Instead of the twelve days of Christmas we have the ten boat stories' skippers or crew all linked to each other in this fun animation. And each spoke of the wheel also links them to one of the three local RNLI stations: Ilfracombe, Appledore or Clovelly. Enjoy!
Animation by Joanne Beech, written by Jo Stewart-Smith, music by Alice Bollen (from our gig film)

I planned to do two graphics for boat stories. One was an interactive map which followed the journeys our boats made along the coast, out to Lundy, around the estuary and up river. And the second a boat stories 'family tree' highlighting the links and family connections between the people I'd been filming from Clovelly round to Ilfracombe. I could only afford to do one and in the end 'the family tree' won, partly because of a conversation I had with Beccy MacDonald while we were staying on Lundy about the links between the different films.

Beccy is the first port of call (via the radio) for all the boats visiting Lundy and I could have put the island in the centre of the wheel. Dave Gabe who goes up river on Cheeky Monkey, for instance, was once the Lundy boatman in the days before the passenger ferry. But Lundy of course is one of our stories and I chose the RNLI because I'd wanted to make a film about one of the local RNLIs and the family networks - one of the many stories that 'got away' as I could only make ten films. I had many more anecdotes than I could fit in but I had to choose an order for the boats and once I'd done that I couldn't jump across the wheel -otherwise it would have become a spider's web.

I spotted Jo Beech's work posted on the Sea Ilfracombe facebook site. She'd done a little animation of all the events going on during the festival including the boat stories film premiere - an animated poster if you like- and it was brilliant. I wanted one for boat stories! She was going to draw the boats but we decided to use my photographs because they are colourful and instantly recognisable to locals who know the boats. Check out Jo's website icanlearn2.com to see the animations she's done to market events or help put complex scientific ideas across. As she says "we create animated videos to help explain and educate anyone about anything."