February 27, 2015 by katie
Our hotel-based interactive thriller Black Tonic is coming back for 2015. And our Kickstarter campaign to support the tour is now LIVE!
Black Tonic is a theatre adventure in the bedrooms and corridors of a hotel for 4 people at a time, Black Tonic explores the chaos caused by a disrupted body clock.
We have already raised 95% of the money we need to tour Black Tonic in 2015. We are launching this Kickstarter campaign to raise the final £3,000.
We’ve created some beautiful hotel-themed rewards, to thank you for backing this project. The Tea Towel, Limited Edition Framed Print, Card 3D Model Hotel Kit, and Do Not Disturb Door Hanger, all feature original hand-drawn illustrations created just for this Kickstarter.
Other rewards include: priority booking, a signed copy of the script, a pair of tickets to see Black Tonic, having a name of your choice featured in the show, a hotel mini-break, and privileged access to the creative process.
We’re really excited about bringing Black Tonic back for more people to enjoy. We want you to be a part of making that happen.
Make your pledge today!
February 11, 2015 by katie
We’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign soon to raise the final £3,000 we need for our upcoming tour of Black Tonic.
More soon…
#backblacktonic
January 20, 2015 by katie
The Guardian: Facebook apologises over ‘cruel’ Year in Review clips
Facebook has apologised after learning, yet again, that not everything can be done algorithmically. Some things, it seems, need the human touch.
http://gu.com/p/44fgx/stw
BBC Your Story
This web app uses your Facebook profile (or manually entered personal info) to create your life story through the BBC News Archive.
http://yourstory.pilots.bbcconnectedstudio.co.uk/
It appears to filter the content displayed using your date of birth, and whether you like Music, Comedy, Politics or Sports.
December 18, 2014 by katie
Winner of the Hello Culture 2014 Open Data Award
Commissioned by Creative PIE 2014 on behalf of Creative Enterprise
Produced by The Other Way Works
Creative Director: Katie Day
Developer: Ed Porteous
Bird Illustrations by: Luke Thrush
Design by: Sebastian Harding
Scientific Inspiration: Prof Debra Skene, University of Surrey
December 2, 2014 by katie
Theatre Royal Winchester
Sat 14 – Sun 15 February 2015
Sat 28 – Sun 29 March 2015
Tickets now on sale (all now sold out!)
http://www.theatreroyalwinchester.co.uk/avon-calling/
August 21, 2014 by katie
Arts Marketing Graduate Internship
6 Months – Paid
Women & Theatre and The Other Way Works are recruiting an Arts Marketing Intern.
This paid Internship offers a creative graduate hands-on arts marketing experience working on a variety of projects for two Birmingham-based theatre companies.
Women & Theatre deliver high quality participatory projects and produce new theatre of contemporary relevance that reflects the lives and experiences of ordinary people, giving voices to those who are not usually heard. www.womenandtheatre.co.uk
The Other Way Works create playful theatre that immerses our audiences in the story.
We are part of a new wave of theatre makers re-inventing the way people engage with culture. We do this by creating intimate environments that offer our audiences agency, which can provoke them to change the way they live their lives. www.theotherwayworks.co.uk
Working as a valued member of our small staff teams, the successful Intern will have plenty of opportunity to use their creative design and marketing talents to help raise the organisations’ profiles, and increase levels of marketing activity. Duties will include: developing print and digital marketing materials; implementing marketing campaigns for creative and fundraising projects; updating websites and social media feeds.
Key Information
6 month Internship starting in September 2014
30 hours a week, Tuesday-Friday (2 days a week with each organisation)
£ Minimum Wage
Predominantly office based in Moseley, Birmingham (both organisations based at this office)
Key Dates
Deadline for Applications: 12pm Tuesday 9th September 2014
Interviews: Tuesday 16th September 2014
Start date: Tuesday 30th September 2014
Apply
To apply for this position contact Women & Theatre on info@womenandtheatre.co.uk
Alternatively, please contact your work coach at your jobcentre and quote LMS reference: ERG 30125.
This paid internship is supported by the Creative Employment Programme.
There are certain criteria you must meet in order to be eligible to apply for a Creative Employment Programme funded internship. At the time of applying you must be aged 18 to 24 years old and you must be registered as unemployed with Jobcentre Plus. These eligibility criteria have been approved by the Department of Work and Pensions.
Women & Theatre and The Other Way Works are equal opportunities employers, who are actively seeking to employ people currently under-represented in the creative and cultural sector. This includes young people, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities.
