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

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.

The Saffron Walden County High School and its partner feeder Primary Schools have begun their Summer School challenge and will be working for one week on their Ultralab set task.

The young people involved in the project all have ‘project blogs’ and have started to document their progress. One of the groups has decided to record activities as a podcast, rather than using text, good on them.

Here is the excellent day 1 podcast:

 Day 1 Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup

Today 30 young people from Saffron Walden County High School and their partner feeder Primary Schools attended a training day at Ultralab to learn how to animate, make music and film for their 2006 Summer Challenge. Every year the Ultralab team set a tough challenge to these schools to complete over the summer months. Patrick Gordon from SWCHS will be running the Summer School, which has been funded for the second year running by Essex County Council. Between the year 2000 and 2004 SWCHS’s Summer School was part of the Ultralab/SEEVEAZ (South East of England Virtual Education Action Zone) Summer School and the good work has continued after SEEVEAZ came to the end of its natural life.

The young people were mixed up into groups and challenged to make clay ball animations, then edit some music together and then create a final piece which was exhibited to the rest of the group. During the day we looked at what makes a good film, and concentrated on sound as a critical success factor.

The young people then left Ultralab clasping four pieces of paper each from three different hats. Each young person had to select one ‘Start’, two ‘Middles’ and one ‘End’. Their first job (in groups back at school) is to negotiate from the sentences which ’start’, ‘middles’ and ‘end’ they will use from their groups collection, to make a film. Complicated, we hope so. The challenge was simple, to encourage the young people (who don’t know each other very well) to negotiate from the sentences they have which of them they would make a film about, and simply throw the rest away.

Jamie Harris, one of our work experience team was on hand to support the day. Another Ultralab Work Experience team member Ben Millwood has since made an excellent automated sentence generator:

The Ultralab team enjoyed making the sentences, using SubEthaEdit on their Apple Mac computers to collaborate their writings together.

Throughout the project the young people will be keeping blogging diaries, along with podcast output.

We’re really looking forward to seeing the completed summer projects.

The young people created their first animations today, here they are:

 Blobs Adventure: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Crazy Frog Man Gone Crazy: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Green Blob of Doom: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Our Great Movie: Play Now | Play in Popup
 The Orange Guy Movie: Play Now | Play in Popup

The Ultralab team works each year on the ‘Create at BETT’ stand at the BETT show. The show is attended by 26,000 visitors each year and has over 2000 stands. The Create at BETT stand is supported by Apple Computer and staffed by Ultralab. Our friends from BBC Blast joined the stand for the first year to promote young peoples creativity.

Ultralab’s partner schools King Harold School and Saffron Walden County High School assisted on the stand providing young people to demonstrate to the visitors podcasting, animation, sound and vision technologies.

Jane Down from the Ultralab team spent BETT working in the NAACE Lounge demonstrating Podcasting to NAACE members.

View the pictures from the show.

 Watch a movie from the BETT 2006 show: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Watch another movie from the BETT 2006 show: Play Now | Play in Popup

Today, (Saturday) Maureen Gurr and myself headed to London to the BBC Broadcasting House bringing together the young people from Saffron Walden County High School and King Harold School for the planning day for ‘Create at BETT 2006.

For the past five years Ultralab have been working in conjunction with Apple Computer and other partners to deliver the ‘Create at BETT’ feature at BETT, the educational technology show at Olympia in London (11 - 14 January 2006).

The BETT Show attracted 24,000 visitors last year, the ‘Create at BETT’ stand is one of the few stands which does not actually sell anything, it is purely there to demonstrate how creative young people can be with technology.

Considering that people under the age of 18 are not allowed into the show, it is great that ‘Create at BETT’ continues to be the only stand fully staffed by young people ‘being creative’, the idea is that visitors will leave the show with creative ideas to take back to their institutions to move creative use of technology forward.

BBC Blast! are involved in the project this year, our training day for the young people involved took place at the BBC’s 21CC (21st Century Classroom) facility at broadcasting house.

On the stand the young people will be demonstrating film, sound, podcasting and animation technologies, all surrounded by an EastEnders theme. BBC EastEnders will be the focus of new script ideas, model animations of classic scenes and the challenge to create a new theme tune sequence for the show.

Both involved schools, friends of Ultralab’s Digital Creativity projects will be sending sixteen children to the show between them. The young people will stay in London with Ultralab.

Maureen Gurr, Richard Millwood, Kris Popat and Matthew Eaves will be representing Ultralab for the duration of the event on the ‘Create at BETT stand’.

Ultralab friend Patrick Gordon and pupils from Saffron Walden County High School attended Ultralab today to show off their creative projects completed during their summer break in August.

Before the summer the group spent the day at Ultralab learning how to make films, animations and music. We concentrated on a new application called ‘Comic Life’ incorporating that programme into the actual summer challenge. The young people had to make a nine window comic over the summer, but the comic windows had to be significantly different from a paper comic, ie: interactive. They could use a series of stills, animation of film throughout their work.

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The work, as ever is outstanding. What is more special is that the young people will be making their own DVD production, rather than Ultralab, who have always made the productions in the past. The young people spent the day with Ultralab learning how to make a DVD, using iDVD from Apple. The completed projects will then be shown in a cinema in Cambridge.

View the pictures taken on the day.