Supporting Communities In Crisis During Covid-19 to Stay Home and Save Lives

A Partnership between Relapse Pictures, Belfast City Council, Clonard Residents Association, Department for Communities and Future Screens NI

Award Winning Documentary Maker Dr Seán Murray of Relapse Pictures recently completed his PhD at Queenʼs University Belfast, a key partner of FSNI. Seán and his company won the 2019 Royal Television Society Award for Best Documentary. When the Covid-19 Crisis hit, Seán transformed his film studio into a Hub to provide food and support to families across Belfast. The actions of Seán, volunteers and partners have ensured that 100ʼs of children, families, vulnerable people and older people have had access to food and support and have remained connected during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis supporting people to stay home and save lives.

Sean is also working with Future Screens NI to assist communities to remain connected. In particular he is broadening access to technology and encouraging residents to share their stories of the crisis.

“Iʼm recently widowed living alone with COPD. I havenʼt left the house in weeks. At the start of this I felt frightened and alone. My family live all over Ireland and are not close by. They are doing their best but could not get to me every day. Seán from Relapse Pictures has delivered food, checked in on me and helped me stay safe well. I donʼt know what I would have done without them.”

Belfast Resident, aged 73

“Our project hopes to understand the narrative within local communities in the context of Covid 19 in order to shape the way we both think and prepare for similar, future events. Key to this is how we technologise our connectedness and shared experiences in reinforcing social cohesiveness for the most vulnerable. We are a grassroots production company embedded in the local community and this funding will go a long way to making a difference in the current economic climate.”

Dr Seán Murray, Award Winning Documentary Maker, Relapse Pictures

Harper the Wonder Dog: Supporting Children in Transition During Covid-19

A Partnership with West Belfast Partnership Board, Author Liz Gough, Department for Education NI, Future Screens NI, and Yellow Design

The ongoing Covid-19 crisis and the uncertainty of lockdown has made the transition from Primary 1 to Preschool more challenging for families. The West Belfast Partnership Board, Yellow Design, Future Screens NI and others are supporting 23,576 Pre-school children and their families and across NI in their transition from Pre-School to Primary One ensuring they are supported safely at home.

Research was undertaken with 25 Nursery Schools, 19 Primary Schools and 12 Sure Start Areas which identified the following:

• The Covid-19 Crisis had shifted learning from School to Home and from physical to digital creating the necessity to deliver age appropriate key health and education messages to early years, Nursery and Foundation Stage children and parents

• Harper the Wonder Dog Could be employed digitally to deliver key messages through a virtual and digital space to the greatest possible number of young children who are currently learning at home.

• The Digital Harper the Wonder Dog Project reduced the anxiety of both children and parents regarding return to school and transition to Nursery and from Nursery to Year 1

This research has informed the development of digitally creative educational content in response to the Covid-19 crisis which is assisting children, families and communities across NI to respond to a new way of learning and teaching outside the classroom while staying at home. Harper the Wonder Dog and partners are assisting children to better understand the crisis in a safe way and by distributing accessible and age appropriate public health message. The series was developed at home by local West Belfast author Liz Gough, Award Winning Educationalist Angela Mervyn from the West Belfast Partnership Board and Future Screens NI Future Fellow and Creative Industry Trailblazer Michael McGlade of Yellow Design.

Come along and meet Harper and find out more from Liz, Angie and Michael about their ongoing work!

A selection of Episodes can be accessed via the link below:

Washing Your Hands

Having Fun Indoors

Playing in the Garden

Helping at Home

You can meet Harper the Wonder Dog at 12pm pm on Tuesday the 23rd of June.  Tickets are available here: https://tinyurl.com/y97ycef6

Future Screens NI Launch the Future Creatives Programme with a Sold Out Masterclass

Professor Paul Moore and Lucy Baxter of Future Screens NI have launched their Future Creatives Programme which is targeted towards Early Career Researchers, PhD Students, Start Ups and those within industry embarking on R&D Programmes.  The Virtual Masterclass was attended by more than 70 representatives of the Creative Industries.

Professor Paul Moore, Director of  Future Screens provided a provocative exploration of the role of new and emerging technology as we progress through the Covid-19 Crisis with an emphasis on post-disciplinarity and the interface between the live and the digital.

