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Welsh author has won the 2010 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

Now in its second year, the prize is awarded annually to recognise excellence in poetry.

O'Reilly scooped the accolade for her new version of Aeschylus' tragedy The Persians for National Theatre Wales, which was staged at a military base in the Brecon Beacons last year.

Read more on the story on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales News website.

Judges from the paid a visit to the earlier this week, one of the 10 musuems and galleries that have been longlisted for the coveted £100,000 award.

The newly redeveloped art gallery is the only Welsh institution included on the prize's longlist.

Chair of the judging panel Michael Portillo was joined by three of his three fellow judges on the visit: museums and heritage consultant Kathy Gee, Guardian journalist Charlotte Higgins and Antiques Roadshow expert and curator Lars Tharp.

The four Art Fund Prize judges at Mostyn: Michael Portillo, Kathy Gee, Lars Tharp and Charlotte Higgins. Photo: Martin Lyons

Director of Mostyn, Martin Barlow, told me: "The Art Fund Prize judges' visit seemed to go very well.

"Like the great majority of our visitors they could see that the architecture of the new Mostyn is really quite special, and it was an opportunity to explain just how complicated the transformation was to bring about in the building's very confined footprint and to point out the '4S: Simple, Smart, Sophisticated - with a few Surprises' principle which the design team adopted.

"Equally importantly it was an opportunity to talk about leading Mostyn's role in presenting Welsh and international art and about all the learning activity organised with the exhibitions, and to present the judges with photocopies of the many hundreds of wonderfully appreciative comments left in our comments book by our 70,000 visitors to date!"

The short list of four museums and galleries will be announced on 19 May, while the winner of the £100,000 prize will be awarded on 15 June at a ceremony at Tate Britain in London.

Members of the public can vote for their favourite longlisted museum via an online poll - .

Artwork by some of the UK's most talented theatre designers has gone on show at an exhibition in Cardiff.

The Transformation and Revelation exhibition, presented by the Society of British Theatre Designers, is taking place at the .

It includes drawings, paintings and photographs, 3D artefacts, scale models, specialist props, costumes and puppets. Plus there are also interactive exhibits from lighting, video and sound designers, theatre consultants and theatre architects.

Paul Barrett, Cat and Mouse - B2, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, 2009. Photo: Kirsten McTernan

Designs on display range from Ian MacNeil’s new designs for the New York version of Billy Eliott, to Es Devlin’s designs and projections for Lady Gaga's Monsterball Tour.

The exhibition also offers an exclusive sneak preview of the new Royal Welsh College £22.5m development currently under construction, which is due to open in the summer. Taking place in a number of spaces including the newly built Richard Burton Theatre, this exhibition marks the first public event to be housed in the revamped venue.

The Foyer, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Photo: Patricia Grasham

Transformation and Revelation - The UK Design for Performance Exhibition 2011, is on show at the Royal Welsh College until Saturday 16 April (open weekdays from 9.30am-8pm and weekends from 10am-5pm).

It will then travel in part to represent the UK at the 2011 Prague Quadrennial International Exhibition in the summer, before a selection of the designs go on show at the V&A in March 2012.

Further information

Welsh songstress Cerys Matthews has added another string to her creative bow as she has penned a new children's book.

Tales From The Deep retells two ancient Welsh legends, Cantre'r Gwaelod and The Maid of Llyn y Fan, in a picture book format and will be published by , a branch of Gomer Press, in May.

Cerys Matthews

Matthews was inspired to produce her début book after seeing illustrations of the legends by , an author and illustrator from Pembrokeshire.

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ 6 Music presenter is also set to release her latest solo album in May, and will embark on a tour to promote it.

For more on the story visit the .

Libraries, museums and archives across Wales are set to benefit from a £2.8 million Welsh Assembly Government grants package, which was announced today by Minister for Heritage Alun Ffred Jones.

Nine public libraries will share £1,470,172 in capital grants for modernisation work, while a further £858,075 in revenue funding has been allocated to develop the work of libraries in Wales, including grants to 17 library projects ranging from developing literacy, information skills, partnership working, online services and encouraging more people to visit libraries.

Museums in north Wales which will receive grants include Buckley Library - set to receive a grant of £300,00 towards modernisation -Ìý while Wrexham County Library service will benefit from £165,000 to lead on an all-Wales programme to promote and increase usage of libraries.

Read more about the north Wales grants on the , and for more information on the funding announcement, see the .

A second series of The Indian Doctor has been commissioned by Liam Keelan, the controller of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Daytime.

Sanjeev Bhaskar in The Indian Doctor. Photo: ´óÏó´«Ã½/Rondo Media/Laurence Cendrowicz

In a posting on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ TV blog, Liam writes: "There is a long way to go before The Indian Doctor hits your screens again - probably early next year - so we're still busy working out the new storylines. However, many of the characters will be returning."

Read about the other forthcoming daytime ´óÏó´«Ã½ shows on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ TV blog.

Welsh actor and director Terry Jones has written a Monty Python-esque libretto for a new opera, which is set to open next month at the .

Jones has written the libretto for The Doctor's Tale, which he will also direct. The story focuses on the plight of a devoted doctor, with a wonderful cure rate, whose devoted patients rush to the rescue after he is forced to stop practising by the General Medical Council - because he is a dog. The patients protest and eventually rescue the doctor from the dog pound, where he was due to be put down.

