Category Archives: Uncategorized

Limbic Cinema

July 25, 2014Student successes, Uncategorizedjudithaston

A group of our students are part of an artist’s collective called Limbic Cinema. Whilst at UWE, they made a documentary about the rhythms of life in Bali which was screened as a triptych and performed in a theatre with a live orchestra. Subsequently it was commissioned as part of the London Olympics, Cultural Olympiad as a 360 degree live film.

Here is Limbic Cinema’s latest venture – an amazing piece of projection mapping for Trinity May Ball about the history of time. What I like about these students is the intelligent way in which they are pushing film into new territory – using multiple projections, live performance and a strong conceptual underpinning for their creative treatment of ideas.

My teaching at UWE

July 25, 2014Student successes, Uncategorizedjudithaston

As part of my role at UWE, I teach filmmaking and creative media to undergraduates, masters and PhD students. Over the years I have seen many of our students achieve great things and this continues to be a very rewarding part of what I do.

You can read about my early days of teaching at UWE in this published paper or in this archive and watch a more recent short video piece of me talking about my approach. In this part of my blog, I will be posting about the interesting things that my graduates are up to.

Database narrative

July 23, 2014Uncategorized, Voices from the Blue Nilejudithaston

I have been working with the Oxford Anthropologist, Professor Wendy James on her long term ethnographic archive from the southern part of the Sudan for a number of years. Our collaboration began as part of my PhD studies in interactive documentary and has grown from there into an ambitious plan to narrate the archive. Our first outcome was a website to support her most recent book about her fieldwork, which was published in 2007, and there is a peer reviewed paper available on-line about our subsequent work.

I have presented our wider ideas about database narrative and the cultural transmission of memory at a number of international conferences and have also written several further articles about our work. Some of these are as a single author, some are written with Wendy, and others with Paul Matthews who has been working with us on the computing side of things. For more information about this work, with the full text of my thesis and links to my publications, please go to my AcademiaEdu pages.

This project is currently on hold, due to the political situation in the region and my own wider business. Wendy is, however, still active as a Sudan specialist and I am building skills which will be applicable to this work as and when the time is right.

Filmmaking as a ‘wraparound’ process

July 17, 2014I Am Orion, Uncategorizedjudithaston

Last autumn, I worked as academic partner on a Future Documentary Sandbox project with artist filmmaker, Jeanie Finlay. We came up with a new term to describe the approach we developed towards her forthcoming feature film – ‘wraparound filmmaking’.

You can read more about this on the I am Orion Future Documentary blog that documents our process and on the new Orion: the movie website that embodies this approach.

My new blog

July 17, 2014General thoughts, Uncategorizedjudithaston

I have finally taken the plunge and set up a blog as a place to document my various excursions into 21st Filmmaking.

I am a Senior Lecturer in the Creative Industries Department at the University of the West of England in Bristol, coming out of a professional background in film, interaction design and anthropology. My role here is to introduce our Filmmaking students to the world of experience design and to inspire them to think about new contexts for their moving image work. As a key part of this, I also maintain my own practice-led research and professional practice.

My current project is to create a cinematic setting for a live performance of Beethoven’s 15th String Quartet. This is with the wonderful Sacconi Quartet for the Bristol Proms 2014: http://www.bristololdvic.org.uk/bristolproms2014.html#SACCONI. I am also Co-Founder and Co-Director of the interactive documentary community i-docs.org and Executive Producer of the Russian Winter live multimedia show.

I shall be documenting my process and thoughts on a reasonably regular basis. I hope you enjoy what I have to say.