Lucy Baxter founder of Darkely Films and Lecturer in Film at Queen’s University Belfast delivered a thought provoking presentation on her work in developing a VR environment to address Mental Abuse which she is developing in partnership with Future Screens NI. 

Lucy’s Presentation

Paul’s Presentation

Professor Anthony Lilley Launches Future Screens NI Cutting Edge Future Fellowship Programme

Professor Anthony Lilley, Director of Scenario Two Ltd and  founder of Magic Lantern Productions Ltd launched the Future Screens NI Future Fellowship Programme on the 20th of May 2020.  Professor Lilley provided key insights into navigating the live and the digital at a time of crisis and offered key insights into the future of the Creative Industries. 

The appointed Future Fellows  include Michael McGlade, Yellow Design, Dee Harvey of Controvert TV, Simon McCormick, Outpost Belfast and Brendan McCourt of New RedTV at the cutting edge of Immersive Technology within Sound, VR, AR and Mixed Reality.   

Michael McGlade, Yellow Design

Michael formed Yellow Design in Feb 2008 with a main focus on branding and digital media.  Yellow Design have a no-nonsense approach - fasting tracking clients to quickly and cost effectively reach their objectives while measuring overall marketing performance. Developing proof-of-concepts and rapidly deployed MVP's in the digital space - ranging across IoT technologies, Mobile App UX and a broad range digital marketing platforms including ecommerce. With a strong record in digital media going back as far as 1996 - myself and the team at Yellow have identified the best of what the medium can offer and enjoy demonstrating this back with our clients - harnessing relationships and referrals along the way.

Over the last 20 years Michael has worked with some exceptionally talented marketing professionals in companies such as Air France, KLM, Logica, BT, CR2 and overtime have built up a specialism in working with technology lead companies that need to convey their services and products. This has brought success in winning contracts with www.zeemote.com, Andor Technologies and EUMESAT (European Satellite Meteorological Agency) .

AR360

The Aim of AR360 is to build upon Yellow Design’s significant research and development work and commercial proof of concepts (supported by Belfast City Council, Invest NI and Tourism NI) that have delivered the AR360 platform. 

Yellow Design have developed the AR360 platform that allows tourists using their smart phones to avail of Augmented Reality experiences, multi-lingual location-based-marketing and wayfinding that integrates within public transport systems generating real time data. 

This project seeks to scale the AR360 platform to respond to a healthy commercial opportunity pipeline by specifically:

-        Identifying, understanding and aligning to emerging and best practice Smart Tourism (and city) frameworks

-        Further defining, developing and testing the capability of AR360 in collecting, visualising and sharing user (tourist) behaviour

Dee Harvey, Controvert TV

Dee Harvey is a writer-director specialising in immersive media. She co-wrote and directed IF, a VR180 film about infertility, that was commissioned by YouTube in 2018. It has been shortlisted for the Royal Television Society NI awards 2019. She is writing and directing Heartbeat, an animated VR experience about miscarriage, produced by Chi Thai and executive produced by Nell Whitley (Marshmallow Laser Feast).  She is a founder of Controvert, a company focused on using immersive and interactive technology to tell stories in new ways. In 2017, she was selected for Reframed, an immersive artist residency at Lighthouse in Brighton. She has over 10 years experience working as an interactive producer at the BBC and in the indie sector specialising in interactive content and social media. She studied Interactive Telecommunications at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, supported by Fulbright.

Impossible Worlds

Explores experiences of Maternal Mental Health and the impact of new motherhood. 

When a child is born… the world changes. To Helen, who recently gave birth to her first baby, the world feels like it has changed forever. Time has become circular.

Her space has changed too. It seems to be shrinking, and warping. Her home used to be porous, with routes to the outside, but now it is her whole world. It shifts and warps around her as she does whatever she can to keep this baby alive and fed and clean.

Impossible Worlds will use 360 Video in VR to create embodied experiences that bring female bodies into virtual space. These are often taboo and overlooked stories and a lot of existing media has struggled to tell these stories in engaging ways that reach an audience. Movement and dance will be used to express in a medium that emphasises presence in the story space.

The project will consider non-euclidean geometric transformations.  geometric editing can transform the experience of VR to create the Impossible World.  Video has enormous potential for creating powerful, photorealistic stories, but is being left behind while the innovations are being made in animation and game-engine VR.  There is a creative challenge in addressing how spherical video to its full potential to can be used to tell complex narrative stories and move away from single-shot experiences.

