global digital creativity research & workshops

I spent today (Friday 27th October) and yesterday at BBC Northern Ireland in Belfast working with the BBC Blast team on a new pilot project for BBC One NI’s Mental Health Campaign.

I worked closely with Emma Majury and Rod from the local college to create a 90 second animation which followed a soundbite story of a person who had recovered from depression.

We spent Thursday planning, Friday morning buliding sets and the afternoon animating. We filmed the entire sequence in reverse scene order, then strung it together in iMovie and added the sound.

I have previously worked in Northern Ireland on the BBC Blast Truck in 2006 with Emma and the team, in 2003 Richard Millwood, Anthony Russell, Martin Doherty and myself undertook a cross-community summer school programme.

 View the first draft of the movie with sound: Play Now | Play in Popup
 View the completed movie with sound and music: Play Now | Play in Popup

Hal MacLean and Matthew Eaves from the team spent the day with Class 2 at Cressing Primary School to undertake some experimental research into clay animation with six year olds. Mrs Harris and her classroom assistants were a great help throughout the day as fourteen six year old pupils took part.

Click the above images to enlarge them.

The objective of the day was to find out how six year olds coped with an animation task, learning the skills of model making, story construction and then using computers and digital video camera equipment to animate their story.

The session was the pilot for a larger project which will be held in Cardiff next month, which we will post more about here at digitalcreativity.org when the time comes.

Hal and myself will be writing a paper on our findings. The learning from this experiment has already changed our plans for BBC Wales.

Everyone involved in the project will recieve their creative work on DVD, created using iDVD, here is a screenshot of the DVD in production:

(Click image to enlarge)

We would like to thank Sue Giles, Head Teacher at the school for welcoming us into the school at such short notice.

Here are the files created on the day:

 Group 1 (Animation 1): Play Now | Play in Popup
 Group 1 (Animation 2): Play Now | Play in Popup
 Group 2: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Group 3 (Animation 1): Play Now | Play in Popup
 Group 3 (Animation 2): Play Now | Play in Popup
 Group 4 (Animation 1): Play Now | Play in Popup
 Group 4 (Animation 2): Play Now | Play in Popup
 Ultralab Example : Play Now | Play in Popup
 Meanwhile Martin Hodder at Ravens Wood School in Bromley, Kent created this brilliant experimental animation:: Play Now | Play in Popup

Today the Saffron Walden County High School and Partner Primary Schools came to Ultralab to spend the day with myself and Hal MacLean to work on the DVD case designs of their Summer School project. For this challenge the young people involved in the project learned how to work with the Photo Shop application.

Thirty young people spent the day at the lab, showcasing the work they had achieved over the summer period. The work will go on display to an evening audience at a cinema in Cambridge later this year.

Some of the young people were tasked with making a DVD containing all of the work, this process was done using Apple’s iDVD.

Click here to read about the first time the group of young people were at Ultralab for their training session and challenge setting exercise.

Click here to read about the First Day of the Summer School on August 3rd.

Here is the DVD art created by the groups, while at Ultralab, to reflect the content of their completed films:

Click to expand the images.

Some of the groups also completed a DVD Disc image:

The Summer Challenge, which is set by Ultralab was called “Outside the Box”.

We invite the young people on the project to add comments below to introduce their work before we actually post their completed projects here on the site.

Well done everyone, exceptional work.

Hal and Matt attended the Bromley Learning Alliance centre to round up and celebrate the work that the children were doing over the summer in their ’summer project’.

Without a doubt these were films of a very high quality, and were made by children still in primary schools (mainly).

The challenge was ‘A Twist of Fate’ and had to be a nine section piece of work combining different genres into a video ‘comic’ show.

We were absolutely delighted with the interpretations of the task, which once again reinforced the notion that the technology we are inviting people to use is empowering them to say something, rather than daunting them in its use.

Well done, Bromley - superb work!

We’ll be arranging the grand celebration event over the next few weeks and look forward to seeing you there.