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Over the years we have carried out a number of corporate jobs, where we have had to brand the photo booth for a client. This can range from a single sticker on the side of a retro booth, to a complete vinyl wrap. Usually they are for Christmas parties or sales promotions, but we did one job that was totally different. This time it was an anti discrimination drive to help end disability hate.

Disability Video Booth

We were contracted to supply a fully wrapped video booth for a North East police force. This was to visit a number of libraries and community centres. This was to allow people to talk about nasty experiences that had been due to their disabilities.

We had one of our regular photo booths fully wrapped by a local company we use. We also extended it and removed the seat. This would allow wheelchair users to access the booth, and we added an uprated microphone system to the unit. All of our booths have video capabilities, but as this was designed to capture their stories we improved the mike systems.

Stott Him On The Heed

The first day we operated was I think Sunderland library. I turned up and set the booth up, and was joined by a couple of females P.C.’s that would be staying with me for the event.

The first client was a young lad. He stood in the booth and asked me what he was supposed to say. I explained that if he had experienced anything nasty he should talk about it.

“Well I was picked on a couple of weeks ago by a lad, should I say that?”

Definitely I replied,

“Then I picked a brick up and stotted it off his heed, should I say that?”

Erm, I think I will get this lady PC to talk to you as I am not sure how that will go down.

For those Southerners that haven’t encountered the North East dialects. Basically he was confessing to smacking his tormentor over the head with a brick.

The PC seemed to think he would be OK, as we weren’t taking names in the data and he left his story. I was a bit worried as over the day we had about 20 visitors. Now usually we have a couple of hundred go through a booth at a wedding or something. So this looked terrible. But the Police Officers seemed over the moon at the response. I guess the client being happy was all that counted.

Further Promotion

Looking back on the internet to see if there was anything mentioning the initiative, as it was back in about 2013, I discovered that the Northumberland Police force had actually posted a number of the video clips on Youtube.

They should be watched as some of them are heartbreaking.

I spent a considerable amount of time with the female police teams in the various towns we visited. At one location we had a fairly high ranking officer down. We were getting on really well when she received a phone call and told me she had to rush off. I did see her the next day and she explained that there had been an incident with a guy running amok with a knife. An officer had evidently tasered him, but unfortunately he had previously soaked himself in petrol. Seems that electricity and petrol soaked perpetrators turn into Roman candles pretty quickly.