Hal MacLean and myself joined the BBC Blast Truck in White City to in the lead facilitation role working with young people from the London Region on Digital Creativity projects. Hal and I spent two days of the event working with a group of budding young enthusiasts interested in a career in television. We demonstrated to them the technologies before undertaking a tough filming task. On the first day of White City we were joined by Ultralab’s Colin Elsey and co-Blast Lead Facilitator Hamish Scott-Brown who brought the young people from the Anglia Ruskin Summer School for a day on the truck undertaking an Animation task.
King Harold School’s Malcolm Burnett arranged for a bus load of his young people, spending their time between the truck events and the BBC’s 21CC Creativity Centre.
A huge amount of BBC staff were about for the three day event, in particular a strong presence of BBC mentors…. that’s people that work for the BBC helping the young people with advice.
The final day was completed with a big celebration of music, film and dance attended by well over 100 people. A great time was had by all.
Richard Millwood, Director of Ultralab joined the finale event and filmed the performances from one of the live cameras. Iona Walters, friend of Ultralab from ‘Input CBBC’ project days was also in attendance filming the dance participants in action. It was also great to see Gail Taylor, who was part of the Ultralab ‘Online Soap’ project back in 2002 (read more about it on this site), Gail now works for the BBC on mobile telephone projects and will be joining the Blast Truck when it arrives in Bristol, as a mentor.
Black Clouds: 
An audience of three hundred attended the 4th annual Summer School creativity celebration at the Victoria & Albert museum in London. The event, which showcases the movies by the children is projected in the V&A’s prestigious lecture theatre, which they then defend from questions from the audience was an amazing experience, as ever, for all involved.
The event, run in conjunction with SEEVEAZ was broadcast internationally over the Internet. Neil Boughen, technician at the event and his team put on exceptional technical performance made perfect by the input, interaction and positive comments from the audience.
The Anglia Polytechnic University Summer School has officially started this week working with young people who’s parents have never been to University in an attempt to engage those who would not usually choose University as part of their future.
Colin and I are pleased to announce that all the footage from the eight locations which we’ve visited over the past year for the RNLI’s innovative Lifeboats.TV project have been imported ready for editing. Before the editing begins I’ve cut a movie with all the people we’ve interviewed, in the exact order they were interviewed. 180 people were interviewed, 20 hours of footage created.
