicts support for radical-right politics better than income does, people weigh loyalty and belonging alongside material self-interest, and grievance is vivid in a way that structural explanation never is. All true. It is also true that people may simply value sovereignty or cultural continuity above GDP, and calling that false consciousness is both condescending and a way of avoiding the argument. What I will say plainly is the narrower point: LGBTQ+ wellbeing is unusually sensitive to political weather. The Home Office itself has suggested that increased public discussion of trans issues contributed to recorded hate crime. For some of us, happiness is not political in the abstract. It is political most weeks.

    Growth, or something else

    The lecture’s policy implication is that GDP growth alone is an incomplete measure of national success. Bhutan is the standing example of the alternative.

    Gross National Happiness rests on four pillars, sustainable and equitable development, cultural preservation, environmental protection and good governance, measured across nine domains including psychological wellbeing, health, education, time use, community vitality, living standards and ecological resilience. The important move is that it treats happiness as a public policy outcome rather than a private mood. An economy should serve health, community, nature, fairness and freedom as well as income.

    It also comes with a warning that I think matters more than the model. Bhutan’s GNH has been criticised for allowing cultural preservation to justify exclusionary policy. So the transferable part is the method, broad multidimensional measurement, and not the assumption that a national happiness agenda is automatically a progressive one. A country can measure its collective wellbeing carefully and still decide that some people are outside the collective.

    Which is the strongest argument I have found this term for measuring minorities separately. A national average can disappear a minority entirely. If Scotland combined its existing framework with explicit equality monitoring, that would be the serious version.

    Should nations prioritise happiness over economic growth?

    The case for is the Easterlin paradox, the fact that GDP counts a traffic jam and a hospital stay as positives, and the existence of working alternatives in Bhutan, Wales and New Zealand that have not collapsed. Ruskin got there first and more briefly: there is no wealth but life.

    The case against deserves better than a straw man. Growth pays for the health service, and health is the single strongest predictor in the ONS data, so a country that stops growing may find its wellbeing policy unaffordable. The 2023 adversarial collaboration between Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers largely overturned the idea of an income plateau, which weakens the strongest version of the Easterlin case. Wellbeing measures are softer than GDP and easier to game, and a government graded on how people say they feel has an incentive to manage the mood rather than the conditions. There is even a democratic objection: GDP does not pretend to tell you what a good life is, whereas a wellbeing framework necessarily does.

    My answer is that the dichotomy is the wrong shape. The question is not growth or happiness. It is what growth is for, and whether anything other than growth carries a legal duty. On present evidence the UK has neither a wellbeing duty nor functioning wellbeing statistics, which means it is not currently asking the question at all.

    What this does to the café

    Queerly Beloved Café has a date. Monday 30 November, and the room booking form has gone in. I’m hoping it will be confirmed soon.

    The date carries three things at once, which is more than I planned and better than I deserved. It is St Andrew’s Day, which sits rather well with a week that made me declare myself an Anglo-Scot in a Teams breakout room. It is the first Monday of Advent, the season of waiting in the dark for something that has not arrived yet, and the one stretch of the church year that does not ask anybody to be cheerful. And it is the eve of World AIDS Day.

    That last one changes the quiet corner. I had been defending it as a hedge against toxic positivity, somewhere for people finding December hard. On the night before World AIDS Day, in a room built for queer joy, a corner with a chair and a candle is not a caveat. It is the point. A community that has buried a generation does not need to be told that joy and grief belong in the same room. The first of December itself was not available, because I am part of a live brief with the Immersive Storytelling module that day, and I find I prefer the eve anyway. Vigils happen the night before.

    The data changes something else. I have been arguing since Week 1 that belonging is a structural answer to unhappiness rather than a personal resilience one. The ONS backs that up from an unexpected direction, since health, relationships and security do the heavy lifting while individual mindset barely features. But the stronger claim is now available. The state has stopped counting LGBTQ+ wellbeing. The last proper look was 2017. So when the noticeboard asks people to send back a photograph, a poem, a complaint or a line on a card, that is a small, unscientific, hopelessly self-selecting act of counting. All those caveats stand. It is still more than is currently happening nationally.

    Carnegie UK’s criticism of Scotland’s framework was that people had not been asked what wellbeing means to them. In this room, they will be. I need to write a questionnaire for attendees before the evening, covering what happiness means to them and whether the night did what it set out to do, to sit alongside the photographs, the film and the audio.

    And the GNH caveat keeps me honest about my own project. A happiness agenda is not automatically a generous one, and a room that defines belonging can define people out of it just as easily as in. The welcome has to be unconditional in belief and clear about conduct, which remains the hardest design problem I have.

    One line from all this that I think is the truest thing I have written this term: the state has stopped counting us, so we will have to count ourselves, and we will do it with cake.

    References

    Carnegie UK (2024) Exploring Scotland’s National Outcomes. Dunfermline: Carnegie UK. Available at: https://carnegieuk.org (Accessed: 14 October 2026).

    Easterlin, R.A. (1974) ‘Does economic growth improve the human lot? Some empirical evidence’, in David, P.A. and Reder, M.W. (eds.) Nations and households in economic growth. New York: Academic Press, pp. 89-125.

    Home Office (2025) Hate crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2025. London: Home Office. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hate-crime-england-and-wales-year-ending-march-2025 (Accessed: 14 October 2026).

    Killingsworth, M.A., Kahneman, D. and Mellers, B. (2023) ‘Income and emotional well-being: a conflict resolved’, PNAS, 120(10). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2208661120.

    Meyenburg, I. (2026) ‘How economists think about happiness’. Lecture delivered as part of the Ruskin Module MOD010539, Anglia Ruskin University, 14 October.

    Office for National Statistics (2017) Lesbian, gay and bisexual people say they experience a lower quality of life. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/sexuality/articles/lesbiangayandbisexualpeoplesaytheyexperiencealowerqualityoflife/2017-07-05 (Accessed: 14 October 2026).

    Office for National Statistics (2023) Personal well-being in the UK: April 2022 to March 2023. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/measuringnationalwellbeing/april2022tomarch2023 (Accessed: 14 October 2026).

    Pratchett, T. (1993) Men at Arms. London: Victor Gollancz.

    Royal Government of Bhutan (no date) Gross National Happiness. Available at: https://www.mfa.gov.bt/rbedelhi/bhutan-at-glance/gross-national-happiness/ (Accessed: 14 October 2026).

    Ruskin, J. (1862) Unto this last: four essays on the first principles of political economy. London: Smith, Elder and Co.

    Scottish Parliament (2025) Wellbeing and Sustainable Development (Scotland) Bill. SPICe briefing SB 25-48. Available at: https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/research-prepared-for-parliament/research-briefings/2025/10/8/sb-2548 (Accessed: 14 October 2026).

    Seymour, M. (2023) ‘Global happiness: from providential moments to hedonic treadmills?’, in Barclay, K. and Stearns, P.N. (eds.) The Routledge history of emotions in the modern world. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 29-43.

    Stonewall (2026) Hate crime. Available at: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/shaping-policy/hate-crime (Accessed: 14 October 2026).

    Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford, Gallup and UN SDSN (2026) World happiness report 2026. Available at: https://data.worldhappiness.report/table (Accessed: 14 October 2026).

    Illustrations for this series are made in Canva, in a flat vector style borrowed from broadsheet long-read journalism. There are no people in any of them, which is deliberate: a module about who gets pictured as happy is not well served by stock photographs of contented strangers. AI tools were used for research, drafting support and image generation. The words, the arguments and the responsibility are mine.

  • Immersive Storytelling: Week 3 (Part 2)

    Nick Gellatly

    3D or not 3D

    After the visit to the Sedgwick Museum, I was fairly certain – despite the change of tack due to which of Darwin’s artefacts are where – that I could make the best immersive experience using an audio format. This is because I audio has always been my favourite format. I have listened to the radio for many years (even listening furtively under the covers as a child), The Archers is the only ‘soap’ I have consistently been part of for more than 40 years and more recently I have become a huge fan of podcasts and listen to many podcasts each day.

    One of the AI tools I use for my projects is ‘Notebook LM’ which is a place where I store all of my research documents and even links to this blog. One of the tools available is that the app can create a variety of different atrefacts based on the data one adds to the project. I asked Notebook to create a ‘podcast’ which, I think, eloquently explains the pivotal moment which led to the project I am now working on, it’s called: ‘Hidden Queer History at the Sedgwick Museum. You can listen to it here:

    Please note that there are a couple of alternative pronunciations of my surname in the podcast. May give me a couple of stage name ideas should fame come-a-calling!

    Sedgwick Museum Development Log

    I have always been a fan of lists and regularly create both digital (mainly on email) and real-life (on the back of an envelope usually as fag packets have fallen from grace) lists. I call it TDL – which stands for ‘To Do List’. I have been doing that for this project too but this week’s second session called for a more formalised approach in the form of a Development Log. I have no doubt that I will update this before the end of this project – and my printed copy already has lots of notes and assorted scribbles on it – but here is the first version of the log:

    261008 Sedgwick Museum Dev Log – Nick GellatlyDownload

    Image: Development Log with added notes

    In the beginning was the word …

    In the Beginning Was the Word: an immersive audio play for the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. As you will know, if you listened to the podcast above, I have created an immersive audio experience which is based on the fact that I have found – through attending the Pride Month edition of ‘Bridging Binaries’ over the summer – though it took place outside pride month itself due to the excess heat of June and July. It builds upon that based on all I have seen and read about the exhibits and I can clear see – and want to celebrate – the queer lives running through the collection. For good measure there are also in the museum religious connections – Adam Sedgwick was himself a priest, and a Scottish connection via Adam Lyell. Scottish Queer Faith are three of the key threads that run through my practice and gave me a real sense of energy in doing a good job with this project.

    To date, I have outlined a story that begins with the word ‘scientist’ coined by William Whewell (after whom the Whewell Mineral Gallery is named) and ending with the word ‘gay’ taken from the title of the shop co-founded by the museum’s very own Jonathan Cutbill – ‘Gay’s the Word’ (I can highly recommend the first chapter of ‘Part Five – Rough Trade’ in A.J. West’s book ‘How Queer Bookshops Changed the World’ for the full story of this iconic and ground-breaking shop.

    Given my love of puns, queerness and interest in faith, this is why I chose the title: ‘In the Beginning Was the Word’

    A synopsis

    Image: The cast of ‘In the Beginning’ created with Gemini

    Ultimately, and for the pitching session in November, I’d like to create a handout of some description which outlines the full immersive experience I am seeking to create. Ideally, picking up on the challenge set my Dr Liz during the fact finding mission, I’d like this project to become one that draws queer people to the museum as one of their first choices when visiting Cambridge. The concept of an audio experience is so that people can visit at any time, can do so discreetly and no-one is required to come out in any way in order to experience ‘In the Beginning’. However, there will be ways in which people can identify themselves in subtle and discreet ways to others within the community and, as part of this process, I have designed – and had printed – stickers which people may wish to wear while visiting the museum.

    In brief, the story you will hear starts when you step through the door of the Sedgwick Museum, put in your earbuds, and meet Mr Norman Flint. He’s the museum porter, with a mustard overall, forty years’ service and a voice that could make a volcano sound like a parish notice. He leads you, very slowly, to the minerals.

    Then something cracks. Out of the gem cases steps Crystal Formation, a drag queen made of minerals, four and a half billion years old and “never once had work done”. She sends Norman off for a cup of tea and takes over the tour.

    What follows is a walk through sixty-seven million years, with a simple argument: queer was always here. You meet SUE, a T. rex now known as they/them. Then Anna Gurney, a disabled lesbian fossil hunter who chose the words “partners and chosen Sisters” for the grave she shared. A young Charles Darwin is delighted by a barnacle with two little husbands. Baron Nopcsa nearly became King of Albania and spent thirty years with his “secretary”. And Mary Anning’s real love affair turns out to be with fossil poo.

    In one ear you hear the official record. In the other, the life behind it. A geologist’s hammer taps each time history falls silent, and a half-remembered tune grows louder with every step.

    At the end of the long gallery waits Jonathan Cutbill, who catalogued this museum and then co-founded Gay’s the Word bookshop. For the first time, both ears agree.

    And Norman? It turns out he has a story too.

    Over the past few hours, I have been experimenting with ElevenLabs – which I first used for a ‘Joseph and His Amazing Electric Dreamcoat’ project in the first semester of Year 1. I have created a first attempt at the opening scene – in this clip Norman and Crystal feature – but there are no sound effects or visitor instructions added at this stage – these will all come as the project evolves:

  • Immersive Storytelling: Week3 (Part 1)

    Nick Gellatly

    360 Degree Worlds – Going Full Circle

    360-degree cameras, table tennis and a room with no corners.

    This week’s session was all about 360-degree photography, and the camera that does it. The idea is simple enough: instead of choosing where to point a camera, you capture everything at once and decide later what the viewer should look at. In practice it means there is nowhere to hide!

    Two teams, thirty minutes

    We split into two teams and had half an hour to capture footage, playing with angles and perspectives. The brief was to keep clips to around twenty seconds, because 360 files are large and take an age to download. This You Tube video gives an example of the ‘Insta 360’ camera in use:

    I haven’t used 3d photography or videography before but have seen some of the (rather bizarre) videos of Francis Bourgeois who has become famous due to his 3d footage of himself running after – and squealing with joy at – trains and railway related material. His close-up, wide-angle filming style has become his signature and launched a remarkable career. He isn’t using 360 cameras on his Grand Tour gig, but the lesson is the same: an odd angle, used with confidence, becomes a style.

    Channelling our inner Marty Supreme

    For the second experiment we took the cameras outside for a game of table tennis. I’d like to say we were channelling our inner Marty Supreme. In reality the hustle was minimal, the footwork was questionable, and the ball spent more time on the ground than on the table. Katie and Kennedy stitched the footage together, and the result puts you right in the middle of the rally, which is rather more exciting than it was to play.

    Into the Igloo

    We also visited the Igloo room, an immersive space where footage wraps all the way around you. It’s one thing to drag a 360 video around on a phone screen, and quite another to stand inside it. The edges disappear, and you stop watching and start being somewhere.

    Two examples worth watching

    We looked at a National Geographic 360 film, which shows how the format can take an audience somewhere most of us could never go ourselves.

    The second example, EMPEROR, is something else entirely. It’s an interactive virtual reality story in which you travel with a daughter into the mind of her father, who has aphasia. His inner world is drawn as a hand-sketched, black and white landscape. It uses immersion not for spectacle but for empathy: you are placed inside an experience that words have made hard to share.

    What I’m taking from it

    My Sedgwick project is built on sound rather than vision, so I won’t be strapping a 360 camera to Crystal Formation (look out for more information about Crystal – coming soon!) just yet. But today was a useful reminder of what immersion is for. EMPEROR doesn’t put you inside a brain to show off the technology. It does it so you understand someone. That’s the test I want every choice in my audio play to pass.

    There’s also a practical idea worth keeping in my back pocket. A 360 capture of the mineral gallery could let people who can’t visit the museum stand among the crystals while they listen. Accessibility, with added sparkle.

    Our Videos

    Katie, Kennedy, Ivanusa, Quinn and myself made the table tennis 360 videos – see the links below for the original videos edited by Katie:

  • What Does It Mean to be Happy: Week 3

    Nick Gellatly

    The Smile Has a History

    This week’s session began with a deceptively simple question: are emotions natural, or do we learn them?

    The most convincing answer seems to be both. Biology gives us capacities and dispositions, but our families, cultures and communities teach us how to recognise emotions, how to name them, when to display them and when to keep them hidden. We do not simply feel emotions; we learn how to perform them.

