Hal MacLean

From 19th to 23rd February The Networked identity week was running, which was a creativity week for young people aged 13-19, based at the Science Museum and later in the week the Serpentine Gallery. During this time I worked with a number of other people, including Christian Nold.

Christian has been developing his work with Biomapping - essentially a small device which measures your reaction to your environment (an emotional response), a little like a lie detector. Combine this with GPS data and you can make a really engaging activity out of walking around a location and mapping your responses to it as you go.

Rob Skitmore, assistant director at the Science museum also  gave us some time and worked with the group to make a simple telegraph device - from the ultra modern biomapping to a two hundred year-old communication device… but the participants all really enjoyed it!

Sophie Higgs was great, too - she worked with us at the Serpentine Gallery and showed us around the Karen Kilimnic exhibition. I was a little dubious of the reactions we would get to the work, but it was astonishingly good, and when Sophie explained some of the deeper meanings it really helped embed the experience with everyone. I certainly didn’t expect to respond to the art in the way I did, and it was an enjoyable moment or two for me! I would urge you all to visit Karen’s exhibition there and see what you make of it.

My thanks to Katy Holbird from the BBC, who was a pillar of support, but also to Sue Dewey and Chiara Hall, who worked tirelessly through their time at the event. Finally, thanks to matt and Alex who started the week off whilst I was at Gillingham! I’ll try to put some images together as a web gallery and publish them here as soon as I can.

Last week I worked for four days at the BETT show and helped run the Create at BETT feature stand at the top of the stairs in the National Hall, Olympia, London. It was probably the busiest BETT show I’ve known in the last five years, and a delight to be working on such a high profile stand.

A number of partners made this stand exist. Apple computers gave their support with Alan Bennett from Apple Education Europe on the stand each day to answer questions and talk about the education market for Apple. Nick from AT Computers provided a stunning range of kit for us all to use (thanks Nick - really good!) and John from Reflecmedia provided a state of the art chromatte station with live chroma keying happening direct into iMovie. BBC Blast helped establish the stand and Learning Central were there to talk about innovative work with the BCS.

Matt from Cleveratom organised a group of children from King Harold School to be on the stand for four days to run the equipment and talk to the visitors. 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, promoting both their activities and our new company!

The image shows Matt giving (yet another) impromptu demonstration to some of the many, many visitors. We used iStopmotion from Boinx software to run some stop frame animation activities.

Both the stop frame animations and the chroma keying were used to create instant podcasts on the stand. It never ceases to amaze us how complex some pieces of software would have you believe a podcast is… don’t be fooled! With relatively little skill and only simple software everyone can be podcasting at will. Email or phone us to find out how we can get you podcasting like a pro! We will happily run sessions in your place of work or school and show you exactly how easy it really is.

In addition to the Create at BETT stand, I was also working on the ‘Tomorrow’s Learners Today’ stand, organised by Stephen Heppell of Heppell.net and situated in the middle of the Grand Hall on the main floor. This was a brilliantly interesting stand with a continuous flow of speakers all talking about building schools for the future. Some amazing presentations from people including Stephen himself, I was available to answer questions from the audience to follow up on the content and get people talking more about how to use the BSF programme in their own school. More about BSF another time - BETT was huge, and a great success!

More images from the stand can be seen by CLICKING HERE. This should open a new window with a web gallery in it.

What an event! This was the last of the tour for this year, and it was a big one!

We were located in the middle of Birmingham, in Victoria Square. Since it was so ‘public’ there was a huge number of people visiting each day. As it happens, schools were reluctant to send children, but other institutions were more than willing!

We had a great time - best workshop for me was the stage make up one, where we had ten or so ‘tough’ cases who really didn’t want to learn about make up. Once we got to creating the blood and gore bullet wounds and knife injuries, we had them hooked! Fair play - most were very capable of applying the wax and some were very good… it was a real eye opener for me, and I hope for them as well.

Other workshops were all as good, really, with music, song development, dance, Flash animation and of course me running clay animation, short movies and photography sessions.

I worked out that over the course of the summer we have produced somewhere around 90 unique DVDs this summer, and duplicated seven times that! Phew!

So that is it for this year, BBC Blast on tour has gone back to Acton to be re-fitted, and we have to go over the events one by one to understand what went well, and what needs more thought for next time.

One thing is for sure - if I am fortunate enough to get asked, the answer is YES!! I WILL DO IT AGAIN!!

The truck arrived in Bristol on the 24th July, and ran workshops over the Wednesday and Thursday of the week.

One of the main activities was making a video for up and coming star DJ Swift. I worked with BBC editor Julian Langham who, to be fair, basically ran the gig! We filmed DJ Swift and his posse all over the town centre in different locations and Julian helped cut it together. The film crew were all Blast participants and each helped make their own version of the video which we hope DJ Swift will place online at YouTube.

The amazing thing about Norwich was that we were located right outside the Forum. The BBC Studios in the East are here, and they were full of old Dr Who props. Yes, we had Tom Baker’s Tardis, and a couple of early versions of Daleks for company. Wow. I’ll try to get a few images uploaded when I can, but as you can see I’m writing this very much ‘after the event’ having fallen very behind in the blogging stakes!

It also rained in Norwich. Very hard. Fortunately it was only during the evening and not the day with the young people, but it came down in sheets. Unfortunately, much of the truck electrical equipment was on the floor and by the time we got to it we were a) soaked and b) wading through four inches of water trying to rescue the kit. My wristwatch still has a misty dial from the rain that night.

The truck rolls onwards… in fact, as I write this, it has gone all through the tour and now sits being cleaned and rejuvenated somewhere in Acton!

White city was an enormous event. Located in the car park outside the media village, the truck hosted dance workshops, animation, video, singing, photography and all manner of creativity.

We started at 8am each day, finished at 8pm and went home quite tired in between! The Anglia Ruskin Summer School crew arrived at the truck on the Wednesday (better late than never, although it was *very* late) and we had a lot of fun creating animations to fulfil part of the work we started at the university. The crew left tired but elated and pleased with what they had achieved.

The dance workshops were brilliant and several of the young people made it on to the TV on the Saturday night to dance at the national dance festival (with Bruce Forsyth). Several world records were attempted (and broken) on the night and we were over the moon to have worked with these folk!

The Sunday was spent in Trafalgar Square, hosting more freestyle dance and even some juggling… there was a scary picture of me learning to juggle, but it is probably best not unleashed upon you poor unsuspecting people

Needless to say, creativity in spade loads, and plenty more to come!