It all looked pretty quiet on Weymouth beech yesterday as you can see - some crows keeping an eye on the Punch and Judy stand, but with Olympic Torch Relay coming to Bristol next week the London 2012 Games seem much closer and more real! In a few weeks time this scene will be transformed!

Plans for the #media2012 media camps at Weymouth during the summer are coming along well and RELAYS-at-Watershed joined colleagues yesterday for a meeting at what will be the lovely HQ for the young citizen journalists in the summer - it's right in the middle of the town and near the sea!

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We've been to report on the fantastic Bristol Festival of School Sport, put togther by our RELAYS friends at Bristol University - 1,300 plus school children, many who don't do any sport in or out of school, visited Bristol University's Sports Complex to try out a really wide range of sporting activities - and they had loads of fun! See the separate blog here.

We thought it was time for our team of young citizen journalists to see what the competition was like - and see if we could pick up a few tips on interview techniques. The BBC Outreach department arranged tours for two groups for our City of Bristol College students this afternoon.

Before the tour Matthew Pick who's worked in radio and television sports reporting for many years, described different types of interviews - from vox-pops to the more extended and in-depth interview - and talked about how to put people at ease, how to stop yourself from feeling nervous, and what to do if things get too troublesome - leave! No heriocs, personal safety comes before everything. He also recalled lessons he'd learnt early in his career such as keeping the length of questions under control!

Our tour guides, Pippa (Broadcast Assistant for Radio Bristol) and Alex (a Floor Manager for Points West) took us to the Points West news room, a Radio Bristol studio, one of the Natural History Unit's post production suites and to the Points West Studio, explaining all the processes that took place in each location. We learned about the NHU cameras that can film at 10,000 frames a second; how the BBC makes measured and responsible decisions about all aspects of its work since it's accountable to the licence fee payers; and how stressful it can be working on the news! We were surprised to learn that the weather presenters not only have to remember all their facts and figures with no autocue, but may also be asked to extend or reduce their slot by several minutes depending on the news content of the day!

Our final stop was a small multi-purpose studio complete with greenscreen, cameras, mixing desk and autocues where we were invited to create a radio drama (Hammer Horror style production script provided) with spot and pre-recorded sound effects, and then a news broadcast, including sport and weather. Everyone in the team got to take on a role either as performers or presenters, or in production - crunching boots in cat-litter and flapping rubber gloves to provide ominous sound effects for the drama or operating the autocue for the news and sport readers or vision mixing.

Many thanks to Jo Sunderland and Dayna Ambris in the Outreach department, Matthew Pick for the talk on interviewing and Pippa and Alex our guides who provided us with such in-depth information and good stories! We'll be putting this new knowledge into practice as we prepare for our visit to the London 2012 Olympic sailing events in Weymouth!

Some of the students from our City of Bristol College Media group who had worked on the Oktoberfest project have taken part in further citizen journalism activity at Bath University. We'd worked with Dr Emma RIch on previous projects and she and some of her colleagues in the Department of Education at Bath Universtiy have a research project that is investigating barriers to young people participating in sport. For this particular project, leading up to the Paralympic Games the focus was on disabilty and sport.

The City of Bristol College team were led once again by tutor Sacha Butterworth and guided by David Goldblatt over a 2 day visit to the Sports Village at Bath University where access to training facilities and interviews with top athletes had been arranged with the help of RELAYS colleagues Matthew Swindells (who provided the photos here - thanks Matt!) and Greg Sharpe.

The students created a blog of their visit and with mentoring from Sacha have also made a film which will be completed early in 2012 and screened at Watershed.

The students seemed to have got a lot out of the experience and after interviewing the silver medal winning Paralymic runner Ben Rushgrove, one of our young journalists posted the following comment on the blog:

Not only was Ben inspiring but also visiting the campus itself which is filled with sports men and women who are also dedicated to their training, personally made me want to take up a sport and I will most definitely be watching the paralympics.

You can see the students' blog here and we'll post news on progress with the film, meanwhile you can see some of the young filmmakers in action in these photos by Sacha!

 

Final session with our citizen journalist team from City of Bristol College and David Goldblatt today - they came to Cinema 3 at Watershed so we could look at the blogs on the big screen together and discuss the work they'd uploaded - the photos, videos and audio interviews and a few text posts. Mobile phone cameras might have some limitations but they managed to capture some great still and moving images, and some intriguing atmospheric audio and interviews.

We always aim to get feedback from participants we work with at Watershed so we can develop and refine our projects; as this is still only our third venture into citizen journalism it's especially important. Joining us for the session with their own research questions were RELAYS colleague Matthew Swindells from UWE and our project  collaborator (and phone-loaner!) Dr Emma Rich from Bath University

We got some really useful responses from our students at this session that included practical concerns (like the frustrations of typing more than a few words on a touch-screen keypad and the difficulties of photographing high speed cyclists on a gloomy path in the woods) to valuable suggestions about the structure of the training sessions  - such as having more hands-on time with the phones before going live with the blogging, and being shown more examples of blogs for reference at the start of the project. Many felt they'd been 'thrown in at the deep-end' - a good place to start as a potential journalist maintains David Goldblatt (who should know!) but then a number of them also said they'd learnt a lot. Of course we recognise that people do learn in different ways so we'll adapt and evolve as we move on with the project.

