International Week Workshops & TAF: Health Communication Workshop

The workshop is part of the 2nd year Film and television students' health communication project. In the workshop the students create ideas for the project with Tampere City Health Services. In the workshop there will be lot of international examples how short films are used for health communications. The emphasis is on creating ideas for effective messages that are emotionally driven and embedded in stories.

Lecturer: Doe Mayer, the Mary Pickford Professor of Film and Television Production in the School of Cinematic arts at the University of Southern California (USC). Doe Mayer has been working in film and television for over 25 years. Her research and publications in health communications focus on family planning, basic education, health and nutrition promotion, HIV/AIDS prevention, population, and women’s issues. Mayer hasbeen involved in projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations and many major non-governmental organizations.

Participants:
The privileged participants are 12 students in Health Communications Project (2nd year film and television students). Other students interested in attending the workshop contact Leena Mäkelä (leena.makela@tamk.fi).

International Week Workshop & TAF: Cinematographic language of media based on films Russian experimental film director Vladimir Kobrin

 Arturas Bukauskas, Vilnius College of Technologies and Design

Arturas Bukauskas was born in Vilnius, Lithuania. After graduating Vilnius University  faculty of physics, he entered animation courses in Lithuanian film studio. Then, studied experimental film directing  in VGIK, Moscow Institute of Cinematography. Now AB works in his studio, directs short films and  commercials, also gives lectures in Vilnius College of Technologies and Design.



A brief outline of presentation:


The topic of the lecture will be - How to create a Time Fetishes in the cinema and how to perform rituals with them. A prayer in cinematographic language. Ritual killing of Time to make it be reborn it in New Media. The lecture is based on the films by experimental film director Vladimir Kobrin (1942 - 1999).


International Week Workshop & TAF: Website designing for devices and Internet

Michael Koch (sitting) teaching at TAMK in October 2010

Academy of Professional Higher Education, Multimedia Designer
 Michael Koch, lecturer and Technology and design Evangelist at the BA Webdevelopment and Multimedia Designer educations in Denmark is hosting the workshop.
Michael is on a daily basis working with subjects as Mobile design and development in Flash, dynamic Flash websites and database, Flash design and coding, Vue and Maya, 3D animation, Motion Capture, Arduino and Unity 3D Visualizations.
In this workshop the lecturer and students will explore how to create Flash websites based on Adobe Flash Catalyst.

For many art students there is an urgent need to get better tools for creating close to finished website design without the need for too much coding.
This is today possible by using Photoshop and/or Illustrator as a starting point to create stunning designs and then importing these designs into Flash Catalyst to create finished websites.
There is also a need to create dynamic data websites in Flash Catalyst and to incorporate elements from Flash, which communicate with servers and the workshop will also show examples of this.
The objectives of the workshop are:
- To understand how you should build the Photoshop psd files (An example file will be provided for students)
- How to setup the Flash Catalyst Flash file based on the provided Photoshop file.
- How to build the website itself
- How to incorporate Video
- How to incorporate Sound
- How to incorporate dynamic Flash files talking to server .swf/.as
- To understand the Photoshop/Catalyst/Flash/Builder workflow offered today by the Adobe Suite

International Week Workshop & TAF: /Experimental studio for //streaming 3-D TV as an immersive live cinema/*

 Workshop held by Mg.art Jänis Garancs, Liepaja University

SHORT DESCRIPTION:
Development of several experimental modules that can function and be integrated as interactive TV, multimedia Karaoke, 3-D VJ-ing, immersive gaming environment.

GOAL:
It is intended as a hybrid (modular) environment that shares physical and virtual spaces for distributed groups of people, eventually collaborating over a longer period of time.
The modules can range from (in its simplest form) a laptop with a web cam, or to a specially equipped ‘info-kiosk (box/booth), to a large immersive multimedia installation e.g. using 3-D stereoscopic projections and multi-channel (surround or 3-D) sound, Internet database components. The modules hopefully would be capable to be integrated into a larger, inter-connected system.

METHOD:
After the establishment of basic common module principles and mapping of interests, we would work in small parallel groups (2-5 people) and share the results in series of mutual presentations.

