the mantelpiece - mark waddington blog

29 ways to stay creative

Here's a nice little video on ways to help you keep up the creative thinking.  I like number 25 - stop trying to be someone else's perfect.  It's got more than a million plays on vimeo which isn't bad.

Televising the revolution

A bit about the Media Team plans (one or two people have asked). Next week I'm kicking off a video focused team at Our Lady of Victories School in Keighley.

Many schools have radio stations and a few even do TV shows. OLV school already has a successful radio station which is brilliant.

Some projects, and those in higher education as well, seem to be modelled on very old production formats. Even the term TV has a lot of old fashioned baggage. So I hope the children will use the tools in a free and imaginative way - not just produce a show that looks like BBC regional news which has been around for half a century.

Thankfully I detect there is a loosening of old style media skills teaching. I don't know where it will go but I hope the media team next week will come up with some real innovations about how to organise, film, edit, present. Looking at all the potential platforms and audiences.

The plan is to achieve the following:

• Employ and develop a full range of creative skills within a complete team, not just the obvious technical bits like cameras.
• Allow the team to innovate and change for the better how media is made - doing it their way.
• Produce a high quality product.
• Have a real purpose for the product - e.g. enhancing communication between parents and school.

I am sure we are getting to a point where children already have a place in the media environment - without needing to be employed by it. So this would be no simulation.

We are aiming to do a termly show at OLV school and will be setting this up next week. I'll let you know how it goes.

Raising curiosity levels

Had a meeting with Creative Partnerships today to discuss some schools ideas.  One comment was that across the different schools we've visited, there were measurable levels of curiosity.  

Some schools children didn't seem at all curious (often in successful schools), while others were very curious indeed.  Set me thinking whether you can encourage a culture of curiosity which is infectious.

At Raynville school in Leeds a whole project was built around a locked chest which has remained in the classroom for a few weeks. That definitely had curiosity value and led to all sorts of imagined stories.

Chris Leach in a blog post has been creating posters which deliberately include very little information and are designed to raise questions and, I guess stimulate curiosity. Sounds like good art to me.  See his post here

So the upshot of what I'm thinking is that leaving stuff out or withholding information is a good way of engaging people and ultimately informing them.  Too much information  - or complete stories without an element of mystery -  doesn't intrigue the audience sufficiently.

 

Reflecting on creative projects in schools

I've been reflecting on this year's Creative Partnerships projects in local primary schools.  There has been a real mixed bag - some brilliant and others less so. 

The work has involved making video usually alongside a drama practitioner. The projects are set up by the school to a very specific brief.  The brief will usually say that the school wants to focus on speaking and listening, confidence building and so on.   

Here are some bullet points from my reflections:

• The best managed projects are not always the most valuable.
• Most learning comes through a constructive response to failure.
• An open brief is much better than a prescriptive one. 
• Not enough effort goes into designing and initiating projects.
• The ideas are rarely big enough.
• Ambitious and risky projects are usually more rewarding.
• The active visible support of the head teacher is vital.
• The most interesting work is done while the creative practitioner is not present.
• Teachers can be fully supportive or not supportive at all - the worst is when they are reluctantly supportive.
• Allocation of roles and in particular the role of a project co-ordinator is vital.
• Build in time for conversation and reflection.
• Capturing evidence of success immediately is invaluable.
• Trust the children.

 The most successful and sustainable project I've worked on is in a school which has been somewhat ambivalent towards new multimedia technology.  A media team made up of 6 children has championed the use of video and in particular green screen with great success.  The children are now teaching the teachers and hopefully contributing to a change of culture.

The next step is to look at the leadership of creative projects - in particular raising the ambitions and quality of the initial ideas.  Perhaps creating a model for project design and initiation -  but then the practitioner backing off and handing ownership to class teachers or the children themselves.

 

Shadow Theatre

Here's a little sample of a video we made at a school in bradford. I have not done shadow puppets before but I was impressed with how this went. Of course in this context the process and what the children learn is more important than the product.  Scripting, building a wooden frame and cloth, fixing up lights, performance etc.

There is a lot of teamwork and problem solving in this exercise. The children have to work together to figure out how the performance is going to look. For shy children there is some degree of safety behind the screen specially when they are in role play. This could be a great way of getting them to talk.

I'm enthusiastic to feature the voices of the children and to work on their timing, intonation and general delivery. For quieter children this is a great way to really listen to their voices and to enjoy the quality of voices that may ordinarily be drowned out by louder children.

