National Storytelling Week – January 31 to February 7 2015

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Celebrate national storytelling week with an immersive, interactive, storytelling workshop.

National Storytelling Week was created in the year 2000 to increase public awareness of the art, practice and value of oral storytelling. Since then, it has been held during the first week of February every year.

Book a digital storytelling session in the 4D Pop Up

Our creative practitioners will lead an interactive storytelling session that will feature large scale projection, LED lighting and surround sound to immerse your pupils. This will be an exciting, engaging experience that will impact on your pupils communication and language skills.

The 4D Pop Up immersive space sets up in 15 minutes and can seat a class of primary pupils. It becomes a space within a space and will transport your young people to new places, times and atmospheres. Learn more about the 4D Pop Up here.

The possibilities:

  • Fire of London
  • Titanic
  • Stories around the African waterhole
  • Noah
  • Gawain and The Green Knight
  • Or let us know what you story you want to hear…

Each workshop can be structured to meet your requirements and objectives.

If you’d like to arrange an immersive storytelling in your school, get in touch with the 4D team on 0844 414 2595 or email hello@4dcreative.co.uk.

Prices start from £550 + VAT for a half day and includes a practitioner and everything needed to create an immersive environment.

Networking and best practice at 4D creative

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Last week we welcomed practitioners from our network of schools for the second 4D exchange of the 2014-15 school year.

4D exchange is a regular event where teachers working in 4D immersive spaces can exchange ideas, best practice and resources with each other. It’s also an opportunity to hear from the 4D team about new tips and tricks that will help you make the most out of your immersive space.

The afternoon featured a huge range of topics including examples of use from practitioners, a demo of our new software, a presentation on a PHD project researching immersive learning and discussions on the next batch of immersive content 4D will be developing.

Explore a gallery of the event below:

As ever, it was fantastic to meet with creative and enthusiastic practitioners who use their immersive spaces for a wide variety of activities. These conversations also help shape how we develop our software and immersive content.

Our next 4D exchange will take place in February 2015 and all the details will be online soon. If you have an immersive space in your school, then we’d love for you to join us.

A trip to The Market – creating great immersive content

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The power of immersive experiences comes from creating just the right atmosphere with the very best content possible. Our content developer, Lauren, spends her days at 4D creating new images, videos and sound effects perfect for inspiring young minds in schools or relaxing those on a hospital ward.

With the new Primary Curriculum on the horizon, it’s a busy time of creating lots of new themes to help our schools immerse their pupils in brand new topics such as the Vikings, emergency services, shapes and patterns.

We want to start sharing some of this process with you and also to compile useful resources perfect for an immersive space.

For each new theme, Lauren is going to create a new mood board and also curate a Pinterest board full of useful images. Better still, if you want to contribute your own ideas, we’d love to see images and videos you may have. Just send us a quick email and we’ll give you access.

Come and explore our Pinterest board below for our first theme idea – the Market. This theme is going to be used to spark conversation with people with dementia but also could be used for a huge range of lessons from maths to creative writing to science and beyond!

Follow 4D Creative’s board Theme Idea – The Market on Pinterest.

Multimedia Content Creation with Z-arts

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The power of an image or video with sound and lighting is what creates each unique immersive experience. This could be a primary school learning about The Great Fire of London  or used in a reminiscence session for people with dementia, the key is always great content!

4D creative have recently been commissioned by Z-arts in Manchester to work on a content creation project which we will be following on our blog. Our content developer Lauren and training coordinator Inés take up the story….

Z-arts content creation project

The Sat’dy Allsorts are an urban music collective based at Z-arts who write, record and perform their own music. This year, as part of a grant from Youth Music, Sat’dy Allsorts have been working on different musical projects throughout the year such as writing for silent films, working with the Bridgewater Hall, and now with 4D creative!

The performers are 11-19 years old and range from grime MCs to soul singers. They meet every Saturday morning 11-1pm to work on their tracks and all of them write lyrics and songs in their own time.

Day 1

Using the 4D Pop Up space we have asked the Sat’dy Allsorts to create some immersive content to add to our demo library here at MediaCityUK.

On the first day of the eight week project, we inflated the 4D Pop Up  then asked the young people what they thought it was. We got a some great answers such as, ‘an inflatable disco’ and ‘a spaceship’. The great thing about all the answers, is that they could all be right!

After introducing the group to what 4D creative is all about and the spaces we create, we took the group into the 4D Pop Up and asked them to close their eyes and listen to the sounds we played.  This was all to get our new content creators to start thinking about the importance of sound in making you feel immersed within the space.

Inés took the group on a journey through our content library, starting with 4D Time Tunnel then drifting through space until they arrived on earth, and journeyed from city to forests and onto more abstract themes to show the range of content. This also gave plenty of examples of images, videos, music and soundscapes to give a better idea of what the brief would be for the next eight weeks.