Simon McCormick, Outpost Belfast

Simon McCormick is an experienced and accomplished Broadcast Audio Engineer based in East Belfast.   Following 10 successful years at The Soundhouse Belfast, Simon co-founded the Outpost Post Production facility in 2017 alongside his business partner Robin Morgan. Outpost continues to go from strength to strength, providing a welcome addition to the buzzing Post Production industry in Ireland.

Immersive Audio for Post Production in Northern Ireland and Beyond

Since forming in 2018, Outpost Belfast has been striving to meet a demand for forward thinking Post Production in Belfast and beyond. As Post Production Audio enters an exciting new phase of Immersive Sound Delivery, Outpost is aiming to be at the forefront of this service industry in Northern Ireland. Broadcasters and Social Media Content providers such as Netflix, Sky, Amazon Prime, Youtube Facebook are increasing their programme and content output utilising Immersive Audio, Outpost aim to create a studio that fully meets the Immersive Audio needs of not just these leading companies, but the needs of local creative industries moving out into the worlds of Gaming, AR/VR/MR/XR for recreation as well as in the health and medical industries.

Northern Ireland and Belfast in particular is fast becoming one of the prime destinations in Europe and beyond for the Production and Post Production of TV Drama, Entertainment, Documentary and Film. 1 As well as catering for these core industries, we believe that intelligent audio in the next decade is going to become a key competitive, differentiating factor and an indispensable aspect of Broadcast, Immersive and Interactive Communication, Storytelling and Brand Advertising. Capitalising on the facilities and teaching expertise of SARC at QUB, The Future Fellowship Scheme will give Outpost the skills, knowledge and experience to become the first Dolby Atmos certified Audio Post Production Facility in Ireland, allowing us to offer the flexibility and knowledge to deliver for the Audio Post Production Industry globally.

Brendan McCourt, NewRedTV

Brendan McCourt is an award-winning film maker  He is an independent film maker and worked at the BBC as a TV documentary producer and director, managing teams on challenging projects.  He recently made a 15 minute Virtual Reality documentary Will the Walls Come down? about young people who live in the shadow of Belfast’s Peace Walls (Funded by the Community Relations Council) and an interactive,  gamified,  animated VR experience (Unity and Samsung Gear VR)  entitled Reality Changes Perception, which enabled women’s groups at 4 Belfast peace lines to come together and create something new in a shared space. (Funded by the Executive Office at Stormont).. 100pc of his time will be devoted to this project.

VR Classroom

The proposed project is the first phase of an interactive gamified Virtual Reality (VR) Classroom for teenagers with a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder who are at risk of disengagement from their education.  Disengagement from education, especially for those on the autism spectrum, is gradually increasing – the most recent statistics show an increase of 60% to 4,485 children excluded from education from previous figures in 2011 (Ambitious About Autism, 2016).

The project will aim, through the development of a fun, immersive, gamified, and highly interactive VR Classroom to:

• Improve appropriate classroom responding behaviours

• Teach replacement behaviours to reduce challenging/inappropriate behaviours

• Teach effective proactive anxiety reducing strategies

This project aims to build on new technological advances, using a VR headset and controller, with behaviour analytic strategies, to determine whether a VR Classroom training programme can result in behaviour changes and new behavioural responses in the real classroom that will ultimately, help children to focus better. Our research indicates such a product does not exist on the market. Many ASD children are strongly drawn to video games. By gamifying the experience, this ability can be channeled in a positive way.

http://newred.tv/about/v

Arts Council NI and Future Screens NI Award 26 Projects via the Creative Industries SEED Fund

Arts Council NI and Future Screens NI Award 26 Projects via the Creative Industries SEED Fund

Arts Council NI and Future Screens NI have collaborated to introduce the first ever Creative Industries SEED fund.  This new fund has invested £365,000 within the local creative economy.  Projects funded include those developed by artists, crafters, and community activists engaging on topic ranging from Re-Imagining Peace Walls to Opera and featuring the very best of  local talent.

7 large scale transformative projects across have been funded across art, theatre, audience development, craft making, mixed and alternative reality and VR film making. 19 smaller scale projects have been invested in the areas of art, immersive technology, festivals, music technology and craft making.

The full range of projects is accessible via the link below:

Creative Industries SEED Fund Awards