The Doctor's Tale is one half of a double bill of new short operas called OperaShots, commissioned and produced by ROH2 - the contemporary arm of the Royal Opera House. The productions have been developed by famous names outside the world of opera, and often have unexpected subjects and novel approaches.

Terry Jones, Anne Dudley and Stewart Copeland. Photo: Perou

Composer Anne Dudley - who scooped an Academy Award for her work on the music score for The Full Monty - is also involved with The Doctor's Tale, which will be performed at the Royal Opera House from Friday 8 April to Saturday 16 April. (Former Police drummer Stewart Copeland is also involved with the other OperaShots production, The Tell-Tale Heart.)

This latest venture isn't Jones' first foray into the world of opera. He co-wrote and directed an opera called Evil Machines, based on a series of his own short stories where a group of household appliances, such as vacuum cleaners and tumble dryers, rise up to overthrow their human masters.

For more information on The Doctor's Tale visit the , and .

Plus from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4 Today programme, in which Nicola Stanbridge met Stewart Copeland and Terry Jones in rehearsals for the productions.

Be sure to tune into ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Wales this Wednesday as Nicola Heywood Thomas will be in conversation with Hollywood actor Michael Sheen.

Port Talbot-born Sheen speaks to Nicola on the Radio Wales Arts Show about his involvement with ' production of The Passion in his home town over the Easter weekend.

Michael Sheen with Nicola Heywood Thomas

Sheen is the creative director of The Passion - a contemporary reworking of the traditional - which is the final production by National Theatre Wales in its inaugural programme of events.

The script has been written by Welsh poet Owen Sheers, and the production promises to be a ground-breaking theatre event that places the Port Talbot community at its very heart, as it will be supported by over 1,000 volunteer cast members, local groups and individuals.

The Radio Wales Arts Show is on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Wales at 7pm on Wednesday 23 March, and for the subsequent seven days on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer.

The fourth and final film in the Framing Wales series has been the most problematic. Who to put in and who to leave out? It's impossible to decide in terms of worth or quality or reputation. There are so many fine artists working the length and breadth of Wales.

When I bump into friends in the street they say, 'Now make sure you include so-and-so... She's such a wonderful painter of landscapes.'

When I interview artists in their studios they say, 'You must feature so-and-so... He continues to be such a powerful influence on all of us...'

When I attend exhibition openings I interpret looks of incomprehension from artists who cannot believe that we have left them out of any series that purports to tell the story of Welsh art over the last 100 years or so.

And who can blame them? I feel, some days, as guilty as the Turner Prize Committee should feel every day for seeming to ignore so much that is brilliant in contemporary British art.

Recently, I watched a programme about the impact of artists who worked in St Ives in Cornwall from the 1940s. Some were born and raised in Cornwall; some relocated there. All of them contributed to creating a widespread acceptance that the paintings and sculpture that emerged from St Ives were the equal of art created in New York, Paris, London or any other creative powerhouse. Their work is housed in museums and galleries across the country but especially in one gallery that opened in 1993, .

The refurbishment of ' existing galleries and the construction of its new West Wing Gallery in Cardiff will help to exhibit some of the finest art produced in Wales, alongside magnificent international collections like the Davies Bequest. Hopefully, the much-longed-for refurbishment of Swansea's Glynn Vivian Gallery and the modifications to galleries like Oriel Mostyn in Llandudno will assist in this task.

However, if the world is going to talk about art produced in Wales as it has talked about art produced in St Ives, it will require proof that the last century of creativity in Wales has been as vibrant and abundant in the principality as it has been in any part of Britain, including St Ives.

That proof exists, locked away in the vaults of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. We must devise or build the means to exhibit that wonderful proof for the world to see.

Past entries from the Framing Wales series can be seen on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer.

My heart was not filled with joy as I drove with the film crew to Llandudno. The very name of that exquisite Edwardian resort is associated in my mind with its role as the venue for the annual conferences of political parties and trade-unions.

I was always a notoriously bad attender; I'd rather sit in a dentist's chair than have to sit for hours listening to one turgid, cliché-ridden conference speech after another.

So it came as a great relief to be in Llandudno and not to be subjected that particular form of cruel and unusual punishment. Instead, we visited the brand-new, multi-million pound extension to Oriel Mostyn where we filmed contemporary Welsh art expert, Karen MacKinnon. She explained the work of Tim Davies, an exhibitor at the Mostyn gallery and the artist chosen to represent art in Wales at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

For someone like me, about to interview Tim himself, and having spent weeks rediscovering, through the process of filming these programmes, the wealth of art created across the length and breadth of Wales over the last hundred years, Karen's great expertise began filling me with doubts.

She talked with such great energy and commitment. We knew, already, that there were, in Wales, a score of wonderful, influential artists we could easily have featured in our films. But names fell from Karen's lips like machine-gun bullets, ripping through any sense I had that we were doing art in Wales justice.