    Dr Joe Harley’s lecture on the history of emotions developed this argument through happiness, melancholy, smiling and consumption. The central idea was that emotions have histories. They are not merely biological reactions wearing different cultural costumes. Their meanings, expressions and social acceptability change over time.

    That matters because emotions do things. Fear, resentment, hope, grief and collective joy are not decorative details added to historical events afterwards. They influence how people act, what communities tolerate and what societies choose to change.

    The smile has a date

    Smiling feels instinctive. We tend to respond when someone smiles at us, sometimes before consciously deciding to do so. Yet even the smile has a social history.

    Colin Jones’s The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris examines a period when showing one’s teeth in polite society could be considered vulgar. An open-mouthed smile was associated with laughter, lack of control and the lower orders. During the eighteenth century, developments in dentistry, portraiture and cultures of sensibility helped make the visible-toothed smile an acceptable expression of warmth and sincerity.

    This does not mean that people had never smiled before. It means that societies changed the circumstances in which particular smiles could be shown, represented and interpreted.

    We also discussed the facial-feedback hypothesis: the possibility that forming a smile can affect how we feel. The familiar classroom version involves holding a pencil in the mouth to activate muscles associated with smiling. More recent research offers some support for facial feedback when people deliberately imitate or form expressions, although the evidence for the pencil method itself is less conclusive.

    This is a useful reminder that an emotion cannot always be separated neatly into an inner feeling and an outward expression. Sometimes expression follows emotion; sometimes it reinforces it; and sometimes a smile is used to reassure, appease or conceal rather than to communicate happiness.

    From providence to personal responsibility

    Mark Seymour’s history of global happiness unsettles the word itself. The English word is related to hap: chance, fortune or what happens to us. Happiness was once understood more readily as something received, perhaps through divine providence, rather than a condition each person was expected to manufacture.

    During the eighteenth century, happiness moved increasingly from heaven to earth. Philosophers and political thinkers began to treat it as a legitimate human pursuit and, eventually, a concern of government. The American Declaration of Independence famously named the pursuit of happiness as a right, while utilitarian thinkers attempted to turn happiness into a political calculation.

    This history leads to a less comfortable modern development. If happiness has changed from a gift into a project, unhappiness can be interpreted as personal failure. We are no longer merely permitted to pursue happiness; we can feel obliged to achieve it, demonstrate it and remain visibly positive.

    Modern happiness surveys and international rankings continue this history of measurement. They can help governments take wellbeing seriously, but measurement also introduces comparison. Happiness becomes another table in which countries—and perhaps individuals—can succeed or fall behind.

    Seymour’s account is particularly valuable because it recovers alternatives that the dominant English-language concept can obscure. Tim Lomas similarly explores words from other languages that express forms of wellbeing for which English has no simple equivalent. A culture’s emotional vocabulary does not merely describe experience; it can help make different experiences imaginable.

    Melancholy, depression and masculinity

    The history of melancholy provides an especially clear example of emotions being shaped by social judgement.

    Melancholy was once explained through the bodily theory of the four humours, particularly an excess of black bile. It could also be understood through religion, supernatural influence, social position or perceived weakness. Men who expressed sadness might be judged effeminate, with their emotion treated as evidence of a defective character rather than a response to experience.

    The word depression existed long before the twentieth century, but its modern medical use emerged gradually. In 1905, the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer proposed using it more broadly in place of melancholia. The history is therefore more complicated than one term suddenly replacing another on a particular date.

    This part of the lecture felt personally recognisable. When I was growing up, boys were commonly told not to cry, to “man up” or to “grow a pair.” Those phrases did not remove fear, sadness or vulnerability. They taught boys which feelings could safely be displayed.

    The consequences do not disappear in adulthood. If someone has been taught that sadness is weakness, asking for help may feel like failure. The emotion remains, but the language and permission needed to express it have been taken away.

    Buying happiness

    The lecture then turned from smiling to shopping. Retail therapy may sound modern, but arguments about consumption, luxury and happiness are centuries old.

    Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees developed the deliberately provocative proposition that “private vices” could produce “public benefits.” Vanity, luxury and self-interest might be morally questionable, yet the spending they generated could support employment and economic activity. The paradox is that behaviour condemned in an individual may contribute to the prosperity of the wider economy.

    The debate continues whenever we distinguish between needs and wants. Consumption can provide pleasure, comfort, creativity and participation. It can also create waste, debt, comparison and a perpetual feeling that what we possess is insufficient.

    Our discussion connected these ideas with Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, whose seductive abundance has often been read through Victorian cultures of consumption and desire. It also brought to mind Terry Pratchett’s “Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness” in Men at Arms. A person without much money repeatedly buys cheap boots that wear out, while a richer person can buy one durable pair and ultimately spend less. Poverty restricts access not only to possessions but to the economical choices that wealth makes possible.

    Alexis de Tocqueville noticed a related contradiction in nineteenth-century England. He encountered an extraordinarily wealthy society alongside extensive pauperism. As more goods became available, people without access to them could experience their deprivation more sharply. This anticipates modern work on social comparison: wellbeing is affected not only by what we have, but by what we see others having.

    Which emotions are permitted?

    In the seminar, we listed ten negative emotions:

    Sadness, anger, fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, loneliness, jealousy, disgust and frustration.

    We then listed ten positive emotions:

    Joy, love, contentment, gratitude, hope, excitement, pride, amusement, serenity and belonging.

    The more interesting question was not how many words we could produce, but which emotions society permits us to express.

    The answer changes according to age, gender, culture, status and setting. Pride may be understood as healthy confidence in one context and boastfulness in another. Direct eye contact may communicate honesty and respect, or it may be inappropriate when directed towards an older person or someone in authority. Fear may be discussed openly as a reasonable response, or concealed because strength has been defined as appearing unafraid.

    Grief may be publicly permitted, but often only for a limited period. My experience in funeral work taught me that society can be generous towards visible mourning immediately after a death and noticeably less comfortable with grief that continues months or years later. The bereaved person has not necessarily changed; the social permission surrounding them has.

    There is also a queer dimension to this. Permission to express emotion has never been distributed equally. Affection that appears unremarkable between a heterosexual couple can still attract attention or hostility when expressed between two men or two women. LGBTQ+ people may have to assess the safety of a room before displaying tenderness, anxiety, grief or joy.

    The question is therefore not simply, “What do I feel?” It is also, “What am I allowed to feel here—and who decided?”

    What this means for the café

    This week helped me see the proposed Queerly Beloved café differently.

    My initial thoughts were practical: books, coffee, conversation, information, community and a queer-safe environment. We could create a noticeboard, work with the Students’ Union, perhaps establish a Queerly Beloved Society, and use a joint event both for this module and as a café launch.

    The history of emotions gives those ideas a stronger foundation. If emotions are learned and practised socially, then the design of a room matters. Furniture, lighting, hospitality, shared rituals and the way people are greeted can affect which feelings become possible.

    Creating a space that encourages belonging is not about manufacturing compulsory happiness. It is about creating permission: permission to talk, to sit quietly, to grieve, to laugh, to ask for help or simply to be present without performing cheerfulness.

    It also reinforces my idea of including a grief corner. Public spaces often welcome celebration more easily than sorrow. A small area containing appropriate books, information and a comfortable chair would recognise that grief is not a failure of wellbeing. It is part of a human life in which something or someone has mattered.

    This provides an important distinction between happiness and hospitality. A café cannot promise to make everyone happy. It can help create the conditions in which people feel safe enough to experience and express a fuller emotional life.

    Perhaps that is the real project emerging from this module: not a room where everyone must smile, but one where nobody has to pretend.

    References

    Coles, N.A. et al. (2022) ‘A multi-lab test of the facial feedback hypothesis by the Many Smiles Collaboration’, Nature Human Behaviour, 6, pp. 1731–1742. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01458-9

    Harley, J. (2026) ‘The History of Emotions and Happiness’. Lecture delivered as part of the Ruskin Module, Anglia Ruskin University, 7 October.

