Participatory Academy at Växjö
Last Saturday I and seven other students from Crew 12 woke up really early to take the train to Växjö, a town pretty close to Karlskrona. We went there to take part of the 4th European workshop on crossmedia & collaboration called the Participatory Academy was held at the Växjö University in Växjö, Sweden.
The team consisted of the following students that were chosen to take part of the event (alphabetically): Antti Kupila, Arwid Thornström, Dag Månson, Johan Hedenskog, Julia Demchenko, Martina Tranström, Max Märkel and Sebastian Ramn. The team was just great, I really loved working the entire night without a minute of sleep with these people. Everybody was motivated, and considering the time we had (started working at about 6pm, presentation at 10am the next morning), I’m really happy with the result. Thank you guys and girls, you were great!
Anyway, the event started with a quick introduction and welcome by Heidi Sandberg from the Interactive Institute, followed by Lena Glaser from SVTi, who spoke about the future of TV, focusing on user generated and interactive content. After this Ron van der Sterren from VPRO Holland had a very interesting presentation, where he spoke about 3voor12, an online radio with loads of user generated content which was really inspiring. Gunnar Slott from SVT took over and spoke about Kvick, a mobile Java application that enables users to interact with for example TV. It showed a bit of what the future might bring, even if the application itself wasn’t that special. Eye opening more than mindblowing is how i’d put it. After this David Simmonds from Mindark spoke about online gaming, focusing mostly on their own virtual world Entropia Universe. Personally i think the presentation itself didn’t give that much (maybe because I’m no big fan of sci-fi or gaming in general), but showed where the world with virtual economy is heading. Before lunch Peter Zackariasson from Umeå School of business, Sweden had a presentation called “Code is Law”, continuing on the topic on online gaming.
We then enjoyed lunch and conitnued with some workshops, led by Raya Ribbius, about concept development. Here also Crew 12 came in the picture, when we were supposed to listen to some youngsters develop ideas with experts from BBC, SVT and other big companies, and then visualize these ideas for a pitch the next morning. It was interesting to see what these people came up with and even more interesting to work on the ideas the next night to have the presentation ready for the morning. We of course had our goals higher than creating a couple still images, so we tried to express a feeling with motion graphics, resulting in five short movies, one for each presentation.
The result from the workshop can be seen here: http://crossmedia-workshop.crew12.nu/
Everybody in the group worked with motion graphics and animation, where I focused on creating and animating the forest (that was illustrated by Martina Tranström and Sebastian Ramn). The sound effects were done by Dag Månson. Our team was led by Johan Hedenskog, who also was in contact with the people arranging the event. I had my Canon 20D with me, so I took loads of photos, which I will put online soon.
All in all it was a really cool and different weekend. More of these!