UPDATE#3 Talking Shop 2024 - Final Lineup
TALKING SHOP
Our annual Talking Shop symposium will take place on 3rd July, at BFI Southbank, and bring together Higher Education, Film and Media specialists from across the UK in an open and friendly forum. With a rich programme of presentations reflecting innovative pedagogy and sharing good practice, along with an opportunity for networking and debating key issues in Higher Education media production, this annual event is an invaluable date in the academic calendar.
We also encourage NAHEMI members to join us for our AGM, which takes place on the morning of the event.
Talking Shop 2024 BFI Southbank Wednesday 3rd.
· 10:00 - 12:00 | AGM
· 12:15 - 13:15 | Lunch and Networking
· 13:30 - 17:00 | Talking Shop Programme
· 17:00 - 18:00 | Drinks and Networking
Presentations
1 Sandra Booth from the Council for Higher Education in Art and Design (CHEAD)
The Creative Manifesto, a collective call for cross-party commitment to long term creative education and a cultural Plan.
2 Barry Dignam. IADT, Dún Laoghaire
C-ACCELERATE project, an initiative to transform entrepreneurship education in creative disciplines.
This paper presents the C-ACCELERATE project, an initiative aimed at transforming entrepreneurship education in creative disciplines, with a special focus on students in Film and Media. Funded by the EIT HEI Initiative, the project is a collaborative effort among five leading European universities, four of which make up FilmEU, the European University for Film and Media Arts, and Aalto University. It aims to embed innovation and entrepreneurship within higher education for arts and creative practices across Europe.
3 John Podpadec. University of West of England
V Domu, a site-specific project about immigration.
V Domu (In the Home) is a site-specific exploration of migration, displacement and overlooked history. Photographs, moving image and documentary interview material is projected into the place that Marjan and Cornelia Podpadec came to call home, a miner’s cottage in South Wales. 16mm film has been used to capture this interaction between archive material and place. The result is documentary in form but experimental in nature. The fabric of the house bears witness to the lives lived there and is a blank canvas on which the projections play. Celluloid film, its own photosensitive particles existing in the space at the same time as this interplay and reacting with it momentarily, unifies the material in a unique way. The empty house is filled with sounds and images, evoking 'the texture of place and memory through the notions of absent presence' (Rosy Martin, 1999).
4 Alexandra Sage. Roehampton University
Real Fiction: using documentary story telling techniques to develop fictional characters.
I will argue that students often assume increased creativity is required to tell fictional stories, and that documentary characters should be extreme or sensational to reach a matching standard of narrative strength. In-class discussions with BA and MA students often reveal an assumption that fictional characters and scripts are the dominant form of narrative within a mixed genre film production degree.
Agnès Varda stated: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” This implies a conscious decision to explore beneath a seemingly ordinary surface to find a varied and extensive terrain. And provides an alternative to seeking sensation as a starting point in character development.
The Inner Writer component 12-week module that I designed for the MA Screenwriting explored these notions through close analysis of selected case studies. In tandem, students were required to take a series of steps to produce a visual portrait which then leads to development of a fictional character and a scripted scene/s. Many of the students had no practical filmmaking experience and technical training and support was provided.
5 Clare Cahill and Fiona Bavinton. Arts University Bournemouth
AI and Teaching Creative Subjects
AI is now impacting every aspect of film production, driven largely by industry tech giants like ILM, Disney, Weta, Epic, Adobe, Avid, and others. Significantly, Microsoft entered the fray at Cannes 2024, promoting CoPilot in film production. As students grapple with these technologies to stay competitive, educators, particularly those from non-technical backgrounds, face significant challenges in updating both curricula and their own skills. This presentation explores the critical hard and soft skills educators need to bridge this gap. This session will address the complexities of AI's impact on creative processes and ethical considerations. Strategies for building technical literacy and fostering continuous learning requires more than technical proficiency; adaptability, cross-disciplinary thinking, critical thinking, and ethical judgment are also core skills.
6 .James Staunton -Price. Aberystwyth University/UWE
The Experimental Film School, Cymru
I am running the experimental FFilm School in the Cambrian Mountains, Cymru. ‘Ffilm’ is the Welsh for ‘film’ but English could do with that other ‘F’: for Future, for Forest, for Feral. The school is a two-week residential course, camping and filming in the Dyfi watershed, for 6 participants favouring those from backgrounds who face barriers to participating in filmmaking education.
This is intended to be the first of many Future Film Schools, with the aim of providing models for documentary filmmaking education, to make a better documentary filmmaking.