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.