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We’ve had a good week here at Athena Media Towers ~(currently owned by NAMA!). On Monday night our colleague Seamus Martin picked up our Gold Award in the New York Radio Festival for our radio series for RTE Radio 1 Death of an Empire. It won gold in the history category and beat off competition from three excellent BBC programmes (including a major one on the same topic of the birth of modern Russia) and ABC amongst others. The series started as a conversation over coffee between myself and Seamus at the beginning of last year. It turned into a radio submission which eventually got support from RTE Radio 1 who came behind the idea of Seamus, a former Moscow correspondent, going back to Moscow to tell the story of the death of the Soviet Union and the birth of what has become Putin’s Russia. The recording period covered the riots and protests against Putin and gave us a lively sense of current affairs in a ‘history’ documentary. Although its a five part series its fundamentally a documentary of five parts weaving stories and sounds to try and create a sense of the time. We got great support from many contributors who gave their time and memories and from people who helped us with the project like Laura Haydon who was living in Moscow at the time and helped Seamus record and Marie Stamp, a Canadian now Irish citizen living in Dublin, who helped with the often difficult logs of non English speakers. We logged all the interviews and people in our office like Stephen Corkery found great archive sounds and clips to illustrate the time. Lisa Essuman, the mainstay of Athena Media, managed the project, chasing archives with RTE and trying to get everything within a tiny budget. She did many of the recording here in Ireland and worked with Seamus helping him to become a radio recordist himself. As the producer I worked to try and shape a story which was an audio and sound story. I recorded here in Ireland and in Finland getting great support from people there. We recorded with Lithuanians and connected with the right voices thanks to our ambassador there who was generous with her time and contacts. Everything had to be knitted together - shaped and paper edited into five half hours. A script written for and with Seamus. Seamus’s knowledge and contacts made the project. We worked for over six months on it to a final edit which really became just ten or so days - two days per episode - and there audio editor Lochlainn Harte worked to make everyone sound good - cleaning up speech and helping non English speakers interviews to work. For a very modest budget we managed to make something special and its our thanks to everyone - particularly the people who told their stories to us - for helping to make the series which has now been internationally recognised.
In many ways we were too busy this week to celebrate or pause too much to rest on laurels as we’re in the midst of one of the most fascinating projects - its a TV documentary called Beyond Limits which follows the stories of elite athletes heading to London to represent Ireland in the 2012 Paralympic Games. Check our our promo videos on the vimeo channel
We are shooting with two great people on camera - Barry MacNeill - who has worked with us for many years - and Eleanor Bowman who is even smaller in height than myself and Assistant Producer Paula Cunniffe! They are dogged in getting the right shots and push their own limits every time we shoot. The stories are compelling and deeply moving. People like Mark Rohan, the world champion hand cyclist, who became paralysed when he was 20 due to a road accident. Mark is charismatic and inspiring. We have meet people like Jason Smyth the visual impaired runner who is determined to not just win gold at the paralympics (he is current world champion) but to make every effort to qualify for the Olympics as well. He still has a chance and it all comes down to a nano second in sprinting. We met women like Catherine Walsh a veteran of the Paralympic Games who is a busy working mother of two full on children but she is also world champion tandem cyclist and determined to break the world record in London. These are inspiring heroes that everyone - particularly children - need to get to know. People like 18 year old Darragh McDonald the amputee swimmer who has a golden personality and is set to take a similar colour medal in London if all goes well for him Darragh embodies the title of the documentary. He doesnt give in to limits. He drives, is at school, has lots of sporting interests and swim like a dolphin - with grace, speed and charm.
We love this project. It is quite special and airs on Setanta Ireland in late August just before the Games starts. Its supported by the BAI Sound & Vision Scheme and to them and our contributors we say thanks. Everyone here loves telling compelling stories and nothing could be more compelling than the material we’re working with in Beyond Limits. Join the conversation about the athletes and the Games on twitter and use the hashtag #beyondlimits

We began the Media Show on April 14th and it closed last Saturday after its eight week run. We felt we were just getting into the flow of it but hopefully we’ll get to do it again. In many way it was eight weeks of intense media news with the fall-out of the BAI/RTE Fr Reynolds report, continued debate over ‘Tweetgate’, the exit of Gavin O’Reilly from INM and the rising deficit of RTE which surprised even RTE executives when the Minister announced it had hit 50 million euro. In many ways the summer months will be dominated by sports, Euro2012 and the Olympics and Paralympics, and it will be autumn before the media storms hit once more. Its been a great experience to run the show which now an on-going life on, with podcasts and additional content, and a pleasure to work with the team including presenter Brenda Power. Highlights for me include meeting Conor White Sullivan the young, dynamic and charming Huffington Post Technology Officer as well as hearing from Ted Talks in New York about why over 750 million people are watching their videos. We had just about everyone in our tiny mini studio here in Adelaide Chambers from the Minister, Pat Rabbitte, to RTE MD Television Glen Killane and TV3 CEO David McRedmond as well as my former boss and BAI chairman Bob Collins. We did inside media reports with TV3, the Late Late Show, Newstalk, Storyful, Longford Leader, KCLR and the Irish Times and we had mediawatch columns from diverse people and topics from ex Irish rugby star Orla Brennan on the lack of media coverage of women and sports to community worker Pauline Sargeant on hyperlocalism. All the mediawatch radio columns are in an audioboo channel if you want to catch up.
For us the summer will indeed be sports as we’re working on a TV documentary called ‘Beyond Limits’ on the Paralympics presented by blind and now paralysed athlete Mark Pollock as well as a radio series, produced by Lisa Essuman, for Newstalk on the Irish women in the Olympics called not suprisingly ‘Winning Women’ . For us the chance that we will see Katie Taylor win Gold in London is very personal since we made a documentary with her in 2008 for Setanta as part of the Tv series called ‘Winning Women’ - I have the chance to be there in August and can’t wait to see Katie go for Gold. Whatever happens no one could have done more to get there and to go for gold than Katie Taylor.
A big treat for us on June 18th is the New York Radio Awards where our series ‘Death of an Empire’ is a global finalist in the history documentary section of the awards. We’re up against top competition from BBC, ABC and beyond but our presenter Seamus Martin will be there just in case we like Katie have a chance of going for something shiny. We always try to see our work as world-class standard, as attempting to be as good as we can possibly make it within our resources and abilities, to achieve excellence and to push the boundaries as much as possible on factual content. In the coming months we have new radio projects in hand and from September a documentary-drama series will begin to dominate - but more about that then!