Mercifully, she had no doubt about the great talents we had interviewed: artists like Mary Lloyd Jones, Joan Baker, Shani Rhys James, Terry Setch, David Nash, Ifor Davies, Charles Burton and Kevin Sinnott. Here's a clip featuring Shani from the programme:

Karen thought it was very helpful that Iwan Bala had spent so much of his time explaining his work to us and that the painter and teacher, Osi Rhys Osmond, had shared ideas about how best to nurture future generations of artists. Experts like Gill Fildes, Kirsten Dunthorne, Barry Plummer, John Smith, Ceri Thomas, Mel and Rhiannon Gooding, Robert Meyrick, Anne Price Owen, Jill Piercey and many others helped us understand how and why artists worked as they did throughout the 20th century and through the first decade of this one. But had we done art in Wales justice?

I am certain that there are many fine artists, working in Wales, to whom we have made no reference. To cover everyone ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales would have needed a series as long as The World At War.

Hopefully, we have reminded all those who consider the visual arts to be important that there has been art produced in Wales over the last 100 years that stands comparison with art produced anywhere in the world. That is a fact, not a nebulous assertion to be used in some wider political debate. It should give Welsh artists all of the confidence and encouragement they need to continue creating.

The final episode of Framing Wales can be seen tonight, Thursday 17 March, at 7.30pm on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two Wales, or afterwards on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer.

Henry Widdicombe, the founder of the , spoke to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Wales' Jamie Owen yesterday about the upcoming event.

This year's festival makes use of the extra bank holiday, due to the Royal Wedding, and runs from Friday 29 April until Sunday 1 May.

Listen to the interview, in which Henry speaks of the success of the inaugural festival in 2010, the line-up for this year's funny fest and the evolution of festivals. He also offers Jamie some tips about his forthcoming stand-up gig in aid of Comic Relief:

Comedians on the line-up include Josie Long, Maeve Higgins, Simon Munnery, Daniel Kitson and Jon Richardson - who was supposed to perform at last year's inaugural festival but was prevented by the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud.

Isy Suttie, better known as Dobby from the successful sitcom Peep Show, is also to return having performed at last year's festival. Plus rising Welsh comedian Elis James is set to appear - Elis blogged for the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales Arts website during his stint at the Edinburgh Fringe last year.

Having heard people describe Ifor Davies as the Grand Old Man of Welsh art, I thought I'd met the wrong Ifor Davies when I was introduced to him at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

We were due to film him the following morning for the fourth film in our series but, far from looking like he ought to have been preserved in one of the museum's glass cases, alongside a Bronze Age hunter or a Victorian milkman, he was probably the snappiest dresser in a room swimming with well-heeled Welsh crachach.

He wore a long jacket you couldn't buy, even in Wales's finest gentlemen's outfitters. It was styled half-way between Darth Vader's cloak and the hand-stitched, velvet creations sported by the flashiest, best-paid Teds in the Aberdare of my youth. This was someone who reminded me that artists are supposed to look different. They are supposed to have style and verve. Ifor has it in shovelfuls: no-less than you'd expect from an artist who has worked and exhibited around the world since the 1960s.

Ifor has a large studio in a converted grain-store in Penarth. Travel due north on the A470 and you come to another conversion serving as an artist's studio, this time a cavernous former chapel in Blaenau Ffestiniog. It houses the sought-after wooden sculptures of David Nash. So sought-after, in fact, that we arrived to film him shortly after crates of them had just been shipped-off to art dealers in Germany. Many of the rest, he explained, were being exhibited at Britain's premier sculpture show, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield.

North of Bridgend, our film crew invaded a studio in another remarkable chapel conversion, nestling in a former mining valley that now resembles a glorious wooded Alpine glen. Here we filmed Kevin Sinnott, born down the road in Sarn, painting his huge, life-affirming canvases and giving us his personal variation on a theme common to the lives of so many artists connected with Wales since the Second World War.

It runs along these lines: talented youngster leaves Wales to study at prestigious London art school, often the Royal College. Talented graduate becomes famous and sought-after artist. Successful artist gets passionate yen to return to Wales, often after becoming parents or after suffering the roller-coaster tendencies of the London art market. Money is scraped together sufficient to convert abandoned churches, schools, farmhouses, barns and warehouses. Drawing, painting and sculpture resume within them.

Crumbling buildings are rescued. New beauty and intellectual vibrancy emerge from them. Wales has its soul enriched.

The final episode of Framing Wales can be seen on Thursday 17 March at 7.30pm on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two Wales, or afterwards on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer.

Welsh actor David Thaxton last night scooped an Olivier Award for his performance as Captain Giorgio in the Donmar Warehouse revival of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Passion.

David Thaxton and Elena Roger in Passion. Photo: Johan Persson

Thaxton, from Neath, is a former member of Welsh choir Only Men Aloud. He scooped the prestigious award in the category of Best Actor in a Musical, beating Alex Gaumond (Legally Blonde The Musical), Ramin Karimloo (Love Never Dies), Sahr Ngaujah (Fela!) and Michael Xavier (Love Story) to the prize.

His win follows on from the Welsh successes of last year's awards ceremony, when actors Aneurin Barnard and Iwan Rheon both won awards for their roles in musical Spring Awakening.

Find out more about the 2011 Olivier Award winners on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News website or on .

Remoteness, I discovered in making this series, is a geographical description that must be used carefully in Wales.

Compared with, say, France or Italy, nowhere in Wales is remote from anywhere else in Wales. Geographically, we are the same size as the small American state of New Jersey but with less than a third of New Jersey's population. True, we can experience problems with our physical communications but, theoretically, the place is small enough for ideas, styles and trends to spread in a matter of hours, rather than years.