TECHNOLOGY & REQUIREMENTS:
We could experiment with any hardware/software platform that allows involve multiple video cameras, game pads, Xbox Kinect Sensor, Wii Remote, MIDI capable video-mixers, sensors and controllers - and can share audiovisual and MIDI data to other intended modules.
Software components could be students' preferred programming environments (on their own responsibility), but the workshop tutor can offer expertise and assistance in VRML/X3D software programming.

International Week Workshop & TAF: 24-hours.in Tampere – interactive documentary workshop

In this interactive documentary workshop participants will explore new opportunities for participation, collaboration and the potential democratisation of documentary production. Utilising mobile device cameras, participants will produce a collaborative, participatory, experimental documentary project centred on 24-hours in Tampere. With reference to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 documentary film ‘Man with a Movie Camera’, we will aim to document the city of Tampere, the people that live there and their daily lives in a 24-hour period. Participants are encouraged to embrace Vertov’s pioneering avant-garde approach to filmmaking, utilising cameraphones and mobile devices to capture “life caught unawares”. Moving beyond the user-generated content model, the project will build up a database of location specific documentary material and aim to create a new system for collaborative documentary production and user-curated content. The resulting project will be presented as part of the International seminar and published online.

Richard Vickers, University of Lincoln

Richard Vickers is a principal lecturer at the Lincoln School of Media, University of Lincoln, United Kingdom. In 2006 (in part inspired by a visit to Tampere) he developed 15x15 (www.15x15.org), a project that utilised user-generated mobile phone video content and explored the democratisation of art in the age of digital production, with reference and homage to Warhol. The project won the Flashforward Film Festival art category in Austin, Texas and has been exhibited extensively around the world

International Week Workshop & TAF: Workshop Nou&Herkauw

Nou&Herkauw and Academy for Popculture
Adri Schokker and Michel Pitstra, two teachers at the Academy for Popculture and creative artists at Nou&Herkauw will host the workshop.

Nou&Herkauw is a collective of artists, and students who work in several disciplines such as media art, graphic design, illustration, and theatre. In collaboration with students of the Academy for Popculture they develop all kinds of interactive VJ performances for cultural events and dance events through out Holland. The setup of Nou&Herkauw is most similar to an OpenLab. The basic idea of a performance is that it starts with totally nothing and that all the visual content is created on the spot during the event. This can be anything! Last on the TAF party in the Klubi, Nou&Herkauw created a film set in which participants could shoot their own Sweeded movies, make animations, and use there tweets as typo-visuals. All the footage were mixed by the Veejays of N&H

Return of the Living Digital @ TAF
What is the relation between the real tangible world, as we know her, and our digital empire? Where are the physical, tangible roots of our digital, graphical user interfaces? And how did they transform to the digital? What is the relation between Me and my ‘Facebook ME’? Is the mediated ME a part of our consciousness, or just a collection primal data?
What would the world look like if we transform all the digital back to the tangible? What would the Klubi look like if you apply the architecture of Facebook on the architecture of the Klubi?

These questions are the starting point of the development of an interactive visual performance for the official TAF party at Friday… The public is invited to participate as much as possible.
During the workshop week, we will explore interesting, absurd, provocative, and funny ways to bring the digital back to the land of the living. All means are allowed as long as the results can be presented in an interactive of performative form.

The objectives of the workshop are:
- An exchange of ideas, experience and knowledge between international students.
- Gaining more knowledge of developing and realising interactive performance concepts.
- An introduction to VJ techniques and culture, creative programming (Isadora, Processing, Max/Msp Jitter), and theatre performance.
- Establish a durable collaboration trajectory between the participating students and Universities

N&H at Northern Dutch Film Festival, November 2009

International Week Workshop & TAF: The Horror of Interaction

 Dr Christopher Hales

Chris has run many successful workshops around Europe, including several at TAMK Art and Media which have resulted in memorable results. Interactive films involving sauna culture, the streets and pubs of Tampere, a murder mystery, and even Santa Claus, have emerged from Chris's workshops, which often take inspiration from the unique location of Tampere.

This year, Dr. Christopher Hales will be back with the workshop The Horror of Interaction. In this workshop, participants will examine why interactive installations, films and narratives are rarely scary, and will come up with a concept for an interactive experience (in the form of a narrative-based installation and/or live performance involving new media technologies) designed to invoke genuine fear, repulsion or shock in the user.