 

What does ICT really stand for?

I'm going to an ICT conference in Manchester on Friday. Apparently ICT stands for Intermittent Cervical Traction (I looked it up);  You can understand why I'm apprehensive.

Actually, I have a lot of reasons to be apprehensive. For a start there will be a lot of teachers there and secondly it's all about technology (not traction).  So why am I apprehensive about technology?   

I'm very interested in technology and what it can do but I feel uncomfortable when it becomes the topic of conversation. It's like someone talking about cars when what they really want is the freedom of travel.  A car will take you along pre-determined roads and you can only stop where there is a parking place.  I prefer to hitch a lift on whatever mode of transport happens to be pointing the right way and get off wherever.

It's for this reason that my current project is to set up creative communication teams in schools;  I did start by calling them media teams but the term media carries far too much baggage.  

The teams consist of six children who each have distinctive talents and interests. I've tried to design the teams so that they are independent of specific tools or platforms, so for example we don't talk about writers, web designers or video editors, we say that these are people who like to generate and sequence ideas, or like working with tools to build things. The outputs can be a web page, magazine or an installation or anything else you can imagine. 

The creative challenges set for the team are never to make a podcast, produce a documentary or film an animation -  that would be like giving them a road map and a car and telling them where they need to get off.   Instead they have to meet a brief which is to investigate specific aspects of a specific subject and report their finding to a specific audience. The solution is open to creative thinking.

In reality, the children may well create rich multimedia web pages using exciting digital tools, but the point is that the tools are not the starting point.   

It seems to me that we spend a lot of time getting up to speed on technologies which are here today, gone tomorrow but less time considering the missions and purposes behind their use. The skills involved in effective teamwork, directing and organising, generating ideas, questioning, story telling are higher level media, and the skills required are timeless and transferable.  

And so I would like to focus on those fundamental human technologies. As for the lower level tools I'm inclined to include those under the heading of independent problem solving challenges - i.e. work out for yourself which is the best tool for the job and fathom it.

Let's meet up if you're in Manchester on Friday

...how wide and long and high and deep - measuring creativity

A authoritative study into the commercial value of Creative Partnerships (a body the government is scrapping for economic reasons), came to the conclusion that £1 spent on the scheme translated as £15 of value to the economy. details here   

Creative stuff is tough to measure, but it only goes to show that even seemingly immeasurable things like creativity must be counted in order to survive. 

"Now Miss Browning, can you quantify your love for me?"  

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach".

"Bit vague, can you give me an exact figure on that reach thing?" 

Three artists, me being one, met with a group of teachers yesterday to begin to answer the question, how do we evaluate creative ways of learning? What we were searching for was a body of ideas - ways of questioning or observing - that would give us something measurable.

In my session we filmed a scene from ITV's Coronation Street  - vintage 1979 - with teachers taking the parts of two actors and a director.  The challenge was to learn the lines, plan the moves and get the shots in 20 minutes. It was all about communication, teamwork and practical problem solving.  You might like to try it yourself, here's the script

Once our little drama was over we asked questions about what the team had learned and what they had felt about the exercise.  We looked at the dynamics of questioning, giving feedback and the value of using video to help review the exercise. It was clear that a powerful way of understanding creative value is through story telling.  

We heard about a radio project in which a shy child could not bare to listen to his own voice  - and in fact hid under a table when his voice was played back.  After the encouragement of peers he now takes a leading role in the school radio station.  Numbers can be taken out of context and sometimes manipulated but stories, I feel, work a little deeper. Stories of human achievement must be the ultimate measure, surely.

Maybe, and here's a thing, we are not even recognising - let alone measuring - the important experiences. Failure, for example, is rarely seen as a positive thing and yet the presence of failure can lead to some wonderful outcomes.  

A couple of nights ago I heard Ellen MacArthur speaking at the Ilkley Literature festival. She wanted to become a vet but her teachers said she wasn't bright enough. This judgement spurred her on to study hard but at a critical time she was taken ill. During her illness she had time to reflect on what was her real passion, sailing. Had she been smarter and not become ill, she may not have achieved as much as she has.

When I was eleven I knew I wanted to be in broadcasting. When I was seventeen I was advised that it was too competitive and that I wouldn't make it. Two years later I was working for the BBC.  The encouragement of my drama and english teachers, contrary to the school's assessment, was not measured and yet it made all the difference.  As Ellen MacArthur said this week, being ready is not enough, you've got to have a burning passion. 