Almost no-where in Wales is impossibly remote from some of the greatest urban centres and markets of England. Cardiff and Swansea are much closer to London than is Newcastle, Glasgow or Liverpool. Much of north Wales and mid Wales is within convenient driving distances of Manchester and Birmingham.

When Surrealist art began appearing in Britain in the 1930s, Welsh artists saw it and debated it as quickly as artists from any other part of these islands. Indeed, the finest surrealist artist that Britain produced was from the mining village of Dunvant, near Swansea. His name was Ceri Richards and he was nothing less than a phenomenon in the international art world.

We went to Dunvant for the third programme in our series and discovered that Richards had been nurtured in a working class community that valued music and art as highly as it did honesty, hard work and Christianity.

Dunvant was the antithesis of insularity. It was a village excited by creativity and Richards had been part of an extraordinary creative milieu generated by the Swansea School of Art, the town's Glynn Vivian Gallery, the Kardomah Restaurant and Dylan Thomas' favourite pubs.

More than his contemporaries in Swansea, Ceri Richards was influenced by the work of Picasso and Matisse and, in 1962, he represented Britain at the world's foremost artfest, the Venice Biennale, where he was a prizewinner. But he was far from being the only Welsh artists to be influenced profoundly by artists from Europe and beyond.

In the 1940s, for example, young Welsh artists were able to visit the studios of two central European artists who escaped Nazi oppression to settle and work in Wales: Heinz Koppel in Dowlais and Josef Herman in Ystradgynlais. Others, like Kyffin Williams, and a host of talented young Welsh artists, lived in London and other English cities but concentrated the central thrust of their art on Wales and Welsh subjects.

This exchange of influences, ideas and experiences is the story of 20th century art across the developed world. It had as dynamic an influence on Welsh art as it did on the art of New York, Paris, London and St Ives.

Paradoxically, however, we discovered in making this, the third film of our series, that Wales also retained a reputation as a place where remoteness and solitude might be found. There were artists who came to Wales precisely because they sought remote places and what they hoped would be an accompanying simplicity of life.

One of them was Brenda Chamberlain who made the hazardous crossing to Bardsey Island to settle and work there in 1947. Like Chamberlain, other artists sought refuge in the Welsh hills from urban life and produced work of the highest quality.

Hopefully, our film illustrates a simple but important truth: the diversity and richness of art created in Wales, or about Wales, is the result of as complex a mix of personalities, techniques, geographies, ideas and influences as art created anywhere in the world. Perhaps we should be ready to celebrate that truth more often than we do.

Episode three of Framing Wales can be seen tonight, Thursday 10 March at 7.30pm on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two Wales, or afterwards on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer.

Standing on the southern flank of Craig y Llyn, trying to picture what Treherbert and the valley stretching away from me must have looked like in the late 1940s, I realised that our third film had to explain, among many other things, the umbilical connections between art produced in those days in London and art produced in communities like Rhondda, in Wales.

In our third film, we wanted to continue to illustrate the pivotal role of Ceri Richards from Swansea, who, by the end of World War Two, was a colossus on the British art scene. Our film crew arranged to meet at the house in London belonging to Richards' daughter, Rhiannon, and her husband, Mel Gooding.

Bursting with beautiful art, much of it painted by Rhiannon's father, their house stands on an elegant yet busy thoroughfare through London and is the very antithesis of another thoroughfare that runs north-south, 170 miles due west of London: the railway that joins Treherbert to Cardiff, via Rhondda Fawr and Pontypridd.

Hard to imagine two more different worlds. But, 60 years ago, there was a flow of healthy creative blood between those two thoroughfares. Ceri Richards, Britain's leading surrealist, based in London, was an inspiration to a new generation of young Rhondda artists who used that railway as a moving seminar room.

Each morning in the late 1940s, Charles Burton, Ernie Zobole, Robert Thomas and other young lions caught a train from the Rhondda to attend Cardiff School of Art. When we interviewed Charles Burton he made it clear that, when they were arguing on that train about the relative merits of Ceri Richards and Picasso, the sliding door to their compartment was firmly shut to outsiders.

We decided this needed re-enacting and hired four young drama students to play the parts of the Rhondda artists. They performed beautifully in an ancient carriage hauled by a steam train on the Gwili Railway near Carmarthen. One of them was told by Steve Freer, our director: "When Kim finishes his piece to camera, standing there in the entrance to your carriage, I want you to slide the door, fast and hard, excluding him from your discussions, exactly as the Rhondda Group would have done to some outsider who might have tried to enter their private world."

Concentrating on the task of portraying a brittle young artist of the 1940s, the drama student put down his pencil and waited, tense with volcanic creativity, until I said my bit. Suddenly, with all his might, he slammed the door shut, missing my nose by a fraction. Whether or not the camera picked up the shock on my face at this screen violence, I don't know, and I didn't glance down to see if the drama student was pleased with his performance.

Instead, remembering Steve's instructions, I got a grip and walked out of camera shot, hearing Steve shout "Cut" as directors do when they get anywhere near actors. Only then, as the steam train puffed down the Gwili Valley, did I tentatively check with my index finger that my ample nose was still intact. It was.