The methodology of the workshop is to identify narrative themes that could successfully convey horror, look at suitable technologies and installation formats for surprise and shock, and to find ways to combine these two into a final implementation. Participants will be given an introductory lecture, will be asked to briefly conduct background research to gather examples of interactive scariness, and will discuss which kinds of things make them scared. From this source material a plan of one or more interactive horror experiences will be designed, with the intention to at least make a quick prototype that can be tested on a group of users - although this is dependent on available time and resources.

In advance of the workshop, participants should think of personal experiences, films or stories that have truly scared them, and be prepared to discuss this on the first morning of the workshop.

Group size: 5 - 10

International Week Workshop & TAF: Programming for Artists with Processing

Dr. Zsofia Ruttkay, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest

Programming has not yet become a natural medium for artists and designers. To acquire sufficient skill of computer programming and the essential algorithmic thinking is normally beyond the capacity of artists, and, for many, it is not apparent what novel possibilities the computer offers for visual exploration and for entirely new genres of experience. Processing – a recent open-source programming language made by artists for artists -- makes it feasible to break both of these forbidding arguments.

The goal of the workshop, held by Dr. Zsofia Ruttkay, is to let participants – including artists who have never ever programmed before – get an insight into the programming language and its environment, practice making visual sketches and control them by using the mouse, and get an outlook on the potentials by browsing selected digital artworks.

The workshop will be organized around a series of algorithmic visual tasks, to illustrate the basic algorithmic concepts and language constructs. By the end of the workshop the participants will have created some own digital sketches, and will have a basis to develop their programming knowledge further. This outcome may enrich the arsenal of individual artists. It is also useful for educators who seek a first, attractive programming language to be taught for art and design students.

International Week Workshop & TAF: Printed advertisements of Soviet Estonia

Evelin Urm from Tartu Art Collage / Media and Advertising Design Department, lector

Soviet Estonia practically lacked advertising in the sense we understand it today.
What was Soviet Estonian print advertising like?
Which was the work field of artists?
Which were materials and possibilities to express themselves?

Evelin Urm will also bring a long a small exhibition of Socialist Estonian tokens, pennants, plastic bags and posters from the 1970s to 1990s, so that all students could have an overview over the print advertisements in Soviet Estonia. She has digitized an slideshow with many different examples of printed advertisements.

International Week Workshop & TAF: Type in Motion

Susanne P. Radtke has developed and run international workshops mainly in the Middle East. Typography is always the foundation for her intercultural approach. The meaning and the message typography can transfer is very different in various cultures apart from differences in writing systems. Designers today focus on one hand on the global market but on the other hand they remain sensitive to their own national and cultural heritages.

Through Type in Motion diverse media like animation, sound and typography combine with your own voice become part of your animated piece.

Creativity and experimentation while playing with typography will be an essential part of the workshop. Increased knowledge about the rules and conventions of the wide field of typography will occur during being in the process of brainstorming, storyboarding and working on the final design. Later lectures in Typography will be included which will build a theoretical background for the practical work.

An interest and openess for typography and a curiousity to explore and express the hidden meanings in proverbs, sayings or expressions are good prerequisites for the workshop. The Program Flash will be used for the animation although the students are welcome to use any other software such as AfterEffects. During the workshop a brief introduction in Flash will be given but the students will be expected to have a good knowledge in the basic design PROGRAMS programms.

Susanne Radtke is tenured Professor of Graphic and Media Design at University of Applied Sciences, Ulm, Germany. She is co-author of Textbook for Visual Media Design. Prof. Radtke earned a graduate degree in visual communications from Berlin University of the Arts. She has studied with renowned teachers from the School of Design Ulm (hfg) which is the successor of the Bauhaus in Germany. Radtke lives in Ulm and Berlin.

International Week&TAF Workshop: How to Create Tension in Fiction Film

Cristina Perales and Rosa Pons hosted a workshop at our school also September 2009

The last but not least of the seven International Week workshops we present is hosted by Cristina Perales and Rosa Pons from University of Vic, Barcelona. They illustrate the workshop:

The  workshop we will offer at International Week 2010 of TAF, How to Create Tension in Fiction Film, will be focused on the relation between shooting and dramatic tension.

Frequently we work on large or short shoots and its value inside the story, and sometimes the result of this combination has nothing to be with the idea or aim written in the script. Our proposal let us to study and define vectors inside the scene following the intention of the script-writing and this brings up to a coherence in the audiovisual narration using cinematography visual expression possibilities.
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Read about the previous cooperative project of our two universities, the Doble Click Festival

International Week Workshop&TAF: Fiat Lux - Let There Be Light

„Availabe light is any kind of light I can get my hands on“ (W. Eugene Smith)

Using additional flash light in photography is one possibility to divide light from darkness. It can be a tool to alter the appearance of the scene being photographed in different ways. For example can it be used as main light, as fill light or it can even mimic the behavior of ambient light. But before we are able to use flash light in a way that adds to instead of destracting our picture we have to discover the different applications and qualities of it.

Using supplementary light is not merely a matter of adding more illumination to the scene. There are questions raised that go beyond technical considerations. Additional Flash light can have a profound effect on a subjects behavior. All eyes will turn towards us after we intrude to a scene and just fire a flash. We have to be aware of this fact. The presence of the flash can be even conspicuous to the point where it actually becomes an actor.

The workshop "Fiat Lux" is meant as a practical and theoretical introduction to flash photography and we will learn more about its unique properties. Students have the possibility to discuss images made by different photographers and different concepts of flash photography and they can apply their gained knowledge toward shooting assignments to perform with Digital SLR and additional flash units.

Light is all around us. Let's start exploring !

The workshop is given by Diplom Media Designer and freelance photographer Alexander Lembke who is teaching photography at the Faculty of Media at the Bauhaus – University in Weimar.

International Week Workshop and TAF: Nou&Herkauw

The result of the workshop will be experienced at TAF Party May 7

Nou&Herkauw@TAF'09

Nou&Herkauw is a collective of artists and students who work in several disciplines such as media art, graphic design, illustration, and theatre. In collaboration with students of the Academy for Popculture they develop all kinds of interactive VJ performances for cultural events and dance events through out Holland.

The setup of Nou&Herkauw is most similar to an OpenLab. The basic idea of a performance is that it starts with totally nothing and that all the visual content is created on the spot during the event. This can be anything! What starts with nothing evolutes to one big dynamic composition of animations, looped sketches, errors, mobile phone streams, live paintings, and so on. Projected on screens or walls in the rhythm of the music of the DJ’s or musicians. The visitors of the event are invited to participate and become makers in this collective creative process.

Idea for TAF
In the workshop during the international week of TAF, Nou&Herkauw will develop a live performance for official TAF party at Friday the 7th of May. The Lab of Nou&Herkauw is a collection of different low-tech/high-tech techniques and modules, that all together form the setup in which artists and visitors can create their visuals. 
Examples of different modules are: Animation tools, cameras, twitter based vj tools, etc. The objective of the workshop is to develop a collection of modules and techniques, which combined form an OpenLab at the TAF party. The students will develop and also perform their concepts.


The objectives of the workshop are:

• An exchange of ideas, experience and knowledge between international students.
• Gaining more knowledge of developing and realising interactive performance concepts.
• An introduction to VJ techniques and culture, creative programming (Isadora, Processing, Max/Msp Jitter), and theatre performance.
• Establish a durable collaboration trajectory between the participating students and universities.

Adri Schokker, teacher at the Academy for Popculture and creative artist at Nou&Herkauw will host the workshop. There will also be students from the Academy of Popculture and other international students.

International Week Workshops: Creative Editing

Elie Yazbek hosted the workshop also last year

Elie Yazbek, responsible of cinema studies at Saint Joseph's University, Beirut, will host the Creative Editing workshop of our International Week May 3-7. Elie comments his second visit to Tampere: "I'm very happy to join TAF team again in May 2010 during the international week, TAF students are really full of energy and need to express themselves!"

The workshop Creative Editing will start with a lecture, the first day, about the multiple theories and practice of editing through the history of cinema. This will provide the students the tools for the second part of the workshop: each student will have to create, through testing and experimentations, a video with footage imposed by the lecturer to the entire group. The main objectives are to train the students to be creative in the editing process and to understand the relationship between storytelling and editing.

Parallel to the work on the videos, students will be asked to show some of their previous short films made at TAMK and to discuss the editing choices with the lecturer and the other students.

