Behind the Scenes at The BOOMTOWN Story Tour

Unless you’re in a Fairy Tale, it’s highly unlikely someone will give you money under a bridge. 

Trust me, I know. Jono and I spend an inordinate amount of time under bridges. If reincarnation is a thing, Jono and I are coming back as bridge trolls… And we’ll insist on a Troll Fee. 

So, imagine our surprise when the film crew from Lottoland’s Help ‘n Dorp arrived at the BOOMTOWN Gallery (“our” bridge) and handed Matt Hogarty an envelope with the promise of hard cold electronic transfer money. 

But let’s go back in time a little bit further. How did our dorp get on the radar of needing help?

Cue the flashback soundtrack. 

Enter Matt Hogarty. You might know him from such endeavours as Love Howick and Love Cities. Before Jono and I went to Europe in May, Matt phoned with a potential-funding-very-tight-deadline proposal. Anyone who has ever applied for funding will know that the deadline is always less than 24 hours. My mission was to send cut-and-paste snippets about Jono and my vision for street art and storytelling in the Midlands and as many high-res photos as possible. I was in panicking-packing mode but it’s hard to say no to Matt (fortunately). 

One evening, while we were enjoying a cold beer in Hannover I received a message from Matt saying we’d been shortlisted as one of the towns for the project. Jono and I are not in the business of getting our hopes up… Especially where money is involved. 

So that’s how we arrived under the bridge on the 24th of June, just over a week after getting back from Europe. Little did we know that the Lottoland Help ‘n Dorp homies were not scouting… They were there to announce we’d made it and hand us the envelope and the deadline. 

“You need to deliver by the 1st of October, that’s when we’re coming back for the final shoot.” 

The project was divided between Jackal & Hide and Love Howick, and we got R292 000 of the budget. This seems like a lot, but we needed to deliver 5 bus stops (covering the cost of panel installation), one side (10 panels) of a 40mx5m underpass, and murals at five other sites. On top of this, we also needed professionally performed stories to be researched, written, recorded, and edited with SFX. The project includes another 10 other artists/writers/voiceover artists. We dream big, and then that dream becomes too small and we need to go bigger… Much bigger. Usually, the dreaming expands by about week two or three of a project. To save the budget and protect our vision, we dried up our personal paint stock and a lot of Jono and my work has been “pro Jono” as we like to call it. 

In its first iteration, the project was The Midlands Magic Storybook Tour. The idea was to paint beautiful murals and include narrated stories to scan via QR code. We were going to present the Midlands as if it were a gorgeous audiobook with painted illustrations. 

If you’d like to recreate this project at home here’s what you’ll need… 

• An efficient municipality who support street art and approve walls and bus stops for painting
• 5 bus stops and a Tony Morcom to install ready-to-paint galvanised steel backing to them
• 1 underpass tunnel of roughly 40mx5m
• Walls to be built at Howick Falls, Howick Central Park, and Nottingham Road
• A plastered and primed wall in Merrivale (thanks Quarry SUPERSPAR)
• An electrical substation in Mpophomeni
• Lots and Lots of Paint (thanks to Hilton BuildIt for sponsoring a lot of PVA)
• Artists

Let’s talk about artists. 

The world of street art is broad. We wanted to showcase this variety by including two artists from Cape Town, even though we knew it would dent the budget. Jackal & Hide’s vision isn’t just about this phase of the project, our vision extends into the future and that’s why collaboration is paramount. We invited two Cape Town artists for the Mpophomeni underpass because we needed artists who could inject a unique style into portraits. Copying photos is one thing; the idea is to represent the essence of an individual through art and to tell a story. MotelSeven and Bushy Wopp are very established contemporary street artists with quirky and distinct styles perfect for this story. Our plan is also to create a platform for the future where national and international artists want to travel to the Midlands to support projects like this. 

Jackal & Hide were also joined by Thato Sbk from Mahikeng to paint two bus stops with his beautiful style, the fabulous Keagan Dunn from Pietermaritzburg, and of course, the dazzling Lelo Mncwango. 

