DiGi50+ Making the digital world work for you

DiGi50+ is a new initiative supporting people living in rural communities to get more out of computers, the internet and being online.

Media19 delivered a programme of training workshops and events in using computers, digital media, sharing and using the web across Northern England in Cumbria, North Yorkshire and Northumberland.  Developing people’s skills and awareness of the possibilities that the internet and digital media can offer to those living in rural areas and with previous limited knowledge or experience.

The website also contains learning tools to help people make more use of media sharing, email, the web and working with photographs from a digital camera.

Funded through the Transformation Fund via the three northern screen agencies, Northern Film and Media, Northwest Vision and Media and Yorkshire Screen, the project developed its own website to support the learning and to encourage people to take part and make their own contribution about their life in the country.

See www.digi50.org

His contribution to our work has been considerable.  Tommy was such a generous, kind and considerate person with a brilliant sense of humour and an unrivalled ability to make everyone feel at ease.

As a sound recordist, Tommy was able to work within any situation and he was always sensitive to all locations, communities and individuals who were involved in our productions, he is greatly missed.

We have lost a true friend and colleague and send our deepest sympathies to his beloved Joanne, Tom and Hetty.

Devised, produced and delivered by Media19, Self Portrait UK is our hugely successful cross-platform project that got people from across the UK involved in producing films, photographs, paintings and writing as a way of expressing their own identity and personality.

Commissioned by Channel 4 and partnered with the Arts Council, England and the National Portrait Gallery, London the project was launched with a series of films featuring well-known faces creating their own self-portraits ranging from water colour paintings, singing, favourite objects, photographs, memories and personal obsessions.

A final C4 series featured some of the most innovative and imaginative entries from the public that were also part of a UK-wide touring exhibition featuring the best 100 self-portraits submitted. Starting at the National Portrait Gallery, London the exhibition was seen in Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast and Manchester.

View the Self Portrait UK films here:

A project that gives a voice to young parents living in the urban and coastal districts of East Northumberland using photography and video to tell their stories and reveal the realities of life as a young teenage mum – the good times and the bad - being scared, vulnerable, desperate, depressed but also incredibly optimistic and stoic.

In their images and films they demonstrate resilience, a sense of humour and strength of character that has often helped them get through the difficult times.

Working with Media19, this group of young mums from Northumberland’s ‘Been There, Done That!’ Peer Education Project, have produced video and photographic work that tells their stories and expresses their feelings and the experiences they have faced after becoming pregnant in their teens.

Now they’re taking their story and their message to schools across Northumberland, as part of their Peer Education Programme, to encourage young people - young men and young women - to make positive and informed choices in their lives and to say that if it does happen, all is not lost – you still have a future.The production by these mums of their video and photographic posters aims to support them in their peer to peer work telling other young people just how it is.

View Kerry, Jade and Vicky’s films.

Posters

The Self Portrait Young Parents project has also worked with young teenage Dad’s at Castington Young Offenders Institute. As absent fathers, they are more aware of what they’re missing and the responsibilities that they have.

Creating a set of photographic portraits during Father and Child visits when partners and children can spend time together to build and maintain their relationship, makes them very aware of their situation and how they might cope and face up to their responsibilities once back out in the real world.

Self Portrait Young Parents is a Media19 project supported by the Northern Rock Foundation and working in partnership with Northumberland NHS Trust Teenage Pregnancy Team and Castington Young Offenders Institute.

An online project for Looked After Young People and their carers to create a space on a dedicated website, www.mylifestories.org allowing them to add and collect memories and experiences and produce their own life stories.

Life Story work is being seen as increasingly important for young people who are growing up in the care system to help piece together their lives by exploring some of the important memories and experiences that they have had.

For most of us, the objects, photographs, certificates reflecting our achievements and mementoes from our lives are taken for granted as they are often kept for us by caring parents. They are an important part of our identity and allow us to look back and take stock of who we are and where we have come from.

For young people in the care system, this isn’t always as easy. Growing up with more fractured lives, these basic aids to their memories don’t always exist, are often lost or just non-existant.

The My Life Stories project has developed a website enabling young people and their carers, support workers or key staff to create their own web space and create and collect their own life stories using photographs, scanned images, video or audio and writing. Everything uploaded can be shared in public or kept private for personal viewing only.

Being available online, their work can always be accessed even if a young person experiences a number of foster placements or lives in different care homes.

Please visit www.mylifestories.org

Produced for Comic Relief as part of the Global Campaign for Education to get young people across the world to lobby the G8 leaders and support every child’s right to go to school.

We produced 2 films working with two groups of young people from the UK who each travelled to work alongside young people in Ghana and Kenya. They were made by the young people themselves working with Nick Oldham, filmmaker from Media19, who taught photography, filming and editing skills to young people attending Kicoshep School in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya and at New Koforidua School in Ghana.

Ghana
Max, Fred, Jess and Ella, young students from Langtree School in Oxfordshire travelled to New Koforidua, about 30 miles south of Kumasi in Ghana. Here the main source of income for people who live in the village is through growing cocoa beans for chocolate and many are part of a co-operative, Kuapa Kocoo, who only sell the beans to Fair Trade organisations. Many of the children can’t get to school either due to poverty or because they have to help their families harvest the cocoa crop.

