Being a weekly round up of collected news, music, things seen and heard.
Media Innovation Awards 2015
Just received our Media Innovation Award trophy for Creative Craft on The Somme In Seven Poems:
“The judges thought the seamlessly choreographed multi-layered animation was complex and difficult but in this animation sequence was achieved without fault. The art direction and overall styling also brought an immersive atmosphere to the poems.”
Thanks judges!
War of Words: Soldier Poets of the Somme – Broadcast Scrapbook
I wanted to write some stuff about this programme sooner, but the events previously documented in this blog (which all began on the afternoon of broadcast) meant it’s taken me some time to take stock and collect all the things that happened as a result of the show going out.
As I have mentioned before, “War of Words: The Soldier Poets of the Somme” was a 90 minute BBC Arts documentary, directed by Sebastian Barfield that sought to reconnect the history and the landscape of the notorious 1916 Battle of the Somme with the extraordinary poetry and literature that it inspired. At BDH we created content graphics to help illustrate the history and also animations (which I was involved with) to accompany the poetry. We had a great team on the job, and working on it was a moving and wonderful experience.
This post is partly a scrapbook for my purposes to collect some of the information, posts and reactions that went out on social media, in a Storify style, so I might be updating it as and when I come across more of them. Also be warned, this post is mostly embeds from Twitter, so if you are reading this on anything else that the actual webpage they might format weirdly.
You can see a clip from the show via the BBC here, this part concerns the removal of lice eggs from clothing and Isaac Rosenberg’s Louse Hunting.
There was a preview screening of the programme at the Watershed on the 5th November. Afterwards Peter Barton, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Sebastian Barfield, Jeremy Banning and Richard Van Emden discussed the programme, the poets and how they shaped the way people remember the Great War. That discussion is available to hear on Soundcloud here:(direct link).
Sebastien Barfield wrote some words on the BBC blog about the show.
This is a link to a discussion of the programme on Military History Online, quite fascinating in itself.
“The Somme In Seven Poems” was a short that BDH produced which anthologised just the poetry animations themselves. That went onto the iPlayer a week before the broadcast, and got some lovely responses from people, especially on Remembrance Day.
Here is a trailer BDH produced for the short.
Obviously in the modern age, people can watch the show at anytime once it goes on the iPlayer so these tweets are not really in chronological order. I just went through the hashtags and search options retrospectively and grabbed some of the most interesting ones.
https://twitter.com/FWWMiscellany/status/533763935141638145 https://twitter.com/ArcanePub/status/535732918468235264The whole programme has been taken down from the iPlayer now but I have heard bits are on YouTube somewhere, you’ll have to search for that yourself, if you feel so inclined.
BDH have produce a VR app that contains the animation for The Kiss one of the poems featured on the show. This works on Google Cardboard and is available on Google Play and iTunes.
The dumbest generation? No, Twitter is making kids smarter
“It used to be that students did comparatively little writing out of school; even if you were in university, there was little call for it, and few vehicles to showcase your writing. But now, as Prof. Lunsford’s research has found, 40 per cent of all writing is done outside the classroom – it’s “life writing,” stuff students do socially, or just for fun. And it includes everything from penning TV recaps to long e-mail conversations to arguments on discussion boards.
“They’re writing more than any generation before,” she says. The members of “dumbest generation” aren’t just passively consuming media any more. They’re talking back to it.”
“But technology doesn’t just make students better writers or more fluent. Digital tools also let them communicate easily with others – their peers, their friends and the world at large. And this, it turns out, can make them even more powerfully motivated to become genuinely (and wittily) literate.”
— via eush
BAFTA nomination for #WondersOfTheUniverse
OK, I’ve had a cup of tea and a slice of cake so I’m slightly calmer now, I’ll explain a bit more fully:
I work at BDH making CGI for television, which can involve making all sorts of things, from visualizing thought to animating bouncing sex toys.
Last year we were lucky enough to work on a miraculous programme called “Wonders of the Universe“, hosted by Professor Brian Cox, and produced by the BBC.
For someone who grew up on Carl Sagan, Star Trek and Doctor Who it was a very special experience for me personally.
I was largely responsible for star surfaces, coronal loops and solar flares.
So now the work we did has been nominated for a Visual Effects award at the Television Craft BAFTAs, alongside Great Expectations, Inside the Human Body, and… DOCTOR WHO.
So today couldn’t really get more awesome.
(There is 15 minute edit of just the work we did here, with music by Timo Baker (full screen, head phones on please)):
and a lovely playlist of clips from the actual series here:
in case you are unfamiliar with it’s magic.
Did I mention I just had cake?
Got retweeted by Jaime Hernandez
S’no big deal.
(T)
Paul Greer 