If you’d like to recreate this project at home you’ll also need…

• An artist and a writer to be project managers
• Bioplus
• A bigger dream

It didn’t take long for us to realise that The Midlands Magic Storybook Tour was too long and too twee. It would have to go. We needed to Marie Kondo that shit before we’d committed to the metaphorical “Biggie Best Aesthetic”. If you lived through the 90s you’ll know the Biggie Best Mania that started with wallpaper and a few scatter cushions and next thing there was matching curtains, pelmets, bins, tissue box holders, and a telephone directory cover. Biggie Best took over lives and left many bankrupt in a pattern-aggressive nightmare. 

Jono and I needed to act quickly– we rebranded to The BOOMTOWN Story Tour. 

But rebranding wasn’t good enough because what do we do about people?

Here’s what we know about people en masse

• They read headlines not articles
• They text while watching television
• Reading has changed
• Listening has changed
• Attention spans… Yikes

So how do we get people to look harder and listen more? 

The BOOMTOWN Story Tour is about getting people to look at murals and street art as more than just a social media opportunity. Jackal & Hide prides itself on our conceptual work and a lot of it is missed because people tend to glance rather than look. That’s where the stories come in. Stories are there to engage you in the moment, to encourage you to take it slow, to relax, and to go back to those halcyon days when listening to stories was the best part of anyone’s day.  

But how do you make people listen? 

Through many projects, we know that most people lose interest when being read to. Public space is challenging and people aren’t in the habit of listening to a nice story when cars are driving past. 

Fortunately, Jono and I have enough Bioplus and optimism to sustain us. There’s no such thing as giving up and what’s a budget anyway? 

What started as basic stories with a few voiceover artists under the banner of The BOOMTOWN Story Tour is now two distinct storylines. So to clear up any confusion, The BOOMTOWN Story Tour comprises Shine Mpophomeni and The BEST Midlands Tour Guide. 

Shine Mpophomeni will be a magical realism podcast about The Storyhunter, Khuba Ikaneng, and the Mpophomeni community. Each episode highlights a different story collected by the Storyhunter with his magic torch. The decision to craft a podcast made sense because we are obsessed with podcasts and there’s so much room to play with how content is presented. 

The BEST Midlands Tour Guide is a tour run by The Hadeda and The Dassie, two illegal tour operators. These two loveable rogues commandeer a tour bus of visiting animals and take them through the Midlands trying to impress them with their hip-hop skills and antics. I was inspired by David Sedaris who wrote the incredible Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (recommended Audible listening) about anthropomorphised animals. Anthropomorphisation tickles Jono and me because it’s a way to be critical of humans without getting into trouble. I’ve written The BEST Midlands Tour Guide script to appeal to all ages. We’re lucky to have local goodboys Luke and Andy from The Fabric Shop to play The Hadeda and The Dassie, Khuba Ikaneng to play The Crocodile, and the marvellous Bianca Pieters whose range of character voices is something to behold/belisten. 

Somewhere in amongst all of this, the deadline changed. The film crew were coming back on the 16th of September. 

Juggling project management (scaffolding, ladders, paint orders, transport, deadlines, budget, etc.) with design work, painting, and writing is difficult. Anyone who has done anything creative will know how distractions work. There were days when nothing creative could be done, and this drove up anxiety because of the deadline… And anyone who has tried to be creative with anxiety knows how that goes. Cue the Bioplus.  

But we made it. Almost. 

Jackal & Hide’s aim for this project was to reinspire that old Midlands Meander feeling. We want people to explore and engage with what’s around them, while also acknowledging that you can’t fight technology. Another important aspect is collaboration. We strive for sustainable collaborations that showcase the extraordinary talent we have on our doorstep and further afield. 

It starts with a vision. And then the vision usually changes, even though the budget doesn’t. But we believe in Fairy Tales and everyday magic, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have a ragtag crew of generous people who believe in the vision and will help you to get over the line. 

I’m sure you have questions about when these tours will go live and when the murals will be finished… Coming up next time, we’ll go Behind the Scenes of The BEST Midlands Tour Guide and yes, you’ll get some answers.