    Jones, C. (2014) The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Lomas, T. (2018) Translating Happiness: A Cross-Cultural Lexicon of Well-Being. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262037488.001.0001

    Mandeville, B. (1714) The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits.

    Pratchett, T. (1993) Men at Arms. London: Victor Gollancz.

    Rossetti, C. (1862) ‘Goblin Market’, in Goblin Market and Other Poems. Cambridge: Macmillan.

    Seymour, M. (2023) ‘Global Happiness: From Providential Moments to Hedonic Treadmills?’, in Barclay, K. and Stearns, P.N. (eds.) The Routledge History of Emotions in the Modern World. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 29–43.

    Tocqueville, A. de (1835) Memoir on Pauperism. A modern edition is available in Henderson, C.D. (ed. and trans.) (2021), Memoirs on Pauperism and Other Writings: Poverty, Public Welfare, and Inequality. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

    World Happiness Report (2022) ‘Exploring the Biological Basis for Happiness’, World Happiness Report 2022, Chapter 5. Available at: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2022/exploring-the-biological-basis-for-happiness/

  • Motion Graphics: Week 3

    Nick Gellatly

    Pre Production

    This week was the point where My Beautiful Laundrette stopped being the film I had chosen and started being a motion graphics project. The emphasis was on pre-production: understanding the story, deciding what my titles need to communicate, storyboarding, thinking about sound, and starting to build a consistent visual language.

    One thing I am learning is that pre-production is not the bit before the creative work starts. It is the creative work.

    What am I actually trying to say?

    I went back to the film. Rather than treating the title sequence as a chance to make attractive graphics involving washing machines, I wanted to understand what sits underneath the story.

    I read a number of online synopses of the film – from the time of original release as well as more contemporary views.

    The last of these was a summary published on You Tube (Dr Sonal’s Literature Lab)

    At its simplest, the film is about Omar, a young British Pakistani in south London, who takes over a failing laundrette and brings in Johnny, his old schoolfriend and sometime lover, to help turn it into Powders. Around them are family expectations, racism, Thatcherite enterprise, property, money, drugs, and Johnny’s involvement with a racist skinhead gang.

    The more useful question became how a title sequence might introduce those ideas without explaining them. Which led to the metaphor the whole thing now rests on: put Britain through the wash.

    The machine can hold all of it. Money, Britishness, race, Thatcherism, Johnny’s past, family, the illicit economy, and the two of them in the middle. Then it can fail to hold it. That gave me a beginning, a middle and an end.

    I created the following synopsis:

    A Synopsis of My Beautiful Laundrette (image created with PowerPoint)

    Ninety seconds

    The storyboard now runs to about a minute and a half. I am not trying to compress the plot into that. I am trying to compress the meaning.

    It starts simply. A pound coin spins in darkness and drops into an old machine. The coin starts the wash and, with it, the story. Money matters in this film: property, enterprise, aspiration and survival circle the characters constantly.

    Then Britain goes in. Red, white and blue clothes tumble in the drum, joined by newspaper fragments, keys, pound notes and a whisky glass. These are the competing versions of Britain surrounding Omar: his uncle’s entrepreneurialism on one side, his father’s socialist ideals and disappointment on the other.

    A pair of skinhead boots crashes into the washing, which puts Johnny’s past in the sequence without recreating a scene from the film. Omar and Johnny then appear as reflections in the curved glass, drifting towards each other until they overlap.

    This is the kind of storytelling I want to try: objects, movement, colour and composition carrying the meaning, rather than illustrating dialogue.

    Getting into After Effects: Making an Artefact

    The second part of this week’s session moved away from planning and into making. This wasn’t about starting the final title sequence yet. Instead, the task was to get into After Effects and experiment: bring material in, put things on a timeline, change them, animate them and see what happened.

    That distinction was useful. I have a tendency to want to know what the finished thing is going to look like before I begin. This exercise encouraged almost the opposite approach: make something first and allow the process to suggest what it might become.

    Starting with something rather than nothing

    I already had a growing collection of visual experiments around My Beautiful Laundrette. My mood board had established some recurring ingredients: the circular washing-machine door, water and reflections, bubbles, money, red-white-and-blue fabric, South London and the contrast between an ordinary laundrette and an extraordinary inner world. I had also begun pushing those ideas away from straightforward illustration and towards something increasingly abstract. 261005 Motion Graphics Week 3

    So rather than opening After Effects and staring accusingly at a blank composition, I had material to play with.

    Image: Mood Board – created with Canva

    Image: Using Mood Board concepts, created with Runway

    The important line in my notes from this stage is:

    “Keep going to make it more and more abstract. Not every idea will make the final cut.” (261005 Motion Graphics Week 3)

    That is probably as important as anything technical I learned.

    Building rather than illustrating

    Once the image was inside After Effects, I began to understand the importance of thinking in layers.

    A still image might look complete, but motion graphics requires me to start dismantling it mentally. What could move independently? What could appear or disappear? What might rotate, scale, drift, blur or change opacity? What should remain completely still?

    The washing machine immediately suggested rotation. Water suggested movement and reflection. Bubbles could drift independently. Light could change. The circular door could reveal another image beneath it.

    Suddenly I wasn’t looking at a picture of a laundrette. I was looking at a collection of possible movements.

    That feels like a small but significant change in how I am beginning to think about motion graphics.

    Experiment first, tidy up later

    The exercise also gave me permission to make something that didn’t have to be good. That sounds ridiculous, but it is surprisingly liberating from my fear of all things Adobe.

    Rather than trying to reproduce my planned title sequence perfectly, I could test scale, position, timing, keyframes and transitions and discover what each did. Some movements were too fast. Some were too obvious. Some effects added absolutely nothing. Others produced possibilities I hadn’t anticipated.

    The point wasn’t necessarily to keep them. The point was to notice them.

    It made After Effects feel slightly less like an intimidating piece of professional software and more like a workshop bench: put something down, move it, break it, undo it and try something else.

    Story still matters

    Alongside the practical experiment, I went back to the synopsis of My Beautiful Laundrette. My notes show that happening almost literally alongside the After Effects work: research into the film sits next to screenshots of the software. (261005 Motion Graphics Week 3)

    Screenshots from After Effects Workshop:

    These images show a number of the steps I took during James’s workshop and how the final artefact began to emerge:

    The laundrette isn’t just an interesting visual location. It is where Omar and Johnny take something neglected and remake it. Around that transformation circulate money, race, class, family, sexuality, enterprise and belonging. (261005 Motion Graphics Week 3)

    So an animation of a washing machine spinning can be just that, a washing machine spinning.

    Or its contents can become Britain being put through the wash.

    That is the difference I am beginning to look for.

    Sound as motion

    The session also made me think much more seriously about audio. My notes ask what sound could drive the motion of My Beautiful Laundrette, rather than simply accompany it. (261005 Motion Graphics Week 3)

    That opens another experimental route.

    A coin drops.

    Clunk.

    The machine switches on.

    Click. Hum. Turn.

    The drum establishes a rhythm. Water enters. Clothes tumble. Mechanical sounds gradually become musical.

    Rather than finishing the animation and then putting music underneath it, I could potentially build some of the movement to the rhythm of the laundrette itself.

    My first artefact

    By the end of the exercise I had something on the After Effects timeline. The source artwork is no longer simply an image; it has entered a composition, with layers, properties, keyframes and time underneath it. (There is a You Tube video version below in case the embedded version does not function).

    My Imperfect Laundrette – made in After Effects on 05/10/2026

    This is the outcome of the exercise rather than a finished piece of motion graphics. I’m keeping it here because the roughness matters. It records the point at which the ideas I’ve been collecting about My Beautiful Laundrette actually began to move.

    The finished sequence can come later. I found this workshop really useful and while I am not confident that I can bring the finished item I have in my mind to reality, I believe I will be able to make a good effort to produce a title sequence worthy of this excellent film which means a lot to so many.

