Our next workshop in the series is a street art workshop at Aspex Gallery with local artist Roo Abrook. The inspiration for this element of the project came to me after I had been away from Portsmouth for a few years and on my return was surprised to see so much wonderful street art around the city. In particular I loved all the paste-ups and this really captured my imagination. I thought, what if someone were to use this kind of street art to cast a spell, as a form of urban shamanism. That was very much one of the starting points for the whole project.

So we invite you all to join artist Roo Abrook in a street art workshop that will get you making your own PASTE-UP ready to exhibit and share with the world. Yes, we do plan to put them up around the city (I am encouraged to say legally with bluetac and sellotape).

If you don’t know already, a PASTE-UP is a kind of street art that usually takes the form of a poster that is either handmade or printed, often using stencils and collage to create an image. The advantage of this technique is that it can be prepared away from the street where it will be finally displayed. Allowing the artist to develop complex and enthralling images with which to decorate the urban environment. Watch the video below if you want to see some paste-up artists in action.

The theme for this workshop will be URBAN MAGIC. We would like to challenge the participants to imagine their paste-up as a form of spell casting, a manifestation of the urban shaman, influencing us to ‘open our eyes and see the magic around us’. Our aim is for the work produced at the workshop to tie in with the wider project themes and imagery. But we also want to provide an open space for people to be creative.

The workshop is for all ages (16+) and any experience. You don’t need to bring anything other than your creativity and enthusiasm. At the end of the day you will take away a finished piece(s) of work and there may also be an opportunity to include it in a forthcoming exhibition. If you want to find out more about the exhibition check out the page on this website that has all you could possibly need to know.

Roo Abrook works with mixed media collage using her own original paintings mainly depicting portraits of women and children, posing questions about beauty, youth, and time. Drawing on Edwardian postcards, lens generated imagery of flora and fauna she assembles collages using a combination of traditional and experimental printing, mark making and screen prints with acrylic paints, spray paints, pencils, pens, spray guns, varnishes and finishes.

Join us at Aspex Gallery for this workshop in creative shamanism for the urban artist!

Tickets are £10 inc. materials (numbers will be limited to 12 places). You can purchase these directly via the Eventbrite page for the project HERE!

10am-4pm (with a lunch break), Sunday 15th September 2019, Aspex Gallery, Gunwharf Quays, The Vulcan, Portsmouth, PO1 3BF.

Supported by Arts Council England, Groundlings Theatre,
Aspex Gallery and University of Portsmouth.

A ‘Cursed City - Dark Tide’ event: https://thesnowwitch.com/

Publicity image: e-lepidoptera by @thisisludo (Paris 2010)

Storytelling for immersive transmedia experiences.

The third workshop in the series got us to explore the ways in which game design could be applied to storytelling. We wanted there to be a participatory and interactive aspect to our story experience and we asked Mark Eyles to lead us into this new terrain.

For our third workshop in the series we had the pleasure of Mark Eyles leading us through the possibilities for integrating story telling and game play. An important concept for us and Mark was able to guide us through a potted history of game design giving us some valuable ideas to play with. I think everyone was challenged to think about the shift from a linear, author led form of story telling to one in which every player brings their own creativity to the game.

The group worked on the design of our project and there were some really interesting developments. Especially in relation to the differing ways that ‘magic’ might be employed, the use of puzzles, the different kinds of interactivity we might want to add to the experience we are designing. Nonetheless, we didn’t lose sight of the importance of character and we spent a lot of time thinking about how each of the writers might create an interactive element to their character development.

Mark Eyles was Head of Design at Rebellion with over 20 years working as a designer, producer and manager in the games industry, a lecturer at the University of Portsmouth in games design and recently winner of the TIGA Person of the Year Award for his contributions to the games industry, teaching of game development and his work. He also wrote scripts for 2000 AD and Sonic the Comic, made holograms and has worked on board game designs for Hasbro, held the first Women in Games Conference and founded the Advanced Games Research Group at University of Portsmouth.

Storytelling for immersive transmedia experiences.