August 14, 2014 by katie
Objective
To ascertain the feasibility of building a prototype of a software engine that automatically creates a video life story from an individual’s social media content.
Protagonist is a practical attempt to make sense of our vast stashes of personal data in a human, emotional, narrative way. Using their own social media content, we want to create a short film memoir of an individual – with the output feeling meaningful, personalised, beautiful and potentially provocative. And we want to see if we can create this using an automated process.
Our ambition was that the Protagonist service will be a commercial, stand-alone, direct-to-consumer product, but will also be used within the Afterlife Retreat (a large-scale residential theatre event The Other Way Works are planning for 2016).
Goals
To produce a design fiction film
To produce a technical specification for the software build
Outputs
An attractive design fiction film to illustrate the potential of the service. Working closely with an animator we have produced a film with a crafted, hand-made aesthetic, which is unique in the marketplace.
A Requirements document based on our research, to inform the Technology Feasibility Studies/Specifications.
Technology Feasibility Studies/Specifications from two independent software consultants/agencies demonstrating different approaches.
A summary of responses from our market research questionnaire.
Key Learning Outcomes
Building a prototype is feasible, and could be done for c£40,000.
Some adjustments would need to be made to the Specification, including reducing the range of social media feeds, and streamlining the processes that identify meaningfulness of the content to the user.
Music to soundtrack the video is a key component, with as much impact as the visual style. Rights and licensing cause a problem here, meaning that people can’t just have their favourite song to accompany the video. A selection of rights-free music would need to be offered, which mitigates the problem, but doesn’t solve it.
Construction of narrative from online data poses an extremely complex computing problem, which is just starting to be explored by digital giants such as Google and Facebook. It would be very difficult to compete in this marketplace currently.
by katie
The Protagonist project is ahead of its time. The ideas are sound, the research relatively easy to complete, and the concept is strong. The problem is that current computer technology and proprietary ownership of that technology makes creating a Protagonist platform difficult and somewhat expensive. At a future date, and perhaps not that far in the future, this kind of cross-platform video creation will be possible. At that point the technology will be used by a wide array of businesses and individuals. From my own research, I know that the Protagonist platform would create the kind of video content that funeral directors and other organisations working on personal memorialisation projects would find quite useful. One of the other groups that will benefit from this technology is archivists, many of whom will encounter enormous difficulties in the near future when it comes to storing digital content and information for prolonged periods of time.
For me, the entire project, and working with Katie, pointed towards what kind of future these online content platforms are working towards. At this point and time it seems far-fetched that one single company or government entity will own and run all online content platforms, so these disparate groups could end up creating a Protagonist-like system that runs across the groups. I have my doubts that this will happen, but it could.
The project also opened up another point for me, which is this: Maybe it is completely acceptable that most of a person’s online content is eventually lost and ultimately deleted. We first world Homo sapiens currently live in a historical moment in which the concept and practice of information preservation is crucial for an individual’s identity. I’m no longer convinced that our future cousins will necessarily view a lifetime’s worth of digital content with such reverence. Indeed, the difficulties in maintaining accessibility to that information as computer technology changes is itself alone a fundamental issue. Many people fail to realise, I think, that internet years are significantly shorter than human years.
Dr. John Troyer
Deputy Director, Centre for Death and Society
University of Bath
by katie
We contracted two developers, independently of each other, to draw up a Technical Feasibility and Specification document for the build of a prototype of the Protagonist service. We wanted to get different ideas about how the problems could be solved, and get a sense of what approaches we could take.
We provided this Requirements Document as something to work from.
Here are their reports:
by katie
Research
We undertook research into existing systems, ideas, companies and academic research to build our understanding of the area.
Pinterest Board with links to projects, people and services of interest to the project
http://www.pinterest.com/otherwayworks/protagonist/
Market Research
Focus Group – Bees in a Tin Event, Birmingham, February 2014
An initial session to gauge potential user interest, and discover what kind of features would be appealing in a product like this.
Focus Group – Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol, April 2014
A drop in session. Using printed versions of the online survey to provoke discussion and feedback. To gain specific feedback on video structure, which events were thought ‘important’, and highlight any concerns around privacy.
Online Survey
A survey was put together using Google Forms, and disseminated via online networks, to provide us with a wider range of feedback on our proposals. A summary of responses can be seen in Appendix.
Above is the graph of responses to the question “Which social networks hold your richest content?”:
