global digital creativity research & workshops

I had the pleasure of working Friday the 15th and Saturday the 16th of February in Northern Ireland with our friends at BBC Blast Northern Ireland in Belfast working with NIDYA (Northern Ireland Deaf Youth Association) to create a film about a monkey escaping from the zoo.

My role was to work with the mixed group of teenagers to film the animation section of the film. Working through interpretors we had a great two days animating in a television studio.

The young people involved in the project lived locally, some were deaf. Filming also took part at Belfast Zoo, and the team were challenged to integrate real filming with cuts to animation.

 

We used a Sony Z1 camera linked up to an Apple computer running the brilliant iStopMotion.

 

The young people involved in the project demonstrated clear animation talent with lots of ideas and ways of overcoming challenges with the story and continuity. The final animation sequences were quite simply brilliant, well done gang. Big thanks to Sue Barry and her team from NIDYA and also to Emma, Emma and John from Blast.

Here are the pictures I took over the two day project.

I’ll link here the completed film when the BBC have finished putting together the final edit.

Here are the other projects I’ve been involved in Northern Ireland:

• October 2006: BBC Northern Ireland Mental Health Campaign.
• June 2006: BBC Blast Truck, Belfast.
• June 2006: BBC Blast Truck, Derry.
• July 2003: Peace Project Film Project, Belfast.

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.

For the sixth year it was nice to be invited back to be a part of ‘Create at BETT’, the creativity feature at the BETT Show held at London Olympia between the 10th and 13th of January. Create at BETT continues to be the only stand staffed by young people, not selling anything specific.

The feature stand exists to simply demonstrate creative use of technology within learning. Last year BETT attracted 27,000 visitors from all over the world to its two thousand stands.Students from King Harold School were on hand to help visitors make podcasts, using the latest chroma key technology from our friends at Reflecmedia.

Visitors were able to stand in front of a chroma wall with selected moving image being rendered live behind them straight into Apple’s iMovie software.

Click the right hand news article image to read what reporter Stephen Manning from the TES had to say about the young people working on the Create at BETT stand:

The young people working on the stand worked with the show visitors to film their ideas and then upload the newly created podcast file to the Digital Teacher Network (DTN). DTN remains as a free space for creative teachers to manage their projects online.

All the podcasts created on the ‘Create at BETT’ stand can be viewed on the ‘Create at BETT DTN Project‘.

All DTN project media files work with iTunes, and are therefore available to download as podcasts onto iPod technology.At the other end of the stand young people worked to demonstrate the brilliant iStopMotion animation software and the potential for using creative technology in the classroom. iStopMotion is so simple and easy to use, yet so powerful too. A wonderful piece of innovative software.

Cleveratom was represented on the stand working closely with the team from BBC Blast, Learning Central, Apple, eMap and the BCS. All these partners believe in creative use of new and emerging technology in learning and we’re proud to work along side them.

I’ve enjoyed the past six years on the stand, clicking here will take you back to the stand in 2002 where we explored web broadcasting technologies.

We’ve done something new and experimental on the stand every year since, it has always been staffed by young people. Here is last years article on BETT 2006.

Cleveratom’s Alex Blanc and Jamie Harris were on hand to support visitors wanting to learn more about the potential of enabling technologies. Alex built Digital Teacher Network from Open Source Software and spent a lot of time explaining to visitors how it worked and what they could do with it. Maureen Gurr was on hand to look after the young people, Fiona from Impact also did an amazing logistical job to make it all happen.

Cleveratom staff have also worked closely with David Baugh and BBC Blast to support the young people prior to coming to the show. The training session held before Christmas in the BBC’s 21CC (21st Century Classroom) were a huge success. Creativity and School Learning Space Design Consultant, Hal MacLean reflects on the performance of the young people:

As ever, King Harold School pupils were brilliant! Their enthusiasm, infectious energy and determination to succeed meant that the stand never had a dull moment. Many thanks to Malcolm Burnett for organising the group and being there with them.

Read more of what Hal has to say here.

View Hal’s Best Pictures from BETT 2007

View Matthew’s Pictures from BETT 2007

View even more of Hal’s Pictures from BETT 2007

Check out some of the podcasts below, also available on the Create at BETT DTN Project site:

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.

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

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.

Hamish Scott-Brown joined the BBC Blast Truck in Newcastle to be Lead Facilitator in a feast of film, animation and music. The event was highly successful for everyone involved.

Hamish Scott-Brown headed to his native Glasgow for a couple of days onboard the BBC Blast Truck as facilitator. Hamish’s role as Lead Facilitator is to lead creative workshops while supporting local facilitators as they come onboard the truck to run their own creative classes. Glasgow was a huge success for BBC Blast with film being a particular favorite of the Glasgow young people.

The BBC Blast Truck headed down the M32 Motorway to join Hal MacLean for an exciting two days of film and dance.

Hal represented Ultralab as the lead facilitator at this location. Matthew Eaves, Hamish Scott-Brown and Hal MacLean are on a rotation system throughout the tour, doubling up at some locations to support each other at some of the larger events.

Hal was pleased to work with Gail Taylor, who worked herself on an Ultralab project back in 2002 called ‘The Online Soap’. Hal also spent time working with friend of Ultralab Samantha Beddoes who filmed Hal and myself back in 2004 for BBC Blast’s November TV show, Sam now works for BBC Newsround and worked closely with Hal on Final Cut Pro, Apple’s film editing software.

Riding the crest of a BBC Blast wave, the truck rolled in to Norwich right outside the Forum. There wasn’t enough room to put up the awning, but we had a marquee instead for the dance workshops and music. The main event for me was to work with ‘DJ Swift’ to create a pop video, working with a team of young people who have never handled a video camera before, let alone thought about how a music video is put together!

We had brilliant support from Julian Langham, who normally edits things like Blue Peter - he was a star! Julian gave his time and energy all day long for three days to make sure this project took off.

Also on the team was Louise who presents on Look East… between us we had enough folk to go out into the centre of town and start filming.

There was a lot of local interest in the work, but we spent a lot of time on the top floor of the multi-storey car park… this caused enough of a problem for someone to complain - thinking a bunch of youngsters were up to no good (It’s been a while since I was referred to as a youngster… thanks, whoever you were!). We trekked through the town and into the castle grounds, filming different sections in different places. The best was an underpass, in my opinion, but only because it really seemed to fit the urban landscape of the song.

Using simple reflectors, daylight (boy it was warm) and Sony z1 cameras, we spent two days out filming, plus another editing (well… Julian did). Between locations and shoots we visited the editing suite in BBC Look East, passing by Dr Who’s Tardis and a few Daleks as we went.

In fact, it’s worth mentioning that one spectacular workshop was a radio show where Dr Who landed in the middle of Ambridge, amongst ‘The Archer’s’… very funny, and very topical for the location!

The first night saw the truck crew happily tucking in to a Pizza Express pizza in the forum restaurant when a lightning storm took hold… followed by torrential rain. We found a quick way downstairs out in to the storm, because the site was flooded with two inches of water or more in seconds flat - we really had to shift the equipment off the floor pretty fast! Needless to say we were soaked, so a quick change of crew t-shirts was in order before we could go back to our meal.

This was an outstanding location for BBC Blast and full of fun and excitement. The results for the filming are superb, and there are some fantastic products that have been created.

The event lasted for two days and was well received by the younger community.