Our second workshop introduced the concept of transmedia to the participating writers. We were lucky enough to have Alison Norrington lead the workshop, she tooks us through the ABC’s and inspired us with some of her own transmedia projects.

We have been very lucky in finding the mentors we have for the writing workshops. Alison came highly recommended and boy did she deliver. Our aim for the workshop was for those participating to get a taste of what is involved in telling a transmedia story. Actually, after this workshop I stopped describing what we were doing as writing and started to refer to it as experience design. A subtle shift in terminology perhaps, but an important one. As with transmedia, it isn’t the author of the work that tells a story. Instead the story is created by those experiencing it.

This was a bit of a challenge for us all but Alison navigated the workshop participants towards a solid understanding of the principles of transmedia story creation. Personally I especially liked the conversational models Alison used to talk about the different ways we can think of story as a form of communication. It is also interesting to see the groups ideas developing and a growing level of complexity that is emerging from everyone’s input.

If you are unsure of what is meant by transmedia storytelling I have posted a short video below which might give you a quick introduction. The video is a summary of a transmedia story that was produced by a Spanish creative agency. It won’t answer all your questions but will give you a brief introduction. Don’t be put off by the ‘branding’ focus, transmedia story’s can also be done just for fun of for the experience.

Though if you really want to know more there are a couple of ways you can get involved with the project either as a creator or an player. Just get in touch via the website and we can tell you what is involved.

Alison Norrington has over 25 years experience in professional storytelling and entertainment working with working with such companies as Walt Disney Imagineering and a featured member of the BAFTA Guru Series. She is a founder of STORYCENTRAL incubating new franchises, participative experiences, production, story architecture, mythology and planning, prototyping, audience development and engagement and utilizing social media.

Storytelling for immersive transmedia experiences.

The workshop came about through a desire to explore a collaborative writing process that would enable the project to work with a group of creatives from the local community. We wanted to know what the challenges were and how we might overcome them. Author Matt Wingett, describes his experience of Joe Reddington’s collaborative writing workshop.

Joe Reddington’s workshop on collaborative was a fascinating experience that really took the lid off how to go about getting a particular writing goal performed through a structured and strict approach to working together collaboratively – that goal being the production of a novel, from conception, through development to printing, in 5 days.

Joe explained that in order to achieve it, specific limits and structures had to be achieved. This meant that each person had ownership of one character, that location and space within the book were also their own “characters” – ie: factors that needed to be included – and that one did not interfere with other people’s stories.

But how could it all work? How do you get into the frame of mind to enable that to happen. Joe started with an exercise that asked each of us to tell the story of a secondary character in a well-known novel as if they were the lead character. They must have an objective, an emotional drive and a purpose. This exercise I found really useful. I have a tendency in my writing not to round out secondary characters, or to make them subservient to the main story. But in this exercise, I began to see more clearly than ever before how actually the secondary character, the villain, the foil – these are all heroes of their own stories, in which they are operating to their own moral and logical standards. When this exercise was over, I could much more easily see how to develop a story between a group of many different people.

So, we were given a task to develop a plot based on the central ideas of, in our case, sport and Jane Austen. Initially, we had to work out each of our characters. What I found really interesting in this was when it came to discuss plot. There was a general agreement to approach this with the notion that “I want a scene in which this happens”. This was a really useful approach, and although the story elements appeared quite tropey, when it came to actually getting those events to fit together, I could see that there were very particular and interesting drives and scenarios beginning to unfold.

In all, it was a pretty joyous activity. I certainly felt I learned a lot about collaborative writing, and that it is possible to produce much more quickly with more voices, which I really wouldn’t have believed before. I also felt that the insight into the rounding of characters is something I will take with me into the future. Excellent stuff. 

Dr. Joe Reddington is the designer of the White Water Writers process.  He manages the day-to-day operation of the project. White Water Writers enables groups of up to ten writers to write and publish their own novel within five days. Writers are given an idea for a story on a single side of A4. They take the idea, develop it, draft it, proof it, refine it and polish it. After four and a half days – they publish it.