Tees Valley Community Media

A new concept in Theatre and Movie Making. Well, not entirely new, the concept of making movies in games and virtual worlds, (Machinima) is not new but the Straad Players with a Second Life island and a Sky Platform Backlot to shoot movies (animations) on is new. Check the promo movie below.

Anyone wishing to become involved should email s.d.thompson@tees.ac.uk

Actors
set designers **
set builders
costume designers
script writers **
camera crew
editors **
post production **
audio technicians **
Voice characterisations **
directors
musicians **

Unfortunately because we're using Second Life children can not engage with
it (in world) but they can look on whilst production is happening and
they can be directly involved in the activities above marked thus **

The Straad Players blog can be found here

Margrove Park Village Hall have been successful in a funding bid to develop their "Digital Village" and will sustain the Village Hall Internet connection beyond the current project and provide them with their own bank of laptops. We're quite excited at the prospect of developing the Digital Village concept further and in the bid we spoke of creating a virtual Post Office, Corner Shop, School and Job Shop as the village has none of these things.

The saying goes that the best websites start with a piece of paper. This is just that the core team (below, minus one missing person) have been doing to design their new Digital Village website.

Virtual Post Office - All the things you can do online such as apply for a TV License, RE-tax your car. Taxing your car online for instance is far more efficient than going to a post office.

Virtual, Job Shop - job search online, pointers and advice, CV's etc - closely connected to ..............

Virtual School - The Digital Skills Network currently in development. Online support and learning on a range of subjects including how to run your virtual post office.

Virtual Corner Shop particularly useful to older residents, they club together to form a consortium to be able to place an order sufficiently large to warrant a Tescos/Iceland - whoever Groceries delivery

Virtual Volunteering A new idea. More details later.

Read the MyWeb2@Margrove Park report

Visit the Margrove Park website

The first in a series of Community Media workshops took place today with students of Bydales School (below)

The students were learning to scan images and archive techniques in preparation for a project to be run at Marske library to build an achive of images which the local community will bring in for scanning.

The students practiced with a couple of archive images and then created some up to date images by scanning the contents of their pockets. These can be seen here

The Marske Digital Village is a partnership project: Bydales Specialist Technology College, Marske Library, Tees Valley Community Media, Destinations @ Salburn - Social Inclusion Demonstrators.

Gallery (all images approved)

Students of Ormesby School are working on a multi media exhibition to be launched in March 2008. The exhibition which will feature voices, music, images and animation will run in the University of Teesside's OCTORAMA. The students will run a workshop at the BBC's Open Centre in MIddlesbrough on November 22nd to pitch their ideas to invited guests to encourage other schools and communities to contribute to the exhibition. The theme for the exhibition will be "Dreams" (wishes, hopes, aspirations) and the children hope their parents will visit the school to record their own voices to add to the soundscape.

The Octorama is a fourteen metre diameter art installation with eight large screens and eight independent sound sources running audio visual content (images, video, ambient soundscapes, voices, poems) and affords the visitor a totally immersive experience. The first outing of the Octorama was at the People And Place event in Eston, February 2003. Click here to see a video from that event.

(click to enlarge) Students study the model of the Octorama "how are we gonna build a 14 metre version of this guys?"	(click to enlarge) students work on their ideas for the exhibition.

3 Animations produced at Ormesby School in the Friday "Enrichment" classes.

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Visit the new "Friends of Redcar Cemetery" website. There are two grave records. Two down only 14000 to go! That's right there are many more recorded graves than there are headstones. Some of it comes into data protection territory but clearly the visible headstones are public and can be recorded on the website without too much fuss. The rest can come later.

View the website here.

These young people came to Destinations this week to begin work on their web presence and to begin to tell their story. We're expecting more people when they return last week when we hope to find a "groovier" name for their blog and a suitable domain name.

Click here to see the work so far.

These guys are part of the Young Carers Project at Eastern Ravens Trust (Stockton), which offers respite and support to Young Carers. Young carers are children and young people who look after another family member due to ill health and/or disabilities. The Young Carers Project at Eastern Ravens Trust enables Young Carers aged 8-17 to take a break from their caring roles and responsibilities, and provides opportunities to meet and make friends with other Young Carers experiencing similar situations; the project also provides activities which Young Carers may not get the opportunity to take part in because of their caring roles.

All Tees Valley Community Media websites, activities and events have moved to a new server. The migration is almost but not quite complete. Please report any broken links, missing images etc to s.d.thompson@tees.ac.uk

We are currently carrying out essential maintainence on the TVCM server. If you find any dead links or missing content or have any problems please contact s.d.thompsonATtees.ac.uk (replace the AT with an @ )

Tees Valley Community Radio and TV can be found at www.tvcr.org.uk Allthough in it's infancy there has been a great deal of interest over the past few weeks. What you see as you arrive at the website are a number of "Channels" down the left hand side representing a number of groups, projects and individuals. More channels will be added in the coming weeks. The three main Tees Valley webcast events are represented here too. You can go to an individual channel and look/listen or subscribe to it's podcast feed. OR in the centre of the page is an amalamation of ALL the channels. If you subscribe to this feed you will get ALL the channels as new content is produced

A parallel project was started in Adult Learners' Week - May 2007 to explore Media Literacy. The excercise was based on three 'Internet radio' workshops run in collaboration with Hope Foundation in Middlesbrough, residents of the village of Margrove Park and Destinations UK online centre in Saltburn.