    For now, I made something move — and learned from what it did.

  • Immersive Storytelling: Week 2 (Part 3)

    Nick Gellatly

    Barnacles, Buses and the Word

    To pick up from Part 2, I thought I had a brilliant idea. It was called Complemental. It was an audio piece for the Sedgwick Museum, built around Charles Darwin’s eight-year obsession with barnacles. Darwin discovered tiny males living on larger hermaphrodite barnacles and called them “complemental males”. In print he described them carefully, as “singular sexual relations”. In a letter to a friend he was delighted by a female who kept “a little husband” in each of two pockets in her shell. The plan was one voice in your left ear and the other in your right. The listener would hear the gap between what a Victorian gentleman could publish and what he could say in private. I was very pleased with myself.

    Then I went to the Sedgwick.

    The wrong museum

    The Sedgwick, it turns out, is interested in Darwin the geologist. Rocks, fossils, the Beagle. The barnacles live across the road at the Museum of Zoology. And the museum for our module is fixed by ARU in, appropriately enough, tablets of stone.

    Darwin’s little husbands would have to stay at home.

    I’ll be honest: I was gutted. When you’ve fallen for an idea, you build the whole thing in your head before you’ve checked whether the building is the right one. It’s a lesson I to need to relearn every few years.

    The bus home

    So I sat on the bus feeling sorry for myself, with the museum’s LGBTQ+ trail leaflet on my knee. Somewhere between Cambridge and home, it began to dawn on me that the better story had been in my hand all afternoon.

    The museum’s Bridging Binaries trail already does what Complemental was trying to do. It reads letters, choice words and omissions. It asks whether a “secretary” was only a secretary. And its cast is extraordinary:

    • SUE, a 67-million-year-old T. rex, now known as they/them.
    • Anna Gurney, a disabled lesbian scholar who did fieldwork from her wheelchair and chose the words “partners and chosen Sisters” for her gravestone.
    • Franz Nopcsa, a flagrant dandy who very nearly became King of Albania.
    • Mary Anning, about whom everyone writes love stories, on no evidence at all.
    • Jonathan Cutbill, who put the Sedgwick’s collections on one of the first museum computers in the world, then co-founded Gay’s the Word, Britain’s first gay and lesbian bookshop.

    A dinosaur at one end and a bookshop at the other. Sixty-seven million years, and the queers were there all along.

    What survived

    By the time I got off the bus, the barnacles had become a single stop on a much bigger journey. The two-ear idea survived too. The public record plays in one ear and the private truth in the other, until at last, at Cutbill, both ears say the same thing.

    There was still a question nagging at me, and it’s the one that matters – in fact it was one that Dr Liz posed to us as students working on an Immersive Storytelling Module, “Once upon a time, people visited museums to learn, today we don’t have to do that, so what will encourage people to visit the Sedgwick Museum today?”. Why would a queer person choose a Victorian geology museum for a day out, rather than anything else? Part of the answer is in the stories. The rest, I suspect, will need a good deal of glitter.

    Sometimes the idea you love is a stepping stone to the one you need. Darwin would understand. He spent eight years on barnacles before he got round to the big book.

    Image: My Journey from Complemental to Crystals (created with Gemini)

    1. In the Beginning Was the Word

    Dusting off a Victorian museum, one sequin at a time.

    In Part 2 of this post, I left you on the bus home, with a museum leaflet on my knee and a question nagging at me. Why would a queer person choose a Victorian geology museum for a day out, rather than anything else?

    This week I think I found the answer. You don’t make the Sedgwick less of a museum. You make it a show.

    The idea

    In the Beginning Was the Word is an audio play you hear on your own phone and headphones as you walk the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. It runs for about twenty minutes, from a T. rex to Gay’s the Word, the Bloomsbury bookshop that changed queer life in Britain. Its argument is simple: over millions of years, queer was always here.

    The title is a joke with a halo. St John’s Gospel begins “In the beginning was the Word”. The play ends at a shop called Gay’s the Word. Somewhere in between, a Victorian institution gets the makeover of its life.

    It starts with a porter

    You walk in and meet Mr Norman Flint, museum porter. Mustard overall, hair like Einstein’s on a windy day, and a voice that could make a volcano sound like a parish notice. He leads you, slowly, to the minerals.

    And there, among the amethyst and quartz, something cracks. Out steps Crystal Formation, a drag queen made of minerals and four and a half billion years old, who has “never once had work done”. From here on, she’s your guide.

    I wanted the visitor to feel the change, not be told about it. The Porter is the museum everyone expects. Crystal is the one hiding in the cabinets.

    The cast

    Crystal takes you to meet the people from the museum’s own Bridging Binaries LGBTQ+ trail. There’s SUE, a they/them T. rex. Anna Gurney, a disabled lesbian fossil hunter who chose the words “partners and chosen Sisters” for her gravestone. A young Charles Darwin, far queerer than the textbooks ever let on. Baron Nopcsa, who nearly became King of Albania. Mary Anning, who, among many other things, worked out that some fossils were poo. And Jonathan Cutbill, who catalogued this museum on one of the first computers in the world, then co-founded Gay’s the Word.

    Why it works as immersive storytelling

    The trick is borrowed from the best television. When Russell T Davies brought Doctor Who back, he didn’t make it more educational. He made it funnier, faster and braver, and people learned more because they cared. That’s the ambition here: queer joy and laughter first, with the facts carried along on the current.

    A few devices do the heavy lifting. In one ear you hear the official record. In the other, the private life. A geologist’s hammer taps every time the record falls silent. And a tune by Ivor Novello rises slowly as you walk, until at the very end you find out why.

    Because it’s audio, nobody has to out themselves to take part. And because there’s a little dress code, a green carnation, a single earring, a carabiner, everyone in the know can spot each other. The in crowd, among the fossils.

    What’s next

    Next comes the script, then a recording session and a test walk with some queer volunteers. If you’d like to be one of them, wear a green carnation and come and find me.

    Whoever said geology was dull has never met Crystal.

    2. The characters

    Two guides, one official voice, and the people of the Bridging Binaries trail. Historical figures speak only words they actually wrote. Anything invented is marked in the script.

    The guides

    Mr Norman Flint, Museum Porter. Sixty-something, mustard-brown overall, wild white hair like Einstein in a gale, a bunch of keys he jangles for emphasis. He has worked here forty years and has a fact for every case, delivered at the speed of continental drift. He is the museum everyone fears they’ll get. He is also, it turns out, a man with a story the catalogue never recorded. Voice: slow, Fenland, monotone, oddly lovable. Think a parish notice read by a sleepy owl.

    Crystal Formation, your host. A drag queen made of minerals, who emerges from the gem cases at Stop 1. Four and a half billion years old and still forming. Quick, warm, outrageous, generous. She loves this museum more than anyone, which is exactly why she won’t let it be boring. She knows when to stop talking, and those silences are the most powerful moments in the piece. Voice: a Heartstopper best friend crossed with a Saturday night headliner. Played by a drag artist.

    The official voice

    The Catalogue. The museum’s labels and records, given a voice. Received Pronunciation, faintly appalled by everything, and always in the left ear. It reads the public version of every life: “secretary”, “cousin”, “resided with”.

    The Clerk. Reads court, police and government records. No performance at all. Centre channel. Used only when the law speaks.

    The cast of history

    SUE the T. rex (67 million years ago). They/them, silent, magnificent. Crystal speaks for them, and they don’t need it.

    Anna Gurney (1795 to 1857). Scholar, fossil hunter, wheelchair user, lesbian, woman of faith. She speaks only the words she chose for her own grave. Right ear.

    Charles Darwin (1809 to 1882). The young naturalist, before the beard, writing to friends and to his own notebook. Amused, curious, delighted. Right ear.

    Hensleigh Wedgwood (1803 to 1891). Darwin’s cousin and a police magistrate, writing late at night to the Home Secretary. Troubled and decent. Centre.