A good number of the students were enthusiastic about the possibility of joining us at Weymouth next year for covering the range of activities that will be going on there from July to September - from Olympic Sailing to the Battle for the Winds, we're planning the trip already!

The 'run-and-jump-on-your-bike' start to the 4 hour race at the Ashton Court Oktoberfest

It's taken four half-days, lots of research, some juggling of phone apps and practice with interviews to get ready for reporting on the live event we'd lined up - the Ritchie Oktoberest - a mountain bike competition at Bristol's much loved and adaptable open space, Ashton Court - an interesting contrast to our trip to Stokes Croft!

We thought there may be a few hardy enthusiasts at the event, but were surprised at the scale - it was heaving with bikes with over a 1000 riders, and plenty of 'sideshows' for the team to profile through interviews and photos in addition to following the cyclists on parts of their gruelling 4 or 8 hour routes.

Only 8 students were able to come but the weather was great and everyone seemed pretty relaxed so it was a good environment to put into practice what they'd been learning over the last couple of weeks.

The students got an interview with Tommy Curtis, co-founder of Watershed's Cyclescreen; he's not a muddy-wheels man but came along to the event to see how the other half relax!

Matthew Swindells, RELAYS colleague from UWE, has worked with us on our 2 previous citizen journalism projects. He's a keen cyclist too and joined us once again, offering some bike-focused insights and suggestions of people  the students could interview.

The only downside to the day was the lack of mobile network coverage, and although there was an Open Wi-Fi network with 'good' signal, it didn't seem to work! So live coverage didn't happen, much! Posts just got stacked up on the phones and finally sent once we left Ashton Court.

You can see the four blogs the students created here Oktoberfest-i, Oktoberfest-ii, Oktoberfest-iii and Oktoberfest-iv.

We'll be having our last session of this third citizen journalism project on Friday 21st October for a de-brief with the students so there'll be a final post on that here soon after to report on what we've learnt and what we'll add, remove or amend before the next one - yet to be planned but we hope to do one or more further trials before the Weymouth Olympics next year.

 

We were given a really good insight into the world of Stoke's Croft by our varied hosts whose enthusiasm and committment are what's driven the area from being a dismal set of run-down buildings into a vibrant, creative centre. If you don't know this part of Bristol go and experience it - now's a good time as the Bearpit outdoor gallery has just opened, Unputdownable - Bristol's new Festival of Literature has begun and in half-term week there's a Big Draw event on at Hamilton House on 29th, and lots of other stuff bubbling up in places like Cafe Kino and Number 51,

Thanks to Kate Bauer for introducing us to and allowing us to use the Museum of Stokes Croft as our base for the day; Chris Chalkley, People's Republic of Stokes Croft who opened a few eyes and minds to some major truths and also took us to the PRSC yard and workshop where we saw murals being completed  for the Bearpit show and a heap of ceramics being 're-purposed'; Lady Nade - (regular gigs at The Canteen and other nearby venues), Becks and Brendan from Coexist who guided us round the creative warren of Hamilton House; Jack from Eudaimon who explained the vertical garden design they're working on at the junction of City Road and Stoke's Croft and to Jari Moate who even took time out of the first day of Unputdownable - a project that's kept him pretty busy lately! Finally, thanks to David Goldblatt for sorting out this great collection of people for us to meet.

 

A vertical urban garden design, a sprung dancefloor, Bristol's first literature festival, more street art than you can shake a paintbrush at, a community kitchen, local and seasonal food, adapted ceramics and a collection of lovingly curated fake memories; these are some of the objects, concepts and topics our student citizen journalists have been exposed to today as part of the training for the live blogging they'll be doing next week at Oktoberfest. Here in Stokes Croft they've had the chance to visit a wide range of locations, record photos, videos and audio and practice interviewing.

In this video Chris Chalkley of the People's Republic of Stoke's Croft explains to our team why drinking locally brewed beer is one small choice that can contribute to making a big difference, and, that not making choices and doing nothing is just not an option.

 

As with the previous citizen journalism projects we've done David Goldblatt led the sessions - the emphasis this time has been on researching the subject in greater depth and learning how to develop a rapport with potential interviewees - find out enough about the topic to make the expert biker feel at ease and sense that you are interested in what they have to say; prepare some good questions, but remember to respond to their answers not just go on to the next question.

Mike the Bike - a mountain-biking fanatic and friend of David's kindly agreed to come along to one of the sessions with his bike so the students could try out some of their newly acquired interview techniques and others did a phone interview with Paul, the organiser of the Bike Festival who works in a Bristol bike shop.

Four teams of students were set the task of creating a 'Rough Guide' blog to Millennium Square where writing skills and technical aspects of the phones were tested and adjusted. We'll be fine-tuning the technology, writing and visual skills tomorrow when David is leading us to some meet some notable characters and intriguing places in Stokes Croft as a test-run for Saturday's bicycling Oktoberfest.

The 'making-of' the students' Rough Guide to Millennium Square

Summer's gone - and come back again, and we've been preparing our next batch of citizen journalists for the task of live reporting on the Oktoberfest mountain-bike competition / festival this weekend in Bristol using Android smartphones, kindly loaned by Emma Rich as part of a research project we're collaborating on.

Last week we ran 3 intensive training sessions with 22 media students from City of Bristol College who are doing the BTEC Extended Diploma in Creative Media Production with their fantastic tutors Sasha Butterworth and Elisha Wyatt. Sessions took place at Watershed, City of Bristol College and the Pervasive Media Studio