Saint Joseph University 

There are now seven registered workshops led by our international partners during our international week. We will introduce them all, until now we have presented:
Interactive Cinema Workshop
"Are You Talking to Me?!" -workshop
Design Spam Workshop

International Week Workshops: Design Spam

Interaction designer and lecturer Pawel Pokutycki from the the Design & Communication department of the Hanze University Groningen (Academy Minerva) will host a one day workshop on day two of our International Week (May 3rd) titled:

Design Spam - workshop on conceptual and experimental approach to interaction design

Pawel explains to contents and targets of the workshop:
88% of all e-mails sent worldwide is spam, what gives about 130 billion messages per day, 84 million per minute, 1.4 million per second.

Why waste the potential of this powerful media concept and focus only on anti-spam defense instead of appreciating its beauty, improving its functionality and creating a new on-line communication tool of tomorrow?

In times when new media concepts die as quickly as they are born (and social media, augmented reality, spimes etc, are no exception!), interaction designers should never blindly follow any trends, nor should they entirely ignore the vanishing inventions of the past. Instead, they should experiment more, be critical, question the logic of contemporary communication tools, hack media reality as it is now and prototype unexpected solutions for the future.

We take spam not as a destination, but only a departure point for an inspiring, creative session based on:

• learning efficient methods of concept development for interactive media
• exploring the boundaries and experimenting with various applications of interactive media in the field communication design
• discussing contemporary trends and future scenario's related to the discipline of interaction design
• questioning the functionality and aesthetics of selected communication platforms and media environments

There are now seven registered workshops led by our international partners during our international week. We will introduce them all, until now we have presented:
Interactive Cinema Workshop
"Are You Talking to Me?!" -workshop

"Are You Talking to Me?!" Workshop on our International Week

Alex and Patrick in Tampere May 2009

Patrick Deters and Alex Reuneker, our partner Hague UAS Communication and Multimedia Design Programme lecturers, will lead one of the workshops of our International Week May 3-7.

The decription of this four day workshop on persona's, creative concepts and programming in Processing is like:

"All communication in the world has a purpose. Bringing people together, making sure everybody knows you're mad or just to clarify a point! But how do you communicate specifically to a child, a grandfather, beatnik or goth through interactive media? We'll be using webcams to convey a message... Do you have something to tell?"

Patrick and Alex visited our International Week and Tampere Art Factory festival last year for the first time. We are happy to welcome them back!

Hague University of Applied Sciences
Communication&Multimedia Design Programme blog
Read the report about our visit to Hague UAS
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International Week Workshop: Interactive Cinema by Chris Hales

Cause and Effect show in Tampere 2007

Chris Hales will be back again in Tampere to run a self-contained workshop about the 'interactive moving image' - involving the design and actual production of a prototype in which interactivity and video imagery are combined.

Chris has run many successful workshops around Europe, including several at TAMK Art and Media which have resulted in memorable results. Interactive films involving sauna culture, the streets and pubs of Tampere, a murder mystery, and even Santa Claus, have emerged from Chris's workshops, which often take inspiration from the unique location of Tampere.

The workshop commences with lectures and case-studies in order to provide background about the ways in which moving images have been, and could be, made interactive - and why. Interactive television, mobile phones, iPods, DVDs, computers, websites, ‘live’ performance and cinematic display will all be mentioned as possible means of showing interactive moving imagery. Different types of content such as fiction, advertising, music-related, artistic, educational and documentary will be considered.

Students will be expected to present a concept for an interactive film in response to the techniques and ideas shown, and several of these will actually be produced as functional prototypes. Depending on the class size it will be possible to work as an individual or in small groups. Video cameras will be used to create footage which will be digitised and prepared and subsequently combined with interactivity. Adobe Director will be recommended, demonstrated and fully supported as a suitable authoring tool, although students are welcome to use other software such as Flash, DVD Studio Pro or Quartz Composer. Interaction technology might involve audio input, sensors/Arduino, keyboard, fiducial markers, or video imaging.

***
The results of the workshop will be shown at Tampere Art Factory.

The author has visited TAMK School of Art and Media annually since 2001 with his Interactive Cinema workshop. Chris Hales has also frequently visited Tampere Film Festival, MindTrek and Tampere Art Factory performing the Interactive Cinema show "Cause and Effect" together with Teijo Pellinen. Cause and Effect has been shown on numerous Film and Media Festivals around Europe.