    Baron Franz Nopcsa (1877 to 1933). Transylvanian dandy, palaeontologist, nearly King of Albania. Grand, Central European, enjoying himself enormously. His lines are marked as invented.

    Mary Anning (1799 to 1847). Never heard directly. She is surrounded instead by two breathless Romance Novelists, one Victorian and one modern, who cannot stop writing her love life.

    The Twentieth Century. A chorus of whispers, wireless, studio audiences and protest, heard on the long walk.

    Ivor Novello (1893 to 1951). Never voiced. Heard only through his music, which rises under the long walk.

    Jonathan Cutbill (1937 to 2019). Geologist, cataloguer, co-founder of Gay’s the Word. No actor plays him. His story is told, and both ears finally agree about him.

    You. The visitor. Crystal’s companion for the afternoon, and the last person the play is about.

    3. Synopsis

    A dusty porter leads you into a dull museum, a drag queen bursts out of the gem cases, and together you walk sixty-seven million years to a bookshop in Bloomsbury. On the way, you discover that queer was always here, in the rocks, the records and the gaps between the words. About 25 minutes, seven stops and a long walk.

    Prologue: The door. Mr Norman Flint, museum porter, meets you on the steps. He jangles his keys, recites the opening hours and the founding of the Woodwardian Professorship, and leads you slowly through the galleries. It is every school trip you ever endured.

    Stop 1: The Whewell Mineral Gallery. Among 40,000 minerals, the Porter mentions that William Whewell coined the word “scientist”. In the beginning was the word, he mumbles. And the gems answer back. A crack, a shimmer, and Crystal Formation steps out of the rock. She sends the Porter off for a cup of tea and takes over. There are meteorites older than the Earth, a duchess and her very dear friend, and a promise: by the end of the tour, we’ll have found another word.

    Stop 2: SUE the T. rex. The Catalogue says “female”. A record scratch. Nobody can tell from a skeleton, so SUE is they/them. Nature never kept to tidy categories, and the rocks have the receipts.

    Stop 3: Anna Gurney. The tone softens. A disabled lesbian fossil hunter dug an elephant jaw from the Norfolk cliffs and chose the words “partners and chosen Sisters, knit together in the Love of God” for the grave she shared. Chosen family. We didn’t invent it. We inherited it.

    Stop 4: Darwin the Geologist. This one is a party. Young Darwin learns to break rocks from Adam Sedgwick, then turns to the strangest sex lives in nature: barnacle wives with pocket husbands, butterflies half male and half female, Hector the hen-feathered cockerel, and his own private note that every man and woman is hermaphrodite. Then a thirty-second sting. In 1835, while Darwin was at sea, his cousin sent two men to trial, and they were hanged. Crystal falls silent and says their names.

    Stop 5: Baron Nopcsa. Maximum glamour. Bandits, the throne of Albania and thirty years with his “secretary”. Then the age of Oscar Wilde closes in. The love that dare not speak its name, the 1895 trials and a sad end in Vienna in 1933, told once and gently, with a content note.

    Stop 6: Mary Anning and the poo. Two romance novelists fight over her love life on no evidence at all. Crystal takes back the story. What Mary actually discovered was that certain stones were fossil dung. Victorian Cambridgeshire then had a gold rush for it, and diggers looking for poo found the hippos of Barrington.

    The long walk. The twentieth century in three minutes, down the long gallery. Polari whispered in back rooms. E. M. Forster in King’s College, with a gay novel locked in a drawer. Young actors at Cambridge who would one day change the world by coming out. Turing, Wolfenden, 1967, Scotland in 1980. And under it all a tune growing clearer.

    Stop 7: Jonathan Cutbill. The cataloguer of this museum, who went on to open Gay’s the Word in 1979. The shop’s name came from Ivor Novello’s last musical, the tune we’ve been hearing all along. There’s the Customs raid of 1984, and the miners’ support group that met among the shelves. Fossilisation runs in reverse: people who’d been turned to stone, breathing again. For the first time, both ears agree. In the beginning was the Word. Here’s the word: Gay’s.

    Epilogue: The Porter. Mr Flint comes back with his tea and, for the first time, says something the catalogue never recorded. Forty years at this museum, and twenty of them married to Clive. Nobody ever asked. The fusty old museum was queer all along, and so, in the end, is the man who showed you in.

    Where week 2 leaves me

    Image: Gay’s the Word (created with Gemini)

    Week 2 started with a 3D scan of my coffee cup and ended with a drag queen climbing out of a mineral cabinet. Somewhere in between, I tried on four hats I’ll never own, lost a project to the wrong museum, and found a better one on the bus home. Complemental, my Darwin barnacle piece, turned out to belong across the road. But it taught me the device at the heart of everything that followed: the public record in one ear and the private life in the other. In the Beginning Was the Word takes that idea and gives it a cast, a journey and a lot more sequins. It runs from a they/them T. rex to Gay’s the Word, by way of a disabled lesbian fossil hunter, a would-be King of Albania, Darwin’s very queer science, Mary Anning’s poo and a fusty porter with a secret. Next comes the hard part. I’ll walk the route at the Sedgwick to fix every stop, check every fact against its source, finish the script, and then record it and test it on some willing queer volunteers. The prototype is presented on 12 November. Between now and then, the aim is simple: to prove that a Victorian geology museum can be the best queer day out in Cambridge. Wish me luck, and keep your green carnation handy.

    References used in the Week 2 posts

    The Sedgwick Museum and Bridging Binaries

    Workshops

    Darwin and queer science

    Pratt and Smith, 1835

    Mary Anning and coprolites

    Ivor Novello and Gay’s the Word

    Jonathan Cutbill and Gay’s the Word bookshop

    • Senate House Library, University of London. The Haud Nominandum collection and the “Seized Books” exhibition.
    • Gay’s the Word bookshop, 66 Marchmont Street, London. https://www.gaystheword.co.uk/

  • Immersive Storytelling: Week 2 (Part 2)

    Nick Gellatly

    No Stone Left Unturned

    Home | Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences

    A Plan Meets the Museum

    The visit began with a tour of the exhibits led by Dr Liz Hide – Museum Director – and I started the tour confident that I had a good idea for an immersive story telling project.

    Before our visit to the Sedgwick Museum, I had already begun developing an idea for No Stone Left Unturned. The brief invites us to create an immersive experience around a museum object, theme or hidden story. My proposal, Complemental, grew from an interest in Darwin’s barnacle research and the questions it raises about how scientists describe and classify the natural world.

    Ross Brooks’s Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life provided a direction for that research. I was interested in the relationship between scientific observation and the assumptions brought to it, particularly where nature complicates apparently straightforward categories. The museum’s involvement in the Bridging Binaries LGBTQ+ tours also suggested a context in which overlooked histories and different interpretations could find an audience.

    The concept centred on a contrast between Darwin’s published scientific writing and his private correspondence. I imagined visitors standing beside an object or display and hearing these two registers through headphones: the published voice in one ear and the private voice in the other. A turn-taking version and a written transcript would offer alternative ways to encounter the material.

    I had put together a project plan and visual storyboards – as you will see above – showing how someone might discover the experience, choose a listening format, hear the contrasting voices and return their attention to the object. I had also begun considering practical questions: access through a QR code, the use of visitors’ own phones, headphone provision and how several people might engage without blocking a display.

    There was, however, a significant assumption within that planning: that the Darwin material I hoped to work with would be available at the Sedgwick. As I looked at the display, a doubt set in.

    An Adventure in Discovery – And Changing My Mind

    The museum visit brought that assumption into focus. Seeing the galleries gave me a physical setting against which to consider the proposal. An imagined encounter beside a cabinet now had to fit an actual space, its displays and the way visitors move through it.

    I was disappointed to discover that the Darwin items I had hoped to use were stored at another museum. I had developed the listening experience around the possibility of encountering the material directly. Its location therefore affected a central part of the proposal.