Episode three of Framing Wales can be seen on Thursday 10 March at 7.30pm on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two Wales, or afterwards on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer.

I knew of Graham Sutherland and had admired his work immensely, especially his portraits of Beaverbrook and Somerset Maugham, and the one of Churchill in particular. I thought it was an absolute disaster when his widow burnt the painting as a result of her promise to Winston before he died.

Detail from 'Welsh Landscape with Roads',1936, by Graham Sutherland. © Tate, London 2011

Churchill had hated it - I think he had wanted to be painted in the red robes, looking regal and gorgeous, and he felt that Sutherland had painted him in a very mundane and ugly way. I thought destroying it was such an appalling thing to do for the future of art in general, let alone for the fact that it was such a good portrait.

Read the rest of this entry

. For those not yet in the know, he's all about Makin' A Bad Ting Good. As are , the Welsh company behind the stop motion animation for this new hit children's programme. We bartered some cheese in exchange for an interview with joint managing director Aron Evans.

Rastamouse is a new children's animated series following the eponymous crime fighting, guitar playing, skateboarding hero and his band of mystery solving, friends and reggae-playing musicians - the Easy Crew. If you haven't seen it yet, take a look on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer.

The stop motion animation series is based on the books written by Genevieve Webster and Michael De Souza, and the character of Rastamouse is voiced by British actor and presenter Reggie Yates.

Rastamouse characters on set: Scratchy, Rastamouse and Zoomer

Read on to see what MD Aron has to say about the programme and his successful company.

Tell us a little about Dinamo Productions' involvement with Rastamouse.

We first met Greg Boardman and Eugenio Perez, the producers for Three Stones Media who produce Rastamouse, two years ago in Cannes. They showed us the project and told us that they had acquired rights to Rastamouse the book, and they showed us a short piece of film. They were looking for an animation studio to work on Rastamouse, so we had a look at the project and absolutely loved it.

We then had a further discussion in terms of how we could collaborate. We secured help and funding through the Wales Creative IP Fund from the Welsh Assembly and secured the work to Dinamo. It's been a great journey.

Though Rastamouse has only recently burst onto our screens, when did Dinamo first start filming the stop-animation for the programme?

We started the animation about eight months ago. We recruited a load of animators and started off by working with the models; the puppets were coming initially from props company , and the first thing that we did was practice the characters' walks to get the them right.

The walks are very important, as was getting Rastamouse to ride the skateboard really well. It took quite a while to get that right, as we needed a specific look to it.

One of the main things for us as a company was getting some of the designs from Genevieve Webster, the illustrator of the books, and then transcribing those illustrations into 3D sets. It did take a while to crack that nut but we were very pleased collectively, and Genevieve was really pleased with the result.

I remember when I took her round the studio Genevieve - being one of the creators of Rastamouse - was incredibly emotional to see the work transcribed into stop motion reality.

What is your reaction to the huge success that Rastamouse is currently enjoying? Did you think that it would be such a hit?

One of the reasons that Dinamo chose to work on this project was the fact that it was so fresh and so different. I loved the rhythm of the language and also the art direction; I found it very attractive.

I think the audience watching on CBeebies have reacted in the same way that I reacted to it initially, I embraced as it's such an original concept and it's such a positive programme - I absolutely loved the scripts when I first read them, which was about a year and a half ago.

I'm not really surprised it's had such a good reaction, I'm really gratified by the reaction, but I thought it was a winner from the beginning.

Ìý

On the set of Rastamouse

TV episodes are around 10 minutes long; how much time goes into creating each episode?

It's hard to work out actually; presently we're working on seven episodes at any one given time. It's a complicated show to film because there are so many characters, but I would guess that each episode takes about two weeks to film.

Can you briefly describe the animation process to us?

The stop-animation process is exactly like ! Tom Edgar, the animation director, sets up the shot and Christine Vestergaard the DOP/lighting director gets it lit nicely and focused and then the animators, when we're happy with the picture, look at the , which is the version of the storyboard with the sound on it.

The animators then match the sound and then literally move the models a frame at a time and animate the characters. It's a laborious but very, very highly skilled production flow.

Did you have much creative input in designing the characters and sets, or were they fairly faithfully adapted from the books?

Initially right at the beginning of production the models were provided by Mackinnon and Saunders but because of the amount of characters that are in the production we have an in-house team that create the clothes for the characters and as a company we also started to build our own characters.

So it's kind of migrated; there was an initial huge and fantastic input by Mackinnon and Saunders and then gradually as the logistics took over a lot of the transcribing of the original designs by Genevieve were then handled by Emily Hartley and Natasha Harrison, who make the costumes for the models.

So our involvement as a company is quite crucial in that process; Emily and Natasha do an amazing job of interpreting the quite simple 2D designs as we have to make them work on the models. It's a very interesting but very creative process.

Behind the scenes with the team at Dinamo Productions

Illustrations of the Rastamouse characters at the Dinamo studios

Do you work closely with the voice actors during the animation process? Are their parts recorded before or after you've done the visuals?

Conventionally in terms of stop motion animation the voices are all recorded and then provided to us at the studio so our involvement on that side isn't a great deal really. We do sometimes suggest changes to the script but that's mostly controlled by Greg and Eugenio.

Will there be more series featuring Rastamouse and the Easy Crew in the future?

