Following on from our Open Class in Creative Activism, we’ve decided to think about how we can use some of the working practices we developed to explore other areas on our curriculum.

So this October we are launching the ‘Cine Collective‘- which is an Open Undergraduate Class exploring and experimenting with Digital Cinematography.

Over the course of 10 weeks we will be looking at a variety of approaches to studying, practicing and interrogating cinematography. Alongside this, the participants on the course will work on a series of cinematic responses to weekly creative briefs- that will contribute to form a showreel of work by the end of the class. Students are asked to openly post their response to each task to our community.

It’s an exciting time for ‘Open Teaching’ in Film, with a number of organisations and universities opening up their doors and helping to change the way that education is structured in the 21st Century. Surely it won’t be long until there is a very real prospect of undertaking a truly ‘distributed’ degree- choosing the best and most appropriate courses from around the world, to create some kind of educational playlist. There’s a lot of potential here for something truly digital, and radical, to emerge.  It’s really exciting to see projects such as the Peer 2 Peer University, Coursera, OERU and Mozilla’s Open Badges gaining momentum in this area- each taking a different approach and model to rethinking education.

In the meantime here are a few other open classes that you might want to explore next academic year….

“Open Source Culture” taught by Mark Tribe (@marktribe on Twitter) Brown University

“Digital Storytelling -DS106″ taught by Alan Levine et al (@cogdog on Twitter) University of Mary Washington

“Guerilla Film Marketing” taught by Randy Finch (@randyfinch on Twitter) Florida State Uni

“Building StoryWorlds: the art, craft and biz of storytelling in 21c” taught by Lance Weiler (@lanceweiler on Twitter) Columbia University

“Digital Media and Participatory Culture” taught by Melanie E.S. Kohnen, Ph.D (@_mesk on Twitter) Georgia Tech

“The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound and Color” taught by Scott Higgins at Wesleyan University

“The Camera Never Lies ” taught by Emmett Sullivan at Royal Holloway, London University

(List originally published by Sheri Candler on The Film Collaborative)

The Post-Secret State: Openness and Transparency in the Era of Gov 2.0 from Peter Woodbridge on Vimeo.

‘The Post-Secret State: Openness and Transparency in the Era of Gov 2.0’ (co-authored with Clare Birchall and Gary Hall)  is published in a new journal called Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, alongside an essay, ‘How to Do Justice to Media Specificity: or, Should This Video Be Left to Speak for Itself?’.

Find out more about Liquid Theory TV 

A few glimpses of some of the work we have shot so far for the feature film I’m currently writing and directing:

‘Latitude’ tells the story of two technology fanatics whose lives are about to change, a tiny little bit, as they descend into a bizarre reality in their geeky hunt to find the world’s ultimate technology, which they believe is hidden in a game called Geocaching.

It is currently in production in the UK and USA, so this is an early look just to give you an idea of what we’ve been up to on this ultra-micro budget feature film that deals with issues around technology, obsession, reality, sanity and control.

The aim of the film is to take a critical look at technological determinism and to challenge some of the conventional logic and common sense that surrounds digital utopianism. Many of the themes in the film are drawn from some of my concerns around the digital: surveillance and control, illusions of freedom, information overload, technological fetishism etc that I have been observing everyday in my own, and other peoples, lives.

The other less pretentious aim for the film is to see if we can do it on such a low budget and to learn from our mistakes along the way.

Stay tuned for updates as the film progresses. We will also do another trailer once we get closer to releasing the movie, alongside a ‘Making of…’ to show how we made this feature film for next to nothing. And as ‘The Medium is the Message’ – we also plan to distribute the film in a number of experimental and open ways- further exploring some of the ideas and themes that the film is trying to tackle.

Starring – Jonathan Leinmuller, Andy McGillan, Christopher Dunne, Rachel Adams and Josh Ubaldi.

Production – Peter Woodbridge, Mick Le Mare, Rebecca Pittam, Richard Neal, Jake Humbles, Ross Varney, Adam Davies, Sam Soane, Alex Hacking, James Colley, Suzi Globe and many many more marvellous people who have helped us along the way.

Music used – ‘Reversed Reality – Igor Dvorkin, ‘City Streets’ – David Michael, ‘Wilderness’ – Philip Guyler available at audionetwork.com/

Find out more about Latitude at http://www.latitudethemovie.com
Follow us at http://www.facebook.com/LatitudeMovie and http://twitter.com/#!/latitudemovie

Or better still send me an email – first name @latitudethemovie.com to find out more

You can now access all of the content from the Creative Activism class in iTunes U.

This includes lecture notes, podcasts, videos and all of the tasks from the course.

Please visit the Creative Activism Class in iTunes U to subscribe to the class.

Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life — with life understood both philosophically and biologically — which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life such as air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals. Taken together, they constitute an engaging interdisciplinary resource for researching and teaching relevant science issues across the humanities, a resource that is capable of enhancing the intellectual and pedagogic experience of working with open access materials.

All the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research — along with interactive maps, visualisations, podcasts and audio-visual material — into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus engaged in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad. The book that I worked on, along with Janneke Adema, explored the way that concepts and ideas around the theme of Symbiosis can be applied to a number of areas within the (digital/networked) humanities.

Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions: Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent. Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and published by Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org).  The Editors of the series are Clare Birchall (University of Kent), Gary Hall (Coventry University), Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London). Other members of the project team include Sigi Jőttkandt (Open Humanities Press), David Ottina (Open Humanities Press) and myself (Coventry University).