    At this stage, I had an idea, research and a storyboard, but the visit had exposed a gap between the planned experience and the available collections. That was where this part of the process ended: with disappointment, and with a clearer understanding of why checking the location and availability of objects needs to happen early. And so I, quite literally, found myself on the horns of a dilemma …

    On the bus home, I started this think about how my proposal would have to change. Join me in Part 3 of this post for a change of focus as I begin to reconsider the story I need to tell …

  • Immersive Storytelling: Week 2 (Part 1)

    Nick Gellatly

    Multi-sensory Storytelling – Scanning Workshop

    3D Scanning Workshop

    The morning began with a 3D scanning workshop. It produced some fascinating images, and it’s not a tool I’d ever imagined using. In a museum project, though, I can see real possibilities. It could bring dinosaurs, Fenland hippos and even the human characters to life in a way that’s fun and engaging.

    If I am completely honest, the thing that would put me off using this facility is the prospect of having to remove and replace 72 lens covers on the device’s cameras.

    Polycam AI 3D Scanning App

    Back in Base Room, we tried some 3D scanning ourselves using Polycam, an AI-powered app that turns a series of photos or a video taken on your phone into a 3D model. I started with my coffee cup. Strictly speaking, the result was not a triumph. The app likes objects with plenty of texture and detail, and a plain cup gives it very little to work with. But I’ve grown rather fond of the outcome. The video above has an odd, half-formed beauty to it, somewhere between a scan and a dream. Not what I set out to make, but I’ll take it!

    Emily showed us a project they’d worked on with The Culture Trust in Luton, a town so steeped in millinery that its football club is still called The Hatters. Using Snapchat filters, exhibition visitors could try on hats from the collection without anyone having to worry about hairspray, head lice or the gift shop’s breakages policy. I had never used Snapchat before, but I have always had a weakness for a good hat. The results are below. I think you’ll agree that I wear every one of them with a sense of joy not entirely betrayed by my expression.

    Making Sense of the Story

    Week 2 of Immersive Storytelling moved from asking what story we want to tell to considering how an audience might experience it. The focus was sensory storytelling and 3D scanning, alongside the introduction of our Sedgwick Museum brief, No Stone Left Unturned.

    Immersion can involve much more than looking at a screen or listening through headphones. Touch, movement, vibration, wind, smell and even taste can contribute to a sense of presence. Each offers a different way of bringing an audience into a story.

    The examples in our teaching materials demonstrated how closely a physical sensation can connect with a subject. Birdly combines virtual reality, bodily movement and wind to simulate flight. In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats uses haptic bass to help evoke the atmosphere of an acid-house rave. Other projects explore empathy through synchronised touch, or relationships with the natural world through breath, scent and movement.

    What I take from these examples is that sensory choices need a purpose. Feeling bass through the body makes sense in a story about dancing. The creative challenge is to identify which sensation helps an audience understand or connect with the particular story being told.

    Our morning visit to the 3D Imaging Studio made the possibilities of scanning more tangible. Cameras, lighting, poses and the resulting images offered an introduction to how physical subjects can become digital representations. The suggested workflow: scanning an object, editing its model in Blender and potentially developing an AR experience in Lens Studio, opens up further possibilities to investigate.

    The Sedgwick brief gives these experiments a direction. We are asked to select an object, theme or hidden story, research it and develop an immersive prototype that changes how visitors engage with it.

    For my developing Complemental concept, this raises useful questions. How might listening help visitors encounter different voices around Darwin’s barnacle research? Would a digital model encourage closer attention to an object? How can alternative formats make the experience accessible?

    My next steps are to develop the concept board, record my research and experiments on the blog, and examine one multisensory project more closely. I want to keep testing a straightforward question: what does each creative choice help the visitor notice?

    I’ll come to the Sedgwick Museum visit in Part 2 of this post.

  • What Does It Mean to Be Happy: Week 2

    Human flourishing, pleasure and the good life.

    Nick Gellatly

    A different question

    Week 1 asked whose happiness counts. Week 2 asked something more uncomfortable: can you be wrong about your own happiness?

    “Happiness is a state of mind, specifically a feeling of contentment” (Epicurus)

    “Happiness is an activity, specifically a way of living your life” (Aristotle)

    Today’s objective is for you to decide which answer you think is best.

    Dr Tristan Moyle set two ancient Greek answers against each other, and then the seminar dropped a thought experiment on us that has been rattling around my head ever since. I came away with a clearer idea of what my café is for, and a date in the diary.

    Two Greeks, two answers

    Epicurus. Happiness is a state of mind: the absence of physical pain and a mind free of disturbance. Not the sex, drugs and rock and roll version, which the lecture pointed out produces hangovers, regret and worry, all of which are pain. His four-part cure says what is good is easy to get, and the natural and necessary list is short: food and water, shelter, warmth, clothing, some friends and trusted companions, a bit of nature. Unhappiness comes from wanting things that are luxurious, unnecessary and hard to obtain.

    That is a materially modest and socially rich account of the good life, and it is more or less my café’s shopping list.

    Aristotle. Happiness is not a feeling but an activity, a life lived well over time. Eudaimonia gets translated as flourishing, and the lecture offered a useful test: it is closer to applause than to a mood. We are rational, social animals, so flourishing means exercising good character among other people, sustained over years rather than managed once or twice. It needs friends, freedom, and enough leisure to pursue something meaningful. You cannot flourish, Aristotle thought, as a wage slave.

    The real argument is not pleasure against meaning. It is subjective against objective. Hedonism says if I feel happy then I am happy, and nobody else gets a vote. Aristotle says a life can be going badly while it feels fine, and that how it feels from the inside does not settle the matter.

    Felicity

    The sharpest thing in the lecture was a philosopher’s example I had not met before. Thomas Hill’s deferential wife. Felicity is devoted to her husband, moves cities for his job, treats her own friendships and preferences as unimportant, and develops few interests of her own. She is entirely contented.

    Is her life going well? Hill says something is missing, and names it: self-respect. Excessive deference is not a virtue but the vice of servility. The point is that the kind of person you are matters to how well your life is going, not only how you feel about it.

    I wrote a few weeks ago that I had lived a life of compliance. I meant it as a complaint against myself. Felicity gives me better vocabulary for what I was actually describing, and rather less self-pity. She is not a failure. She is a person whose preferences were quietly organised around somebody else’s, in a way that felt, from the inside, like contentment.

    Which is exactly the trouble with the subjective account. If happiness is only how it feels, Felicity has nothing to complain about, and neither did I.

    The machine

    The seminar ran Robert Nozick’s thought experiment from 1974. A machine will give you any experience you choose, for the rest of your life, while you float in a tank. You will not know you are in it. Would you plug in?

    Most people say no. If pleasure were all that mattered, that refusal would make no sense. So something else matters, and Nozick names three things: we want to do things rather than have the experience of doing them, we want to be a certain sort of person, and we want contact with a reality we did not construct. Someone long in the tank, he says, is an indeterminate blob. There is no fact about whether he is kind or brave.

    My answer was no, and the reasons are occupational. I spent a career in PR, which is the applied version of the machine. The job is to produce an experience of an organisation that is rather better than the organisation. Somebody who has built small experience machines for a living does not queue up for a large one.

    There is a queer reading of it too, and it is the one I would offer the group. Anyone who has spent years presenting an acceptable version of themselves already knows what a fabricated life costs. The machine offers a welcome that nobody is actually giving you. That is the closet with better lighting.

    The seminar’s best question came last: if you discovered you were already inside one, would you unplug? Most people say no to plugging in and no to unplugging, which do not obviously agree. Nozick’s critics call it status quo bias, and suspect the intuition tracks attachment to the familiar rather than a principle about reality. My answer stays consistent, I think, because the argument is about what a person is rather than what is true. Leaving late still leaves you something to become.

    What this does to the café

    Queerly Beloved Café is, technically speaking, a small experience machine. A designed room, a curated atmosphere, a staged feeling of belonging. That should worry me, and this week it has turned into the most useful thing I have.