I'd love if it there were more series of Rastamouse! It's going to be a very interesting time because we don't know at the moment what the audience numbers are, and how well it's doing so it's kind of early days. But certainly it's created a lot of really good PR so hopefully, fingers crossed we'll get more, but we'll see.

What other programmes have Dinamo Productions been involved with?

Last year we were shooting a series called Tellytales in conjunction with Elen Rhys at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales. That was a series we did for CBeebies and it involved a lot of live action and 2D animation.

We've also been involved with Grandpa In My Pocket, which has been a very successful show. That was all shot in Cardiff and that was a highly rating show and is currently showing on CBeebies. We've just finished a third series of that, and we did all of the GFX [graphic effects] and the animation for that particular series.

We also finished, about a year ago, a series for ZDF and Playhouse Disney called Fun With Claude, which was a 52-part 10-minute show, purely in 2D animation. We've had a very busy couple of years, and certainly Rastamouse was crucial in the development of the company because it gave us a chance to put a stop motion studio together and gave us the opportunity to move over to Treforest.

Ìý

Details of the various Rastamouse sets and scenery

Can you tell us about any future projects you have in the pipeline? / What are you working on at the moment?

Ìý

We've got a new show called The Abadas, a commission by CBeebies, S4C and RTE. We're very excited about this show; it's a combination of 2D animation and live action, and the producer is our in-house senior producer Siwan Jobbins, so we're going to be in production of that project in the summer. And yet to be announced is another 26-part half-hour show, but it's a bit early for us to announce that...

How many people work on Rastamouse and what sorts of tasks do they do?

Currently we've got nine animators working on Rastamouse. In the art department, in terms of the set and the set dressing, we've got about five people working on that, plus a lighting engineer, a DOP [director of photography], an editor, runners, production coordinators and myself - it does amount to about 25 people.

A Rastamouse set in production

Pieces of scenery including bread, cakes, loaves, pizzas and pizza boxes

How many different models of the main characters are there, and how do they differ?

In terms of the Easy Crew - so Scratchy, Zoomer and Rastamouse - we've got eight copies of each of those models. Of the other main characters we've probably got about three or four, and also about 12 little orphans - as they're very busy in lots of the shots!

It is interesting shooting stop motion as it's a bit like managing actors, because you've only got a certain amount of characters you can work with. We have a lot of set and puppet clashes, which is an interesting logistical problem.

Also worth mentioning is that some animators work with particular models. For example, Edward Jackson, one of our animators, likes to work with models that are quite loose in terms of their joints - he works with a specific Rastamouse which is a bit looser, whereas some of the other animators like to work with models that are a bit more stiff. Each animator 'owns' their own Rastamouse.

How many frames are typically used in a second of animation?

We're , so we have about 12/13 frames per second, but when we're shooting the skating sequences we shoot on ones - so that's 25 frames per second.

Shooting on twos is faster, you can do it twice as fast but if you're doing a skating sequence for example and you're shooting on twos, you get a kind of strobing effect which looks a little ugly. So if you have any very fast movement it's best to work on ones - it's a smoother action and it's more pleasing to the eye as it's a faster frame rate.

Does Dinamo plan to do more stop motion animation in the future? Is your core business likely to remain computer-generated?

What the future holds is for Dinamo to be a one-stop shop for all types of animation, that's what we'd like to keep on doing.

I've got a number of projects which I'm looking at at the moment which include other stop motion projects. We're also looking at going into the games industry and also feature film work as well.

Is it more labour-intensive to shoot stop motion animation as opposed to CGI?

Stop motion animation looks on the face of it to be quite labour intensive but on any given day a lot of the animators can get through about 12 to 14 seconds of animation, which is really quick. It doesn't sound too quick to the layman but in terms of animation it's very quick!

But with CGI animation you can probably do about four seconds of animation, so it kind of balances out. Stop motion animation is physically demanding and there's a lot of issues in terms of re-use, but with CGI animation you can re-use a lot of the animation which isn't so much of the case with stop motion.

Gladstone, President Wensley Dale and Ice Popp on set

How long has the company been running, and how long have you been based at the Treforest Industrial Estate?

Myself and Owen Stickler started the company in 2004, and we had about six people working for us. We moved over to Treforest about seven months ago, and we've currently got about 85 people working for us.

Further information:

• Rastamouse on CBeebies
• Watch Rastamouse on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer

Tuesday 8 March 2011 is the centenary of International Women's Day, and there are many events happening across Wales to mark the occasion.

There are profiles of many great Welsh women on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales Arts site for you to peruse. These range from figures from the visual arts such as Gwen John and the Davies sisters, to authors such as National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, Menna Elfyn and Rachel Trezise, and acting stars Catherine Zeta Jones and Rachel Roberts.

Gwendoline and Margaret Davies.Photos courtesy of Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales

Here are a couple of arts-inspired events taking place to mark International Women's Day:

in Penarth is hosting an exhibition by four female artists that runs until 22 March. It features paintings and sculptures which incorporate the theme of poetry.

Pauline Williams, Shirley Anne Owen, Kay Keogh and Sue Roberts have each responded to particular poems that have in some way influenced them in their own craft.