So how do we measure the contribution of creativity?  Perhaps it's by looking for the passion that is ignited out of truly creative and inspiring experiences - whether good or bad. Maybe we have to wait until the story is complete before we can know if we have been successful.

The poem, "How Do I Love Thee" by Elisabeth Barrett Browning is, of course, inspired by the text from Ephesians.  

"…you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge"

Stitched up at Cafe Nero

Here's a neat trick David Hockney might be interested in - done on the iPhone 4. You can wave the phone around and it intelligently shoots and stitches together a number of images. Cheating really but it looks pleasing.  This was taken at Cafe Nero in Ilkley and I like the way the crockery is all fragmented.

DSLRs - a creative response to the constraints imposed by technology

You may, or may not know, that I have a Canon 5D Mk2 camera which I'm learning to use for video. It's a wonderful invention but tricky to get to grips with re the video.  

There are many challenges using a DSLR for filming like focusing on the fly, seeing what you're doing in the viewfinder and holding the damn thing steady.  

 

Regular video cameras are designed to overcome these problems through years of reference to camera operators in war zones, making music promos or generally hurling them around.  Stills photographers work differently, looking for individual moments with their best eye clamped to a little hole.

Perhaps we should think differently about how we use DSLRs for shooting video rather than bemoaning the fact that they aren't like film cameras. Instead of looking at their weaknesses, think about what new opportunities they present.

Could it be that DSLRs open the way for photographers with an excellent eye for colour and composition to bring a fresh approach to shooting moving images?  Many videographers, in my view, have got into a bad habit of whizzing and crashing the camera around to bring life to a subject.   A stills photographer may be more inclined to look for the possibilities within a specific set-up - considering the precise lighting conditions for that framing and taking care over the details. 

What we see is an attempt to make mobile phones and stills cameras do what is best done by much more specialised equipment.  Instead we should be thinking about what these tools can give us that we can't get from conventional cameras. Can the constraints lead us in a different direction altogether?

This video shot on DSLR is about custom motorcycle engineer Shinya Kimurs by Henrik Hansen. The film reveals movements  within the frame - often subtle - by keeping the camera still; Most of the shots are locked off and could have been taken from a stills tripod. Not bad for a film which is all about motion. 

The careful construction of the film mirrors Shinya Kimurs care and love of constructing his machines. The editing is brilliant and the mastery of audio exceptional.

I think this demonstrates an intelligent and creative response to the constraints imposed by the technology. 

The producer - capturing the hearts and the imagination of the team

What is the role of a video producer  and how does that translate into a school project? What are the benefits of a video project in a school?

In the professional world (in which I've been there for 30 years) there are many different skills and resources that go into producing high quality video.  The reason TV is so expensive is mostly down to the availability of talent both in front of the camera and behind it.  There are performers, photographers, writers, editors and so on.  And it's not just the raw skill that's required but the ability of these people to get on with each other.

The producer has to bring all these people together and keep them functioning as a team with the creative elements being handled by the director. Although often the two roles are blurred or even the same person.

A producer will be required to understand enough about the process and skills required to be able to allocate tasks, encourage good practice, set standards, trouble shoot; They are talent scouts, facilitators, mentors; They manage and plan. They have a stern voice when the project goes off track.  A producer sets boundaries of responsibility and resolves conflict. When confidence breaks down the producer must raise spirits, be cheerleader and offer hope.

TV production teams are messy and uncomfortable places generally. The participants are vulnerable - it's as if their very soul is being put on the line. Then there is the added pressure of impending deadlines.  

In truth, the main source of pressure is the interdependency between team members.  No one person can achieve success on their own and yet they may all want to claim the success as our own. They may have difficulty trusting one another. So to be genuinely creative in this context requires great sacrifice and humility.

The dynamics of even the smallest video project can bring into play these elements.  

Many children have little or no experience of belonging to team like this. They miss out on some invaluable experiences: being needed for their particular talents, the experience of generosity and grace, responsibility with independence, the celebration of success.

As well as these essential team skills and experiences, there are also many other practical skills to be learned - writing, performing, technical work, photography, research, directing, drawing, design,, interviewing, planning, coming up with ideas.

Video production as a team exercise is indeed a great learning opportunity but only if someone takes on the role of producer.  Without someone acting as a producer in the way that I have described the results may be poor and the experiences negative.

A producer must ensure that the video production captures more than simply footage, it must capture the hearts and the imagination of everyone involved.