Lauren then went on to explain the content development process which happens internally at 4D creative. Together the group discussed how to source images, the importance of finding non copyright material and finding creative commons content, and then explained some editing techniques as all of these ideas are important learning for those wishing to work within a creative industry.

Having created some theme brief mood boards back at 4D HQ, Lauren then asked the groups to choose which theme they were going to concentrate on for their own content.  These included Poverty, fairytale, conflict, urban culture, electricity, Shakespeare, alliteration, Manchester and emotions.

Mood boards were then created with magazines and internet searching helping to generate a huge range of ideas for each new theme.

It was a great start to a wonderful project with the Sat’dy Allsorts and Z-arts. The young people seemed enthusiastic and eager to start their content by finding the best images and creating original music for the immersive environment.

We look forward to the next session in a few weeks!

To find out more about Z-arts and the Sat’day Allsorts visit: http://www.z-arts.org/take-part/satdy-all-sorts/

MCA Content Project Part 4 – Outstanding pupil presentations.

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The first stage of our Content Creation project came to a close this week with the pupils of Manchester Communication Academy presenting their work.

Our teaching and learning lead, Gav, visited the academy to see the pupil’s creations and has written us this report…

“As the culmination of a huge project, I was invited to see the outcomes of the content creation work by one of the six year eight groups, that have been following the same programme of study.

Given the starting point of ‘Inspiration’ by year eight teachers of PE, the young content developers of tomorrow selected the development software to use, iMovie; researched the subject and selected the people who they considered to be inspiring.  From Jessica Ennis and Bradley Wiggins, to Felix Baumgartner and Neil Armstrong. The end result was four interlinked themes, built into 4D create and ready for the sharing.

What has struck me throughout our association with this project is the evident pride the content developers have in their work and ideas.  It was exciting to see how fired up the groups were about their own work and that of their colleagues. Throughout the sharing I was told what choices and adjustments to transitions they had made, or how they had found the right picture at the right resolution. Reflecting on tips we had offered but mainly the learning, skills and steer given by Alex Garry, their teacher.

All I can say is, their work, their choices and the activity they came up with was a pleasure to be part of. Sometimes I can be accused of ‘gushing’. I’m not going to apologise for that! Even though I am no longer a full-time teacher in a school, it was a ‘what I got into teaching for’ moment.  Beaming kids, asking questions, achieving, being proud of their work and being proud of their teacher.  I am a gusher!

One of the most exciting and rewarding hours I have spent in any of our rooms. Since moving to MediaCityUK, the hub of digital content development in our North-West regional home, I can see how the young content creators in schools today are being given the creative and technical skills and aspirations for jobs that exist today and for the jobs that have not even been thought of yet”

Since the lesson, it’s been fantastic to find out that the content creation project is to become a scheme of work for Year 8 and GCSE pupils. Lots of credit needs to go to the staff and pupils at the Academy who all put a great amount of effort into creating some outstanding pieces of work. A big thanks needs to go to Mr Gary and Mr Sibbald from the Academy who have lead this project with us.

The next stage for the Content Creation project is further meetings with the academy to see how we could expand this scheme of work further. We are also planning to pull together packs of resources so similar projects can take place in any of our network of schools. More news coming soon!

The brand new 4D creative content collection!

The power and flexibility of 4D Immersive Spaces is created by lighting, sound and projection. Outstanding immersive lessons need carefully curated content and every 4D Immersive Space starts with a bank of content that can teach lessons right across the curriculum.

We have recently worked with a team of creative and passionate freelancers who have developed a brand new library of content for our spaces. Images have been transformed, lighting states programmed and whole scores of music written.

One of our team, Tony Carberry, filmed this video showing some of his content creations which you can see below. Tony made us an enchanted forest, futuristic world and crashing waves theme amongst many others.

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Of course, once a 4D Immersive Space is up and running, the power to create content is open to everyone! Teachers and pupils alike can source images or create new themes using cameras, phones and recording equipment. Putting pupils in charge of their lessons like this, raises engagement and pushes creativity.

If you’d like to come and see what content we use in our spaces or how you can programme outstanding transformational lessons, then just get in touch.

Face-pulling workshop with Gav Cross!

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Anyone fortunate enough to have passed by the 4D creative office last Friday must have been quite surprised by the all the commotion!

Perhaps the heatwave finally got to us or perhaps the office coffee was particularly strong, either way, we were all bundled into our fantastic demo space and treated to a ‘pulling faces’ workshop, delivered by our amazing INSET practitioner Gav Cross!

The purpose of the exercise was to get some emotive photos of faces for one of our new content packs! We got a great collection of photos and a few laughs out of the occasion so thought it would be nice to share a time lapse of the event.

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