Kesurokai documentary film

My film of the Chisana Kesurokai 2010 event is almost complete. I am going to Germany this weekend to show it to the group of carpenters who took part in the event in Japan last summer before finalising it. It is a little scary showing it to the people I filmed, but I am pleased with the result so feel fairly confident they will be too.

The majority of my previous film work has been 3-5 minute youTube material. Making sense of a huge amount of footage shot over a seven day period and reducing it to a half hour documentary has been an interesting challenge for me. However, video-logging techniques developed during my research helped immensely and this documentation of all the video clips enabled me to search and select appropriate material fairly efficiently.

Once it is finished I shall post it on my vimeo site.

The two buildings and some of the carpenters involved.

Return from Kesurokai

For the last two weeks I have been in Japan filming a group of Japanese and European carpenters making traditional timber frame buildings using only hand tools and trees felled on site. It has been a fantastic experience but it is also lovely to be home. The heat and humidity was very tiring ... in contrast it is around 12C and raining heavily here in the Peak District today! It feels a long time ago that I was sat on the tatami mats next to the worksite kitchen logging my video and photos:


Full details are on my Kesurokai blog and early 2011 I should complete a short documentary film about the event, but here are a couple of tasters of the material:

RSA Animate illustrated lectures

The combination of skilful drawing illustrating the short, thought-provoking lecture in this video is great:

I have watched several of them now (it's part of a series) and find them very compelling. Many people find it quite difficult just to listen to a lecture and need something to watch ... other than a 'talking head'. The sketching hits just the right humorous note for me; it emphasises what is being said, without distracting from the content. It also looks effortless which means it probably took ages and ages to create! 

Multimedia design

I have been running a blog to document my work for Kesurokai, an organisation that brings together traditional craftsmen from Japan and Europe. As a favour, I also agreed to update their web site however, as their organiser, Hannes Schnelle, and many of their craftsmen are from Germany, it is written in German! It has been a long time since I learned German at school so this presented an interesting challenge, but I managed it with some excellent help from green woodworkers Michail and Katy Schütte who translated the bulk of the text and my kind friend Michael Hohl who helped me finish it off.

Who needs a web site?

Blogging software is so easy and so customisable, I feel that personal web sites are going to become a thing of the past. Why pay someone when you can do it yourself? Why wrestle with Dreamweaver when you can set things out simply and clearly on a blog?

I have found that creating a website with a blog is a different experience, because you tend to build gradually, rather than assembling everything, then putting it up in one go. However, if you are fairly organised and categorise as you go then a blog creates a rich resource that the reader can brows in many different ways. 

I started blogging for Kesurokai, a European-Japanese cultural exchange project I am involved with. I needed to create a project web site and also document the project between its start-up at the beginning of the year and the main event in August. The documentation has become a web site and has generated widespread interest very quickly and easily.

I have also just set up a new blog for my partner, Robin Wood to use as a sales page. He has been blogging for a while and gets on well with it, but cannot easily update the products for sale on his web site because it is too technical, and of course I am not good at getting around to it! So, I created a new blog for this and tweaked his existing blog, so they feel as if they are on the same site and tie in with his web site. Blogger isn't as sophisticated as TypePad, which this blog is on, so it was not straight forward but I am quite proud of the result.

Craft interpretation

When I was researching for my PhD and experimenting with interpretation, I found that a well-annotated drawing was what the learners responded to best. Photographs helped, but somehow gave too much information or the view was never from quite the right angle.

At that stage I had a hang-up about drawing which I have found many people suffer from. They feel that if they can't easily produce and exact replication of something, they can't draw, and give up. However, it is a learned technique and, given a little help from a few fellow students, I found I could sketch what I needed.Nowadays I can quite quickly produce drawings like the one above using Adobe Illustrator, but always start by sketching by hand to get a feel for the perspective that will be needed and how it will work in with the text. 

These pictures show my partner Robin Wood's latest development; a device for holding a bowl whilst hand-carving which he has called the BowlMate. He developed it for learners to use whilst he is teaching and there has been so much interest from the wider woodworking community he wanted to publish plans, which I spent an enjoyable day yesterday doing. 

You can see the results of my work on his web site here and also download a PDF here.

Design thinking

Design thinking: creativity for the 21st century is an Open University level 1 course that went live in February 2010. I worked with the course team as a consultant; authoring content, providing feedback on the use of new software that was developed for the course, and overseeing consistency of content and use of images across the whole course.

Course content
Through a mix of academic, practical work and reflective activity students develop an understanding of design, acquire new designing skills and build a portfolio of design projects as a foundation for future study. The course looks at common principles of design and ways of thinking that lead to ideas and creative solutions.

Software
OpenDesignStudio is an image sharing site so the students, who work remotely, can upload images of their practical work and discuss it with their tutor and other students. Compendium is a mind mapping software that students use to record their activities as they are designing and as a reflective tool as part of their assessment.

Ongoing involvement
I now work as a tutor on the course and am also forum moderator, an essential part of college life for distance learners!

Students at a Day School