    Nozick gives me a test the project has to pass. If the room delivers the experience of belonging to people who remain unconnected to anyone, it fails on its own terms and I have built a tank with scones. If it produces real contact between real people, and the design simply makes that easier, it is the opposite of the machine. That is now the design brief rather than a nagging doubt.

    Three consequences follow.

    • The room has to do something, not just feel like something. Aristotle’s flourishing is activity. So the evening needs an occupation, however modest: making, reading, cooking, talking to a stranger with a prompt in your hand. A pleasant atmosphere with nothing to do in it is the warm bath conception, and Epicurus is welcome to it.
    • The documentation is not the artefact. Stills and film are experience and can only ever be that. The evening is the work, and the footage is a report from it. For a media student that is an awkward inversion, and it belongs in the reflection.
    • The grief corner stays. A machine would edit out loss. A real room cannot, and the seminar has made that a point in its favour rather than a caveat.

    Epicurus supplies the shopping list: warmth, shelter, something to eat, trusted companions. Aristotle supplies the reason it is not a gesture: flourishing needs company and practice, so belonging is a condition of a good life rather than a pleasant extra.

    And the rest of the semester

    The machine turns out to be a useful test to hold against everything else I am making this term.

    Motion Graphics. My title sequence for My Beautiful Laundrette is pure experience, two minutes of manufactured feeling, and there is no shame in that as long as I know it. Titles promise a world. Nozick’s question is whether anyone can live in it. The interesting design problem is whether a sequence can point at something real rather than simply produce a mood.

    Immersive Storytelling. Complemental, the binaural piece for the Sedgwick, is the closest thing to a literal experience machine I will build. Headphones, a fabricated acoustic space, a listener who forgets where they are. The distinction that matters is the one Nozick draws: the piece should send someone back into the gallery looking harder at the actual rocks, not replace the gallery with a better one.

    Welcome Buddy. Nothing simulated about it. A new student either is welcomed or is not, and no amount of well-made video substitutes for someone saying hello. It remains the least assessed and most real thing on my timetable.

    Taken together, three of the four are in the business of making experiences, and the fourth is the one that reminds me what they are for.

    A date

    Queerly Beloved Café will run in the first week of Advent. Advent Sunday falls on 29 November this year, so the café sits somewhere between then and 5 December, with the artefact due on the 11th.

    The week is not an accident, though I intend to keep the reasoning quiet in the room itself.

    Advent is the season of waiting in the dark for something that has not arrived yet. It is the one stretch of the church year that does not ask anyone to be cheerful, which makes it the right week for a café built on joy that has room for loss. It is also the season of preparing a place, and of a couple who famously could not find one.

    More practically, it is the week when university term is grinding to its end, everyone is tired, the evenings are black by four, and Christmas is arriving whether people have somewhere warm to go or not. If a room with a lamp and a pot of tea is ever going to earn its keep, it is then.

    No scripture on the walls. One candle, which reads as warmth to everyone and as something else to those who recognise it. That is as loud as the theology gets.

    So finally answering the first question posed in this session:

     Today’s objective is for you to decide which answer you think is best.

    • “Happiness is a state of mind, specifically a feeling of contentment” (Epicurus) or;
    • “Happiness is an activity, specifically a way of living your life” (Aristotle)

    So, which one?

    I think Aristotle gives the better account of what happiness is. Epicurus gives the better advice on how to get it.

    The test is whether a person can be wrong about their own life. Hedonism says no: if you feel contented, you are happy, and there is nothing further to discuss. Two cases make that hard to accept. Thomas Hill’s deferential wife is entirely contented, and her contentment was produced by an arrangement that cost her a self. Nozick’s tank offers maximum pleasant experience with no doing, no company and no character, and most people decline it. If contentment were the whole of the good, both would be triumphs. Aristotle’s answer explains why they are not: happiness is activity, exercised over time, among other people, and how it feels from the inside does not settle whether it is going well.

    Epicurus is still right about almost everything on his list. What is good is easy to get: warmth, shelter, something to eat, a few trusted companions. That is a modest and generous account of what a good life actually needs.

    This is why my artefact takes both. Queerly Beloved Café is Epicurean in its materials and Aristotelian in its claim. A lamp, a teapot, mismatched chairs, and something for people to do together, because belonging is a condition of flourishing rather than a pleasant extra.

    It also answers Week 1. If flourishing requires company, freedom and a little leisure, the response to unequal flourishing is to build those conditions, not to ask people to feel better about going without them.

    Images for this post

    The illustrations for this series are made in Canva, in a flat vector style borrowed from broadsheet long-read journalism. The palette stays fixed: cream, deep navy, a muted grey and one warm amber accent. There are no people in any of them, and no faces, which is deliberate. A module about who gets pictured as happy is not well served by stock photographs of contented strangers, and the argument of my artefact is that belonging is built out of rooms, objects and arrangements rather than staged smiles. So the images show the furniture and leave the people to turn up.

  • Motion Graphics: Week 2 (Part 3)

    The Homework

    Image: Original photgraph ‘Scratching my head’

    Task: Look through the ‘Art of the Title’ website and find 2 title sequence that you think have used After Effects in some way and explain why.

    https://www.artofthetitle.com

    Rio 2016 Paralympic Games (2016)

    This is the first title sequence which appears on ‘Art of the Title’ when I search using the term ‘After Effects’ but it is a good example because it combines live-action footage with motion graphics and the animation exaggerates its energy: illustrated waves, smoke, creatures, colour trails and graphic shapes appear to burst from the athletes’ movements. Bold colours – which I particularly like – rapid transitions and exaggerated scale create a strong visual identity across very different sports. It demonstrates how After Effects can transform existing footage through layering, tracking, masking, animation and compositing, while keeping the original action readable. The images from ‘Art of the Title’ are stronger, I think, than the version I can find on You Tube.

    Rio 2016 Paralympic Games (2016) — Art of the Title

    Chariots of Fire (1981)

    My next choice is Chariots of Fire (1981), partly because I have a personal connection: scenes from the Scotland–France athletics meeting were filmed at Goldenacre, the playing fields of my old school, George Heriot’s, in Edinburgh. IMDb says that what makes the title sequence compelling is its restraint. Slow-motion running, carefully positioned typography and Vangelis’s deliberately modern electronic score transform relatively simple footage into something almost mythic. artofthetitle.com says that the graphics never compete with the images; timing, movement and text work together. For my own After Effects practice, it is a useful reminder that compelling motion design does not necessarily mean adding more, sometimes pace, placement and simplicity provide the strongest effect.

    Chariots of Fire (1981) — Art of the Title

    The Interview (2014)

    My third choice – just in case the Paralympics one is duplicated elsewhere – is The Interview (2014), not least because its titles were created by “Laundry” and the pictures are rather beautiful. Laundry is a Los Angeles studio specialising in design, animation and visual effects. They based the sequence on research into North Korean propaganda imagery, then animated and composited the designs using Cinema 4D and After Effects. What particularly interests me is its connection to my Political Pop experiments in Week 2 (Part 2): https://theoldtimes.co.uk/2026/09/29/motion-graphics-week-2-part-2/ an established political visual language is appropriated and exaggerated. Bold colour, heroic poses, typography and propaganda imagery become simultaneously spectacular and satirical. It demonstrates how motion graphics can carry political and cultural subtext, rather than merely decorating credits.

    The Interview (2014) — Art of the Title

    Edge of the City (1957)

    I don’t think Edge of the City has used After Effects – perhaps a 1957 predecessor – but I chose this movie for my final pick because of its urban setting and while very different to the East London setting of My Beautiful Laundrette has something of the darkness and grittiness of the original titles of my chosen film which is interesting but as a concept, I’m more keen on bright colours and so this look and feel is what I don’t want rather than what I’d like to emulate.

    Edge of the City (1957) — Art of the Title