PP1 labs

Contents 1 outline 2 what 2.1 Lab 1: Control 2.2 Lab 2: Time 3 how

outline

In PP1 Labs students work on two small-scale media production projects in response to specific themes, each project produced within a six-week block during the semester. The Labs are driven via lectures, tutorials and independent group-work.

Student groups research, develop, produce and deliver ‘rapid-response’ small-scale media projects. This is an exercise in advanced collaborative media practise; in grappling with sophisticated ideas through innovative media production. There is great freedom for each group in determining the form of their project, within the parameters outlined below.

Students are put together in small groups, selected at random, for each of the Labs. Thus each student will work in two different Lab groups across the semester. In terms of collaboration, this process of random selection and group formation and dissolution each six weeks has a number of advantages:

• it enables students to forge new working relationships with their peers
• it avoids anxieties for students that may be caused by jostling to work with friends, being excluded, etc
• it saves valuable time negotiating group formation
• it models real-world working environments in which workers rarely have the capacity to choose everyone they work with

what

Each Lab has a specific theme which links media practice with theoretical considerations. In 2008 these themes were ’Control’ and ‘Time’ and were related to study of the Henry Jenkins book, Convergence Culture.

Lab 1: Control

Projects are produced for delivery to an online media space called The Control Room:

The Control Room…

The Control Room presents conceptual, highly creative and experimental projects made by and for media students. 
It’s about exploring ideas through quick, fresh, convergent media in the form of sketches, pilots, prototypes and stand-alone 
media bites.

In The Control Room we’re dedicated to developing innovative ways of connecting and interacting with audiences and users – 
re-examining the hierarchies inherent in the processes and tools of media production - and 
looking at media objects within broader systems of ideological dominance.

Our subject matter is all about control – or lack of it!

The Control Room is part of PP1 which is committed to preparing students for the ‘real world’ of producing media 
in the twenty-first century.

Key questions to adress may include:

• How do listeners/viewers/users participate, interact or share ’’control’’ within what you make?
• How does what you may make sit within broader systems of ideological power and control - hegemony?
• How, within your production team, do you attempt to control the production process and to what extent is this desirable? How is creative control exercised/allocated/shared? What role, for example, might techniques of improvisation play?

Lab 2: Time

The media that we make in this program is all time-based. As a result, perhaps without thinking about it too specifically, we are always thinking about time. In this lab, we will making time the focus of the media project. Key questions may include:

• How does time structure the media you make ? – think of elements such as rhythm, pace, flow and fragmentation
• How do narratives unfold in time?
• How do we experience time? How effectively does memory capture time – human memory, machine memory, media memory?
• Can we design time? Are we (in our lives, and in our media making/consumption) ‘time poor’, or ‘time rich’? Is it possible to save/waste time? How do we juggle priorities?
• What is liminal time?

Projects are made for delivery to an online project space called time machines

time machines…

time machines examines the experience of time; its linearity, loops and 
repetitions; its capture into memory, both human and machine; its 
unfolding in narrative forms.  

It investigates the zeitgeist of this particular moment in history, what might be 
called the ‘hyper-moment’. What might it mean to live in a time when ‘to be is to blur’ 
(Mark Amerika); a time when, for example, ‘[t]he image is no longer given the time 
to become an image’ (Jean Baudrillard)?

time machines presents conceptual, highly creative and experimental projects made by 
and for media students, and delivered under the pressure of time. It’s about exploring 
ideas through quick, fresh, convergent media in the form of sketches, pilots, prototypes 
and stand-alone media bites.

The media we create – for screens and radio - is time-based. As a result, perhaps without 
thinking about it too specifically, we are always thinking about, and working with, time. 

time machines is part of PP1 which is committed to preparing students for the ‘real world’ of producing media in the twenty-first century.

how

Lab Project parameters:

• These projects are, by definition, ‘rapid-response’ workshop productions conceived and produced under the pressure of time – there is no time for angst or procrastination!
• Each project must be achievable within the highly constrained time and resources available. Depending on the type of project you conceive of, and the complexity of its production process, this may result in a project of fifteen seconds duration, or of several minutes.
• Projects can be ‘pilots’, ‘sketches’, experiments, fragments or prototypes for a larger hypothetical future project. However, the coherent logic of this needs to be outlined in the accompanying statement.
• It is up to each group to determine the form and nature of their project, be it audio/radio based, video based, documentary, drama, linear, non-linear, hypertextual, interactive, experimental, episodic, mobile-based, geospecific, or some hybrid of the above.
• Projects, particularly in the second Lab (‘Time’), need to demonstrate, in their form, approach and/or content (if these elements can be separated...) an engagement with ideas and theories put forward in Jenkins. Jenkins’ book challenges media professionals to confront and respond to diverse contemporary media making practices, tensions and issues, and consumer behaviour.