The whole project was a collaboration between NIACE and University of Teesside Department of Academic Enterprise (Community Media).

More details of that project can be found here where you can hear participants interviewing and being interviewed about the skills they had learned. A full report will be published at the end of June.

Click here for more pics. Click on image belowto enlarge -

On Wednesday 18th April at 2pm 11 students from Cleveland Fire Brigades Prince

People from several community groups met at Destinations Saltburn to discuss plans and ideas for the future. All had been engaged in the past year in one of two projects: "East Cleveland Community ICT" or "Digital Discovery Route" both of which were facilitated by the University of Teesside's Digital City. The group were meeting to take community ownership of the East Cleveland Laptops. Through a new project "Social Inclusion Demonstrators" several of the communities are getting Internet connections and wireless networks to make use of those laptops. The Teesside S.I.D. is one of just 20 such projects in the country ( info here ) and is funded by the University for Industry (UFI). The Teesside S.I.D. project or "Digital Village" features several "spokes" with Destinations UK online centre under new ownership/management of Paul Davies as the "hub".

The group met in the first floor of Destinations a former toy shop "Kings of Saltburn" which has a history of being bombed in the 1st World War. It was agreed that Steve Thompson (Community Media Coordinator) would chair the groups meetings and he outlined details of the progress made through the East Cleveland projects and how they fitted into new and future plans. Sue Anderson and Paul outlined plans for this space to compliment the learning centre and open access Internet Cafe below. the group were invited to input ideas into the plans for this space and several great ideas were forthcoming. In fact ideas were in no short supply throughout the meeting in general and all the participants expressed that their experiences of the two East Cleveland projects had left them thirsting for more. We can expect to see more animation and blogging more digital media and there was a great deal of interest in creating an Internet radio network. The group will continue to collaborate through electronic communication and further meetings. It was proposed that the meetings should move around the communities and the next one is planned to take place in Skinningrove.

Below you can see two great new animations. The first is "Diversity Dave" made by participants of Redcar and Cleveland Mind at Skelton Civic Hall and the second is "Mr and Mrs Careless" made the Prince's Trust Recdar Team 8 at Redcar Fire Station. You can see all Prince's Trust 8 postings here and Readcar & Cleveland Mind @Sklelton here. Both groups have a launch planned for their animations which will be reported on in this blog.

Diversity Dave by Redcar & Cleveland Mind @ Skelton

Mr & Mrs Careless by The Prince's Trust Redcar 8

Click on image to enlarge. Animators at Freebrough Engineering College are hard at work on week two of a series of animation workshops with the University of Teesside's Community Media Coordinator. Click here to see more images from the session.

Pupils from the Sacred Heart School in Redcar are working with various schools and departments of the University of Teesside on a new project called the Forensic Challenge. The idea builds on the "Community Challenge" which began life as an online pub quiz. In the first ever online pubquiz Timms Coffee House in Skinningrove beat the Black Bull in Trimdon who were sporting Prime Minister Tony Blair as a member of their team. Archives of the Community Challenge here.

Later using software developed by Dave Eagle of the Univerity of Teesside's School of Computing and working in partnership with BECTA (British Educational Communications Technologies Agency) various other challenges took place. These included a Euro-Challenge and a 52 team "Challenge the Nation" right across the UK.

Now the Sacred Heart pupils are bringing this right up to date by making the content of an online quiz a Crime Scene Investigation. The components of this challenge will include, images, video footage, interrogations and geographial information through satelite images and googlemaps.

Graham performs the music track for the groups animation "Diversity Dave". (Click Image To Enlarge)

Over the past few weeks the group have been working at Skelton Civic Centre to create their masterpiece which you will be able to see soon on this site. To whet your appetite Click here for behind the scenes action

A wonderful day was spent at Skelton Village Hall producing four animations in a day long animation workshop. Four teams worked to produce 4 different animations which are collectively known as "Aliens on the Beach". You can view the finished production by Clicking Here

You can view pictures from the day by clicking here

The Princes Trust team at Redcar Fire Station talk about their sets and their production plans for a couple of animated films they are making.

Four young children, all aged 7 from Crook in County Durham will be keeping a video diary which can been seen HERE They are travelling to Tampere in Finland to attend the film festival VIDEOTIVOLI to represent, and be ambassadors for a film, they made in October half term 2006 with community filmmakers from Jack Drum Arts. The film project was initiated through Jack Drum Arts via it's drama and media-makers clubs for children and young people in Wear Valley and funded by County Durham Children's Fund.

Read more! »

Are you working on a short animation or a film that needs a piece of music to finish it off? A poem that needs images, an image or set of images in need of a poem?

Maybe you have music, animation material, photographs, artwork or an unfinished script that

Chandni Ladies Group get together at the International Centre in Middlesbrough to cook, learn different things, chat, gossip, go on outings, do basketball and healthy cooking.

Over the next 12 weeks they will document their activities with a web picture diary which can be found Here They are getting to know how to use the camera and the internet and are using a free tool called Picassa to store images.

The editorial team meet at their digital headquaters in Loftus Library to upload the third Town Crier to go online. After 18 years of the print publication the Town Crier went digital in August 2006 with issue 104. Now the team are meeting to learn how to use the new software to upload the LTC and to discuss ways of developing further the "digital arm" of their operation.

Pictured right Paul Waugh learning to blog. We can expect some cliff hanging (pardon the pun) stories from Paul and his colleagues so keep your eyes on the COASTGUARD BLOG (link)