ELVSS13 – State of Being

The ELVSS collaboration/community of practice is now in it’s 3^rd year. Since #ELVSS12’s excursion into internationally collaborative mobile filmmaking on the topic of global sustainability, we’ve taken a different turn – and the community has extended as we’ve now welcomed the University of Bogota (Colombia) into the mix.

This year (#ELVSS13), over 100 learners from the UK (Salford), New Zealand, Colombia and France were brought together to further explore creative practice through mobile filmmaking.

Their brief?

To work in international teams in order to co-create the visual backdrop for Warwick Blair’s 8-act opera which was premiered at the Tete-a-Tete Festival at the Hammersmith Riverside in London:

“State of Being is an inspiring, sometimes harrowing, journey through the human psyche. The opera presents a powerful series of emotional states of being that depict an individual’s struggle for survival and redemption. The opera interpolates live and recorded music with video and theatre to produce a compelling synaesthetic experience.”

In order to produce the video element, the learners were divided into 8 teams, and once again had to negotiate not only time and space, but also a challenging creative brief. Each team was assigned an act and given the ‘soundtrack’ with a one-word descriptor (real right-brain stuff). They then had to produce the visual backdrop for their act, entirely filmed and edited on mobile devices.

This meant that learners from across disciplines and cultures had to negotiate not only the creative process, but also meaning, e.g. What is truth? How can we represent truth visually? As you can imagine, this is extremely challenging not only from a organisational/temporal perspective (as we had even more timezones to deal with this time around), but even more so from an aesthetic perspective.

As with #ELVSS12, the process was exhilarating, scary, frustrating and at times quite painful – but WE DID IT! Warwick Blair’s State of Being was premiered in August, accompanied by a stunning visual backdrop that had been co-created by over 100 students from across the globe. Congratulations to all involved!

You can see the final output here.