global digital creativity research & workshops

Every year our team work with Saffron Walden County High School to undertake a creative challenge which encourages students at the school and its partner primary schools to work together and engage with creative technologies. This year the challenge was as big as ever and involved all ‘groups’ taking part having to work together with each other to make ‘one big story’.

On the 11th of July Hal MacLean and myself headed down to the school to train the young people in four hours how to use the following pieces of software:

• Final Cut Pro (Video Editing)
• GarageBand (Sound Editing)
• iStopMotion (Animation)
• Comic Life (Comics)
• iMovie (for use with Reflecmedia kit to allow Chroma Key work)

This is the first year we have introduced Final Cut Pro to the 10 - 13 age range of pupils. We believe Apple’s iMovie is far too easy for young people who are now ‘tech savvy’ in comparison to the year 2000 (when we started this project). Young people now require high end tools as the desire to achieve high quality effects increases, Final Cut Pro has meant we’ve had to teach young people how to edit in the same software the BBC edit the news programme you will no doubt watch on TV this evening.

We’ve also introduced the young people to Reflecmedia kit, which allows them to ‘chroma key’ Harry Potter style! The material allows blue/green screening in any light conditions.

We look forward to returning to the school in October to review the finished products and celebrate success. When we return we’ll be training the 25 young people in Photoshop and DVD Studio Pro.

Click here to see what other projects Hal and I have been involved in with SWCHS.

Here are the first two podcasts which document the start of the project, in Day 2’s Podcast Elliott Williams talks about how Summer School projects have changed since 2001.

 Day 1 Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Day 2 Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup

I’ve spent the past three days working on the BBC Blast Truck in Hatfield, delivering a Film and Camera Production workshop for young people delivering this workshop each day:

The Truck will stop this year in 30 places, Hatfield was the first location. Last year Hamish, Hal and myself travelled with the truck (under the Ultralab flag) working with the local facilitators to deliver the Blast experience, we ran workshops and supported other facilitators to run theirs.

When I arrived at the venue it was good to see a lot of young people crowded round a DJ from BBC Radio 1xtra, clearly enjoying the experience of learning ‘Radio Production’. My own Film Making workshop was attended by 21 young people, we used Sony Z1 video cameras, learned how to shoot, edit and create a film together. After practicing, each group made their first film ‘Surprise’ within the three hours and were then set the tougher challenge for the following two days.

I challenged the young people were then to make a 100 second film entitled ‘Confusion’. The film had to be exactly 100 seconds long, could only have three lines of dialogue and had to be shot is a way which was modern and not traditional.

The films the young people created were very good, considering none had prior experience in film making.

The youngest participant was nine years old, the oldest, seventeen. The abilities of the young people were so good in both iMovie and Final Cut Pro they finished their work in double quick time and were able to visit some of the other workshops taking place on the truck, filming and documenting what else was happening.

Both myself and the team at Cleveratom have lots of experience running film, animation, creative art and photography workshops and were delighted to be invited on to the truck to pass on our knowledge.

Cleveratom wish the BBC Blast team the very best of success in delivering the 2007 national Blast Truck tour to a further 29 locations.

During the half term holiday in London Matt and I worked for the BBC running the Networked Identity project at the Science Museum and the Serpentine Gallery. This event was for young people to spend time finding ways of expressing their emotions about the environment that they are in.

Working with us for the week was Christian Nold who has developed a scientific art form called ‘Biomapping’. In brief, this is a lie detector mechanism which you wear as you walk around an environment. The detector measures changes in your state of arousal, or your emotional response to your current situation. Combine this with a GPS device and you have the ability to plot your emotional response on a map of your area… Google maps come in very handy here!

Additionally, throughout the week we encouraged the participants to blog their experiences, photograph and video where they went and keep a project diary of all of it. The Science Museum hosted a number of events for the participants, including free entry into the Science of Spying exhibition - a wonderful interactive event whcih really captivated the young (and old) alike! Rob Skitmore from the Science Museum also ran a morning’s workshop getting the young people to make a telegraph - in one week we travelled from the early part of the last century into the here and now! Rob was excellent, and the activity a great success.
All of this data was important to keep as they were also working towards an Arts Council Bronze award. The Serpentine Gallery had an exhibition of Karen Kilimnic’s work. This formed the focus for the second part of the week. Sophie Higgs from the Serpentine Gallery worked with us for the last couple of days and really helped bring out some very interesting ideas from the group.