Pauline Williams, Darkest Night - oil on canvas. Image © the artist and courtesy of Oriel Washington Gallery

Pascale Petit, who was born in Paris and grew up in both France and Wales, is set to give an illustrated talk on the work of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and read a selection of poems from her latest book, What the Water Gave Me, as part of the .

On Saturday 12 March the Fluellen Theatre Co will perform Dario Fo's A Woman Alone at the . The play, a black comedy about a housewife held prisoner in her own home, will be a script-in-hand presenation and preceded by a talk about the writer’s life and work.

´óÏó´«Ã½ Cymru Wales will also be joining in the day's celebrations, and will be highlighting the achievements of women through discussions and stories with an all female presentation line-up on English language services.

It will start with ´óÏó´«Ã½ Breakfast and Good Morning Wales, continuing through the day on Radio Wales and Wales Today, with female continuity announcers on ´óÏó´«Ã½ One Wales and ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two Wales. Radio Cymru’s output will also be reflecting the anniversary.

Plus browse the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales History and ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales Music blogs for more information.

Very spooky feeling. Wandering, alone, around the beautifully refurbished art galleries of the National Museum of Wales. In one of the huge rooms, our director, Steve Freer and the crew are setting up to film paintings by Ceri Richards and Graham Sutherland for the second programme in our series on the history of art in Wales over the last century.

Alone, in the galleries where pictures collected by the Davies sisters hang, I find myself spooked by spectral images reflecting from the framed glass. They are not of me, now well into my sixties, but of me at 16 with my pals from Mountain Ash Grammar School, arguing the merits of this painter against that one, of Van Gogh's wonderful, rain-streaked landscape at Auvers and Cezanne's Provencal Landscape.

I knew, always, that I was so lucky to live within 30 miles of such pictures. Almost half a century has passed since the days when I stuck out my thumb at the top of Penywaun hill, between Hirwaun and Aberdare, hoping for a lift down the valley. Once in the big city, the first stop was Spillers record shop in the Hayes to hear the latest jazz releases. I remember walking from Spillers to the National Museum, clutching Miles Davis' album Milestones. I'd just blown my accumulated pocket-money on buying it. The album cover was a work of art in itself: a stunning photograph of Davis, sporting a shirt so deliciously green that I searched for years, unsuccessfully, to find one like it.

Cardiff, jazz, the impressionist and post-impressionist paintings of the Davies Sisters' Bequest: music and paintings that linked Aberdare and Mountain Ash to New York, Paris and Provence. The combination and links generated energy of such intensity that, a half century later, it still sparked and leapt around those pictures in the National Museum.

Just before we start filming, I try to communicate a little of this, without appearing to be entirely certifiable, to a young art expert who works at the Museum, researching and writing about the paintings. She listens, politely, but I know I'm not getting through. Her incomprehension at much of my babbling makes me begin to wonder how far I should go in front of the camera in trying to explain what this place meant to me as a kid in 1964, hungry for great art.

In the nick of time, I tell myself, 'Hang on, you raving egomaniac, this is about explaining how Ceri Richards, not Kim Howells, was thrilled and inspired when he first saw the Davies Sisters' pictures. This is about how Ceri Richards, in turn, inspired a new generation of artists and how, in turn, that generation passed on the torch to painters and sculptors in Wales.'

Saved then. But even as I did my pieces to camera, out of the corner of my eye I could see those ghosts, arguing and buzzing across the magic glass of those sublime pictures.

Episode two of Framing Wales can be seen tonight, Thursday 3 March, at 7.30pm on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two Wales, or afterwards on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer.

An exhibition to mark the centenary of the birth of Swansea-born artist Alfred Janes will open later this month at the in Cardiff.

Janes was one of the group of many talented Welsh artists who attended the Swansea School of Art in the 20th century, and was one of the Kardomah Boys - alongside friends and contemporaries including Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins and Daniel Jones.

Alfred Janes in 1936 in his studio in College Street, Swansea. Photo courtesy of Hilly Janes

Hilly Janes - the daughter of the artist - recently got in touch to tell us about the exhibition, which she is helping gallery owner Rhian Kooy to curate:

"My father was both intellectually curious and a dedicated craftsman. Whether painting in the Chelsea flat he shared with Dylan Thomas, the Gower barn that was his studio in the 1950s, or later in what had been the dining room of our house in Dulwich, he experimented with different styles and techniques, often inventing his own methods of mixing paint or introducing new and unusual materials such as sand we collected from Oxwich Bay, or perspex.

"This made him hard to pigeon-hole - never a wise move commercially - but it's what made him, according to leading 20th century art historian Mel Gooding, "".

Alfred Janes' painting The Queue (1938). Image © the artist, provided by Hilly Janes

"The exhibition at Oriel Kooywood is a centenary celebration of my father's work from rare early drawings to paintings completed just before he died in 1999.

"There will be portraits of contemporaries, including: Kardomah Boys Mervyn Levy and Tom Warner, and also student Chelsea flatmate, the artist William Scott; figurative scenes of post-war domestic life and Gower beaches; abstracts from the 1960s and the constructions and collages of the 1970s. In his final works he returned to a constant theme - the fruit and flowers of his parents' Swansea shop, which he described as 'my heritage in still life painting'."

