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

Future Screens NI Spotlight - Multimedia

Multimedia:

Multimedia forms a large section of the space Future Screens NI works in, with a particular view to how this sector is being innovated upon. Some of this innovation comes from new technologies such as 360 cameras, VR/AR headsets, Realtime Rendering pipelines ect. and how they can be used to change the shape of the industry, but these innovations also come from how this technology can be utilised in ways that were previously not possible, by employing newly emerging techniques. Some of the most interesting companies we work with are combining both of these methods to create entirely new workflows and products that can lead the industry in a new direction and also put the Northern Irish creative sector as a whole firmly on the global stage.

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Retinize: Retinize is a multi-award-winning immersive media studio, creating VR and AR experiences for clients like National Geographic, BBC, Seagate, BMW, National Museums NI etc.

Their mission is to create new and incredible immersive experiences that push the boundaries of what the viewers/users are typically expecting from similarly designed content and what the medium (VR/AR) is currently capable of. The overall goal for Retinize is to harness this newly expanding medium by using a full spectrum of available technologies to get the absolute best out of the content. To do this they use state of the art 360 video, 3D stereoscopic vision and spatial sound to truly immerse the user in breathtaking content. By doing this they believe that they will be able to get more people to fully embrace a new form of story telling that is able to instantly transport a user to an entirely new world.

Retinize initially began as a spinout from Wild Rover Productions which had been well established in Northern Ireland since 1999 as a film and production company. From here Retinize established their own roots in high end global film and television before going on to explore more tech focussed projects which include VR/AR experiences that were created for  National Museums NI and Tourism NI in addition to further utlising the technology for animation techniques and more advanced production that can not only be used internally for the creation of high end video pieces but also has the potential to change how the industry as a whole thinks about animation techniques and production.

For More on Retinize: https://www.retinize.com

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ALT Animation: ALT is a collective of creative professionals who joined forces to create a production studio focused on delivering high quality story driven animated content, using efficient production pipelines to provide creative solutions and compelling content for global audiences of all ages across multiple platforms. Formed in 2016, ALT Animation is made up of Animation Producers, Tim Bryans and Andrea McQuade and Creative Director Lee McQuade. Together they have over 30 years of experience in the creative industries during which they have produced dozens of hours of award winning broadcast animated content, helped to raise in excess of £15 million in production finance, developed numerous iOS Apps as well as created and produced campaigns and adverts that have been viewed right across the globe. They have worked for international broadcasters such as CBBC, Disney, Nickelodeon, PBS Kids, RTE, KiKA and Channel 4, and global brands such as Unilever, O2, Mars and Vodafone combining their production management and creative experience to deliver award winning material with exceptionally high production values.

Their newest project “The Hearios” is an exciting stop motion animation and live action mixed media series aimed at a pre-school audience featuring a family of musical moles who teach children the important developmental skill of active listening. 

Since their formation, ALT Animation have been focused on developing a slate of animated properties for the global market. In 2017 ALT Animation optioned an idea for an animated series from children’s author and music expert Ann Bryant.

Working with Ann and Mark Gordon of Score Draw Music, ALT have developed the idea into The Hearios, a property with true international appeal which promises to couple compelling animated content with a very valuable message for a modern pre-school audience.

In the current market, the competition for commissions from broadcasters and SVODs is extremely high with production companies from around the world competing for the relatively small number of shows that get picked up every year. The children’s department at the BBC receive over 1,000 pitch documents every year, from which they will commission 3 or 4 projects. Whilst the BBC are obviously the market leader in children’s animation, this level of uptake is indicative of the competition that animation producers face to get their content out into market.

In order to make The Hearios stand out from its competitors, ALT are proposing to bolster their current proposition by carrying out user testing with our target audience, in collaboration with QUB, to provide information about the existing listening skills and vocabulary of pre-schoolers and how they are affected by the central conceit of the show. The series has been designed to improve children’s active listening skills which have been shown to assist with their development in areas such as speech, language skills and memory. ALT propose to carry out some user testing in order to establish the effectiveness of the show in capturing children’s attention to the sounds presented and their development of a vocabulary of sounds. Educational aspects of a series are of huge importance to broadcasters, especially public service broadcasters who have a particular remit to inspire and educate their audiences.

For More on ALT Animation: https://www.altanimation.com

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Italic Pig: Italic Pig is an innovative games studio based in Holywood that specialise in high-concept narrative adventures packed with snappy dialogue, irreverently-epic plot lines and experimental game mechanics.

The premise for their new VR game “The Infinite Hotel” came from working within VR’s key limitation - physical  space - rather than fighting against it with workarounds like teleportation, autorun or stick  controls.  Italic Pig’s The Infinite Hotel is a character-driven VR adventure that boasts “A grand scale  adventure in a room scale space”. Set in a hotel with an infinite number of floors, the player  takes on the role of elevator operator to the weird and quirky staff and patrons of the  universe’s most luxurious holiday resort. Though The Infinite Hotel has achieved recognition, the current Character Generator does not function to the level Italic Pig wish to provide. Italic Pig aim to create a second generation Character Generator that uses fewer assets in an innovative method, and uses machine learning to create believably randomised characters (known as “Randos”) that are appealing to the player.

The game won The Big Indie Pitch at PocketGamer London and  earned a highly regarded Best In Play award at GDC San Francisco. Both Oculus & HTC have  shown genuine interest, and the demo has been compared to “stepping into a Pixar film”.   Italic Pig have been recognised as NI Game Studio of the year.  Infinite Hotel was nominated for Best Immersive  Game at the upcoming ​Raindance Film Festival​ 2019. 

The Trailer for The Infinite Hotel can be accessed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kavlSIDXzo

For More on Italic Pig: https://www.italicpig.com

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For more information on the projects that have been funded through future screens NI and how to go about applying for funding yourself please follow the link below

futurescreens.org/funding

Future Screens NI and Experimental Design LA win Best International Collaboration

Future Screens NI and Experimental Design LA  and partners where delighted to win the award for Best International Collaboration at the Education Awards which recognise excellence in the third level education sector in Ireland.

The award recognised the important impact of the partnership between Future Screens NI and Future Technologist Alex McDowell in widening success with the creative industries within under-represented communities.  Professor Paul Moore and Alex McDowell are pioneering a ground-breaking worldbuilding framework which is transforming the creative industries for good across Northern Ireland. 

The award also recognises the contribution of all industry partners and SMEs working actively within the Cluster.  Moya Doherty Future Screens NI Industrial Champion and co-founder of Riverdance collected the award on behalf of Future Screens NI.  Alex McDowell flew in from LA to represent Experimental Design at the Awards Ceremony.

For a brief overview of Future Screens NI: https://vimeo.com/372602129