Kenya
Amy, Ed, Alex and Abigail from Sir John Lawes School in Hertfordshire went to Kenya and worked in the Kicoshep School in the Kibera slum on the outskirts of Nairobi. It was a difficult place to work. An amazing place with amazing people, great enterprise and great energy but along with terrible sanitation, AIDS and disease is rife. The school supports many of the orphans of Kibera who have lost parents through HIV/AIDS.

View images from this production on Flickr.

What makes you feel welcome? A project produced for the Design Council initiative, Design of the Times (Dott07), a year long programmes of events that explored how design can influence the way we live.

Welcoming my husband home on Redcar beach, bringing in the crabs during the summer'

Working with different communities in Middlesbrough, we explored what makes people feel welcome, or not.

A cup of tea, your front door, being greeted by your dog, industrial landmarks, defaced buildings and badly designed subways were amongst the range of thoughts and ideas presented by the people of Teesside.

We asked a few simple questions: What makes you feel welcome? What landscape makes you feel welcome? What landmark makes you feel you’re almost home? For some people a welcome landscape isn’t always pretty hills and fields. Many find beauty and tranquility amidst the stark industrial landscapes of the northeast.

'Most people think the towers are ugly but we love them'

Loving the bleak industrial landscape at the mouth of the Tees, wanting to embellish the corner of a supermarket car park, bright, spanking, well-kept loos and regional landmarks such as Roseberry Topping and industrial chimneys were amongst the ideas presented by the public using photography, writing and video and produced as an exhibition staged on Middlebrough’s most notable landmark, the Transporter Bridge.

'Exhibition at the transporter bridge, Middlesbrough'

View images from this project at Flickr.

View a selection of Welcome films in the playlist below.

Developed from our flagship project Self Portrait UK, and to help combat the mostly negative images and press coverage in Britain, Self Portrait Refugee allowed Refugee & Asylum Seekers to make a creative statement about who they are, how they want to be seen and reveal their own experiences, hopes and dreams for the future.

“To be a refugee is not what people think. I am trying to survive the fire, a darkness that covers my heart, the sun who burnt me and the sea around me; but nothing would stop me finding my way.”

Produced through a series of workshops with many refugee projects across the northeast, the final images, texts and short films were shown as an exhibition on the Tyne and Wear Metro system. This dramatic and powerful set of images have been seen by thousands of people on their Metro journeys with the combination of strong visual and written statements challenging many pre-conceptions.

Supported by Arts Council England North East, Channel 4, The Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Northern Rock Foundation and the North of England Refugee Service.

View posters from this project on Flickr.

See the films made by 3 young refugees.

A campaign for new young entrepreneurs, produced for Channel 4 and partnered with NESTA

Bonnie Chung, finalist

Apart from listening to music, avoiding their parents and planning a life in the sanctuary of their bedroom, young people have fantastic ideas for new businesses and Bedroom Britain invited teenagers from across the UK to send them in.

Jimmy Turrell, Designer

Launched on Channel 4 with a series of shortfilms, young people were invited to submit their big ideas for new businesses. The series featured both experienced and up and coming UK entrepreneurs including the late Anita Roddick, Fashion Designer, Bruce Oldfield, Richard Reed (Innocent Drinks), Jimmy Turrell (Safe Place Design), Chris Donald (VIZ) and Alexander Amuso (R’n’B Ringtones) who all gave their own expert advice on how to get started.

Chris Donald
‘Viz started in 1979 as a little local rag in Newcastle selling 150 copies, and by 1989, 10 years later, it was selling 1.25 million and it had become a national phenomenon. My advice to young people is to have a word with their parents and tell them to leave you alone.’

Bruce Oldfield
‘I worked for a few people but it wasn’t very satisfying, and I thought that the only way to do what I want to do is to actually do it yourself. Even when I was young I was buying t-shirts, printing things on them and selling them. I was hungry and very keen.’ Bruce Oldfield - Fashion Designer

Richard Reed
‘For your idea you’ve got to make sure it’s a strong, simple, clear idea. I was always told that if you can’t explain your business idea in one sentence to your granny then you don’t have a good business idea.’

Anita Roddick
‘There’s got to be that spark in you of dissatisfaction that creates an energy to change something.’

Alexander Amosu
‘When you’re young is the best time to be successful. The time when you have no rent, no electricity, no bills - take that opportunity because you can make as many mistakes as you like and never really regret it.’

A series of regional roadshows in Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow and Nottingham was followed by a final national event where eight of the best ideas were scrutinised by a panel of expert entrepreneurs, including Red or Dead fashion guru and founder of Hemingway Designs Wayne Hemingway, broadcaster and owner of production company behind TV Hit ‘Location, Location, Location’ Muriel Gray, award-winning Social Entrepreneur and Fair Trade, environmental fashion and lifestyle label ‘People Tree’ Safia Minney and multi-millionaire R’n'B ringtones creator, Alexander Amosu. All eight finalists featured in a second series of programmes on Channel 4.

An award winning series of films featuring a selection of visions for the new Millennium as submitted by the public including; a plea for all alleged WW1 deserters who were executed, to be pardoned; a Buddhist’s view on the new Millennium and; a single woman’s view on life and her desire to be just single.

View a selection of Millenium Movies inthe playlist below.