Fish and Pineapple by Alfred Janes, 1936. Image © the artist, provided by Hilly Janes

The exhibition at Oriel Kooywood Gallery runs from Friday 18 MarchÌý to Friday 15 April. for further information and opening hours, and read more about Alfred Janes on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales Arts website.

The Urdd organisation has announced that the will be held on the grounds of Coleg Meirion Dwyfor on the Glynllifon Estate near Caernarfon.

This isn't the first time that the Eisteddfod has been held there; the Urdd Eisteddfod took place on the site in 1990. That was one of the first - if not the first - Eisteddfodau I remember going to as a child (I was four!).

This site itself is draped in local history as it was once owned by the Lords Newborough, and boasts beautiful gardens and acres of land, part of which is owned by Coleg Meirion Dwyfor.

Meriel Parry, Chair of the Eryri Urdd National Eisteddfod's Executive Committee said: "Eryri is looking forward to the Eisteddfod and glad that the festival is returning to the area once again and with a great site secured at Glynllifon, we look forward to a very successful festival in 2012."

If you don't know the difference between the different Eisteddfod festivals held over Wales take a look back to a previous blog I wrote.

I'm glad the Urdd have decided to bring the Eisteddfod back to Eryri. A lot of talent has come from the area itself, with some starting out by competing in the Eisteddfod. Most notably Bryn Terfel, who was raised not far from the Eisteddfod site in Pant Glas. Here he is performing at the 1982 Urdd Eisteddfod:

The latest film by Welsh director Marc Evans goes on general release this week, and sees the acting début of Welsh songstress Duffy.

, a road movie that tells the stories of two different women in Wales and Argentina, will have its Welsh premiere at in Cardiff on Thursday 3 March, before going on general release on Friday 4 March.

The film also features fellow Welsh stars Nia Roberts, Matthew Rhys and Matthew Gravelle.

Duffy makes her film début in Patagonia. Photo: Verve Pictures

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Matthew Rhys and Nia Roberts in Patagonia. Photo: Verve Pictures

Matthew Gravelle, Nia Roberts and Matthew Rhys. Photo: Verve Pictures

Read more about the film, and Duffy's part in it, on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales News website. Plus browse a photo gallery featuring more stills from the film.

I may not be the greatest admirer of his work, but we couldn't leave the artist David Jones out of our second film. He was the kind of semi-detached Welshman, born in England, partly of Welsh parentage, who becomes a disciple of what he imagines to be the essence of Welshness.

So, in his enthusiasm to do his bit in World War One, he joins a regiment that has a Welsh name but discovers that it contains as many Cockneys as it does Taffs. He survives the horrors of the trenches and returns to Britain, his knapsack full of wonderful drawings of his comrades from the Western Front.

He is determined to make his living as an artist but does so in the oddest way: he heads for an abandoned monastery on the steep flanks of a tiny, remote hamlet, called Capel y Ffin, in the eastern Black Mountains of Wales. There, he joins an artistic community, led by the distinguished (and, it turns out, disturbingly odd) sculptor, Eric Gill, who had moved from gentler Sussex to the monastery with his religious cohorts and extended family.

As David Jones expert Dr Anne Price Owen explained to us on a grey, freezing morning in Capel y Ffin, this was a turning point for Jones. The simple, Spartan existence he found at the monastery, steeped in religious mysticism and guided by Gill's quirky creativity, helped Jones break loose of the artistic conventions that had governed his approach to painting up to that point.

Our cameraman, Tudor Evans, framed the monastery against the hillside - a panorama complete with what appeared to be the very same horses that Jones included in his drawings and paintings back in 1925.

In reverential, hushed tones, Tudor, with one eye glued to the viewfinder, said, 'Superb. What absolute peace. It looks as if nothing's changed in 85 years...' A moment later, he leapt back and pointed, his finger quivering, outraged that his cameraman's nirvana had been shattered by the sudden, howling appearance of a quad bike, charging towards the horses, driven by a farmer intent on rounding-up his livestock and caring nothing for Tudor's artistic sensibilities.

Our director, Steven Freer, the very essence of diplomacy, consoles Tudor. 'It's OK,' he says, in words as soothing as the British Ambassador might use in a nuclear missile bunker in Pyongyang, 'you've shot some wonderful stuff for us already. We've got more than enough...'

Tudor doesn't look convinced but we pack up, the quad-bike's vile whine still echoing off both sides of the valley, and head west to the jewel that is the Glynn Vivian gallery in Swansea. I know I'm going to feel more at home there, in Dylan Thomas's ugly lovely town, full of glorious pictures, painted by the very same pals Dylan argued with over milky coffee at the Kardomah. Evan Walters, Ceri Richards, Alfred Janes, Vincent Evans and a host more of west Wales' best. What a treat!

Episode two of Framing Wales can be seen on Thursday 3 March at 7.30pm on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two Wales, or afterwards on ´óÏó´«Ã½ iPlayer.

I loved Shani's paintings. They very much had their own style and they're all similar and all recognisably hers.

Her paintings have very staring, very hypnotic eyes. You can't look away from the self portraits, you find you are mesmerised and grabbed by those eyes looking right through you. And the skin colour, the reddish nature of the skin colour, felt to me as if she'd always painted herself almost sunburnt by the Australian climate that she had moved away from when she was nine. She always has that Australianness in everything she's done, I think.

Overall, Shani Rhys James. (Property of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wales)

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