There were some problems throughout the week with the technology, which was a bit of a shame. Just about everything electronic which we plugged in at one time or another managed to fail at some level. This introduced an edginess and challenge to the week which we were not so accustomed to, and meant that I spent a lot of time on the telephone talking to Matt about ways around the issues! It wasn’t that each piece of kit died, so much as different pieces were not working together as well as they might have done!

Despite this, by the end of the week there had been an astonishing amount of creativity exhibited by the participants and a display of the work was mounted at the Serpentine Gallery on the Friday. Parents and friends were able to visit, view and share in the work that was done, much of which was at a very high level of achievement.

So, well done to all who took part, thanks to all who supported (including the tireless Katie Holbird from BBC Blast) and special mention to John and Mike from Reflecmedia who went out of their way to ensure we had kit in time for the event to use with the young people.

Hal MacLean and myself spent this evening with the young people and their families from the Bromley Learning Alliance 2006 Summer School, in Bromley. We headed down to celebrate the animation work created by the young people over the summer months.

The challenge which was set back in July this year was to create a modern day comic book, in animation, photography, sound and film.  The ‘tough task’ was called ‘Twist of Fate’ and had ‘no right answer’, as ever.  The young people are giving an induction session to the technology and project, they then return to their collective schools over the summer to undertake the challenge.
We have been working with Merril Haeusler (Director) of the BLA since her days with SEEVEAZ (South East of England Virtual Education Action Zone). It was refreshing to see Merril at the event, and hearing her relate back to the early days back in 2000 when she first launched the project with us. If it had not been for the investment by Merril both financially, and more importantly her belief in what young people can do with creative technoloies I really do question where we would be today. As my last official presentation event for Ultralab it was nice to be in the company with Merrill, who was at my first ever Ultralab engagement back in 2000, at the Millennium Dome in London (Read about it here).

We’ve come a long way since that early project, travelled the world, impacted on broadcasters, governments, education establishments and policy makers. We still have a lot of work to do, together.

So here they are, the creative comics created under the banner of ‘Twist of Fate’ by the tallented young people of the Bromley area, enjoy:

 Changing Dreams: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Space Pigs: Play Now | Play in Popup
 The Restless Race: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Twist of Fate: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Unlucky Lottery Ticket: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Wacky William: Play Now | Play in Popup
 World Cup 2006: 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.

Hamish Scott-Brown, Hal MacLean and myself enjoyed ourselves all summer on the 2006 BBC Blast National Truck Tour. Here are the highlights:

 Watch the BBC Blast Tour 2006 Short Movie: Play Now | Play in Popup

The BBC Blast Truck is being supported by the Ultralab team for a tour around the UK undertaking creative outreach work with young people.

The big grey trucks rolled into Hull and were situated in Hull College car park for a two day visit with extended hours. The truck acted as a drop in centre for young people wishing to experiment with digital creativity, dance, music and ethical fashion. Bookings were also taken though the BBC Blast website. The venue was run by Paul from Connexions Humber in association with the BBC. Sadly it rained for the duration of the visit.

I ran classes in clay animation, digital photography, silent movies and creating comics.

It was really nice to be back in Hull, this is not the first time I have worked within the Hull region. In 2004 I was part of the ‘International Certificate in Digital Photography’ (ICDC) project in association with Creative Partnerships Hull.

Back in 2002/3 I worked closely with Richard Millwood, Hamish Scott-Brown and Professor Stephen Heppell of Ultralab on the ‘Input CBBC’ project. We worked in Hull and the North of England region with schools, colleges and community centres to find out what television would be like if young people made it themselves. There is more information on the project on this website.

Matthew Eaves from the team was really pleased to be invited onto the Etholle and John Breakfast Show this morning at 7.30am to talk about the World Wide Web’s 15th birthday. The show focused on the history on the Internet and Matthew explained how the Internet was changing as people needed it to allow them to be more creative.

Have a listen to the show:

 Matthew Eaves on BBC Essex: Play Now | Play in Popup