Arts Council of Northern Ireland Grants now open for their Minority Ethnic Artists Mentoring & Residency Programme

Future Screens NI funding associate Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) are currently accepting applications for their Minority Ethnic Artists Mentoring & Residency Programme with Grants of up to £5,000 to support the work of minority ethnic artists & creative practitioners living in Northern Ireland. Applications Closes: 12noon, 4 October.

The ACNI recognises and welcomes the diversity within our society. Their aim is to support individual artists and creative practitioners from minority ethnic backgrounds and migrant backgrounds at every stage of their career. Through the Minority Ethnic Artist’s Mentoring and Residency Programme they wish to create opportunities for specialized training, research, cultural exchanges, networking and learning for individual artists, creative practitioners and arts administrators from minority ethnic and migrant backgrounds.

ACNI & Dept. of Communities offer new £5 million recovery fund open to individuals in the arts & creative sectors

Future Screens NI funding partner The Arts Council NI and the Department for Communities NI have opened the Creative Individuals Recovery Programme (CIRP), a new £5 million funding programme to support individuals working in the arts & creative sectors retain valuable skills with grants up to £2,000. CIRP funding aims to support one-off costs that are incurred by individuals working within the creative economy, helping them to re-engage with, or maintain their creative practice. Funding should help individuals and artists sustain and build the professional and technical skills, which are so important to the entire creative ecosystem.

 Closing: 12noon, 6 October. For more information follow the link here.

The Department for Communities is developing separate support funds for arts and culture organisations, including those whose purpose relates to heritage and indigenous languages, and further announcements for separate awards for D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists will be made soon.

Future Tuesdays launches with Paul Moore in conversation with Cathy Craig, Founder of INCISIV

On 14th of September 2021, Future Tuesdays launched the season with Future Screens NI Director Paul Moore in conversation with Cathy Craig, founder of INCISIV Sport. The two innovative thinkers shared insights and examples of leadership and innovation within the creative industries based upon their knowledge and expertise. Professor Craig shared her journey with research and development within higher education and industry sharing poignant examples of where the two fields meet especially in the field of new and immersive technology.

Professor Cathy Craig is a Professor of Experimental Psychology at Ulster University. Cathy founded INCISIV in 2018 and has emerged as the lead in neuro-technology, machine learning and brain decision making. The emergence of INCISIV as a leading company exhibits rapid success which has been built upon the considerable and unique expertise of Cathy employing Data Analytics to unlock the secrets of how we move, why we move and why sometimes we cannot. 

Find out more about Cathy and INCISIV here: https://incisiv.tech/ 

Professor Paul Moore is a Professor of Creative Technology and Director of Future Screens NI. Future Screens NI is a multi-million creative cluster programme investing in the creative industries. The success and character of Future Screens NI is built upon Paul's expertise in creativity, data, clustering and the ability to redefine and reform programmes for the greater good. 

The event was hosted on Stage Left, a recipient of Future Screens NI funding.

Visual Spectrum develops and provides a Lighting & Visuals Masterclass for events professionals.

Responding to Future Screens NI Rewriting the Narrative call for projects responding to the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, Visual Spectrum developed and provided online training aimed at creative professionals in events production. Acknowledging the need for upskilling among professionals in the creative and entertainment industries with periods of downtime accompanying lockdown, the Lighting & Visual Masterclass provide much desired training.

Offering instruction to novice and experienced technical crew in fields such as TV and theatre, the course facilitated the switch to live events in preparation for the subsequent re-opening of venues. The course covered technical challenges of producing a large-scale visual experience through associated software including Cinema 4d, OctaneRender, and Adobe Creative Suite. The skills taught in the course allow creatives to build 3D models of spaces, to light them appropriately and to plan effectively for a large-scale visual production. The project created a student support community which has regular engagement from the students connecting with 70+ students worldwide from Seoul, Korea to Texas, USA. 

For more information on the course visit: https://www.visualspectrum.studio/learn

Visual Spectrum Studio is run by owner and director Oisín O’Brien. Oisín has been the lead designer on lighting & visual for AVA Festival and has worked on projects for internationally recognised companies like Jaguar Cars, Electric Picnic, Web Summit, Sony Mobile, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, and SXSW.

TEAM

Oisín O’Brien - Director​

Nuala Convery - Assistant Director 

This project was funded through the Future Screens NI Rewriting the Narrative Award.

Brain and Nerd R&D an adaptive music system for greater game immersion experience.

Brain and Nerd have teamed up with Ziggidybang to develop adaptive music systems for the Unity game engine, the ubiquitous video game developing software. The R&D project addresses limits to static or level/zone-based music disrupting otherwise immersive open-world games, a game mechanic where the player can explore and approach objectives freely. The adaptive music system will keep track of where the player is in the game world relative to nearby emotional stimuli and continuously calculate indices for Threat, Adventure, and Wonder. To this end, Brain and Nerd are developing a sandbox game Hortalius to test the music system. The adaptive music system will improve immersion in games built in the Unity game engine by continuously adapting its soundscape to the player’s predicted emotional response to onscreen gameplay, forming a real-time, player-responsive music system not seen before in indie games, thus enhancing, rather than impeding the immersive experience with the soundtrack.

Brain and Nerd is a growing independent games development studio that has worked on its own IPs in Northern Ireland for over eight years. It specialises in procedural generation, engine and tool development, and customer-led development. 

For more information on Brain and Nerd visit: https://brainandnerd.com

Industry Partner: Richard Campbell, Bmus (Hons), Creative Director, Ziggidybang. 

Co-Investigator: Prof Michael Alcorn, Dean of Internationalisation, School of Arts, English and Languages, Sonic Arts, Queen’s University Belfast.

This project is funded by a Future Screens NI Research & Development award.