Hal MacLean

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.

Thursday 23rd November 2006 was the date for the Bromley Learning Alliance celebration event, where children who took part in the Summer Project got to share their work with parents and friends. Matt and I were presenting to an audience of approximately 200 people and we were delighted to be leading the parents through the work, commenting on it and talking to the children as each film was shown.

What struck us both was the absolute quality of the films in terms of the story behind each one. The animations they created (all stop frame, all using the excellent iStopMotion from Boinx) may not have had the precise model making skills for a Nick Parks production, but the digital literacy the children exhibited was astonishing. The participants were all aged from 9 to 12 at the time of the event, which is a very young group to do this kind of work with.

They are not the youngest, however! That honour falls to Cressing Primary School who we worked with to see if stop frame animation could be used with 6 and 7 year olds. We found that it can, but you cannot simply go in and do it without a certain amount of preliminary work.

The Bromley pupils were part of the Bromley learning alliance, which was formerly known as ‘SEEVEAZ’. We have worked with them for the past five years running summer projects in digital creativity and they have carried the torch on further than we originally anticipated.

Top marks to Bromley, then – and our sincere thanks to Andrew Ferrier, Sue and Merrill for their support and time in making this all happen.

We made the DVD for the children to take away on the night, but there were so many issues with the media that we will re-do it for them free of charge.  This is the first time such a glitch has descended on our DVD production routines – I only hope the re-make will be better! We use DVD Studio Pro for the authoring and I am confident that the problem lies in the media or the audio format we used. I’ll investigate… but my apologies to the children of Bromley who have a disc that may not work well!

Last Tuesday I attended the teacher’s centre in Bromley to deliver a presentation for a group of staff from different schools who are going to be taking part in this year’s ‘Summer School’ event.

For a lot of the time I went over the last five years worth of work, which was absolutely compelling to do – I can’t say how much of an impact this stuff has – it is really leading the way in the digital creativity stakes! The staff were attentive, asked questions and ultimately just *had* to participate!

When I get round to demonstrating clay animation it is really captivating – not because of me, but because of the subject and the materials you get to use. On this occasion I animated a mobile phone and a ball of plasticine, making a six second film called ‘disappear’. Then it was the turn of the teachers and boy oh boy you should have seen the way they got into making those plasticine models! It really is a refreshing thing to do and to see…

The actual training day for the children is next week, and I am sure we will have every bit as good a result as in previous years. We ought to make a few DVDs of this work…

It’s official… Ultralab are going to be providing staffing for the forthcoming BBC Blast tour of the UK!

BBC Blast have commissioned a truck to be built which converts to a studio and workshop area. This is quite amazing on its own, but add to that twelve PC laptops, three MacBook Pro laptops, High Definition DV cameras, networking, A3 colour printing and scanning, a sound studio, video editing capabilities and all manner of digital creativity tools, and you have some idea of what can happen inside the vehicle.

And that’s not to mention what goes on outside! The outer area is going to form a workshop space with a stage for performances, too. Covered by a large awning, the space has room for about 100 people when showcasing work, which is quite a number.

So what is Ultralab’s role?

We have been working with the Blast team for a while in different capacities. At the BETT show last January we were part of the collaborative venture between BBC Blast and Apple computers that became the ‘Create at BETT’ stand. Since then, we have been talking about how to take the ideas ‘on the road’ and the BBC wanted to run a creativity roadshow… seems like the two were destined to meet!

Ultralab staff will form the lead facilitation team on the tour, with one person at every location acting as the head of a small team of local freelancers brought on to run the workshops. This will then provide for a good deal of continuity between cities as the tour takes place, ensuring someone with a clear understanding and years of experience of the creative opportunities is at every venue.

I am delighted to be a part of all that, along with colleagues Matt Eaves and Hamish Scott-Brown. Between June and September the three of us will be on the tour taking on the lead role between us. Starting in Liverpool with Matt, then going over to Northern Ireland with Hamish, the tour then moves into Scotland and works its way south through Sheffield, Norwich, London, Reading and many other places along the way. The North East is hosting the truck as well, with Hull and Newcastle carrying the responsibility.

Each location will have a mix of dance, video, audio and graphic creative activities, running over a number of days and culminating in a showcase day. This is going to be a 15 week tour, and if all goes well then next year becomes a 30 week tour!

Amazing to be part of something so exciting, and I am thrilled to be working with such a forward thinking team at the BBC.

More news as the tour progresses!

Oh yes – he does exist in Final Cut Pro 4 and 5! If you have no idea what I am going on about here, run a few intenet searches for ‘Bruce the Yak’ or ‘Easter Egg in Final Cut Pro’. The guy’s a legend!

I am not going to tell you how to get him in v4 or 5. In an earlier version you have to invoke the tools window and click find a certain spot to control+click in, and ‘Call the Yak’ would appear as an option. Nowadays it’s a tad harder, but suffice to say it isn’t in the tools window – and it isn’t about control+clicking anything.

There could be a custom button for it, though…

(Many, many thanks to Michael Conniff for pointing the way here.)