Learning on ScreenOpening the Window on Shakespeare’s Biggest Classroom
On the 2 July 2012, I, Cinna was streamed live to schools across the UK (via service provider Janet) as part of a live event which included a studio discussion between I, Cinna director and writer Tim Crouch, actor Jude Owusu, and children’s author Malorie Blackman. Watched by 9,000 children it received positive feedback from teachers who reported that the event was not just beneficial to learning but had also been extremely enjoyable.
Teachers around the UK expressed a strong interest in future projects. For the RSC Education team it had been a hugely ambitious project that meant they were grappling not just with developing an interactive online platform, but also filming a production on location with students in all the lead creative roles working alongside professional artist Tim Crouch.
© Jamie Morris / Ravensbourne College
In January 2012, Gregory Doran was appointed as the RSC’s new Artistic Director. One of his first innovations was to develop the RSC Live from Stratford broadcasts whereby productions of RSC plays are streamed live into UK Cinemas. Over the next six years this footage will provide RSC Education with high quality film recordings of every play in the Shakespeare canon. The first of these, David Tennant’s Richard II, was broadcast in 2013, and RSC Education once again invited Ravensbourne to be partners in the creation of their schools broadcast. Two Ravensbourne students, Jon Lambert and Sean Mhemet, were keen to enhance the experience of the previous broadcast and began to develop an interactive platform that was more effective at fulfilling the original aim of enabling everyone participating in the broadcasts to feel like they were in the same room together. They created a new microsite and web interface for the live studio Q and A:
‘The students replicated standard industry practice by producing iterated wireframes and proto-type sites, as well as attending client meetings with the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon. Feedback from in house designers at the RSC was integrated into the site production, again replicating standard industry practice until the final site design was agreed upon. The site was a flat, full-width, single page design that echoed extremely fashionable ‘infinite parallax scrolling’ genre. It was a commendable example of contemporary web design, visually equal to the best commercial productions of the time.’[vii]
On the 15th November the new technology went live. As David Tennant and Gregory Doran were arriving in the studio, students began to submit questions to them via the web. These appeared as a ticker stream in a control room where RSC staff selected key questions and fed them through to Konnie Huq in the studio, trying to ensure a varied selection of questions from each of the participating schools. The studio event was run by 15 students from Ravensbourne’s Broadcast courses:
‘Multiple cameras were used in the studio, giving a number of budding camera operators the opportunity to put their skills into practice. Live sound was key, giving students in this area a similar opportunity, with lighting also an important consideration. The studio feeds were mixed in Ravensbourne’s state of the art control room, where students developing this skills set were able to engage in vision mixing and ensure the quality of the delivery, as well as adding graphic to the feed where necessary. A dedicated team ensured that the video was encoded and delivered via the Internet in a reliable, and high-quality form, which will be an increasingly important mechanism for TV in the coming decades.’[viii]
