Syzygy Workshops

A Shared History, A Shared Future
With Birmingham Library Services, JHD Media and Jonothan Lee
August - November 2007

Working with primary and secondary school pupils to create audio-visual performances using VJamm Pro, exploring the nature and extent of slavery in the modern world and the history of slavery.
During these course we film short clips and make animations with the pupils to create an individual performance piece for each group, as well as using a pre-existing library of video and audio clips.
These courses were run as part of the "A Shared History, A Shared Future" programme run by Birmingham Library services during 2007 as part of the bicentenial celebrations of the outlawing of slavery

Pop Goes the Filmmaker
With Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton ArtForum and Mediabox
July/August 2007

A 2 week intensive experimental film making course. This course examined Pop Art, using Wolverhampton Art Galleries Pop Art exhibitions as an inspiration and starting point for individuals in the group to create short experimental films, set to music, that were also VJ'd in an exhibition event at the Gallery.

BBC Blast
June 2007

A single day workshop in which 16-19 year olds could explore greenscreen technology and make short video clips with themselves using the greenscreen, to explore how modern films mix actors and CGI to create scenes.

Barnardos Youth Group
May - November 2007

A course in film making with a group of around 30 young people (age range of 9-17), with 6 sessions over 7 months to teach them to film, edit and post-produce their video, by creating a trailer for a superhero film. This course teaches digital filming and editing processes, greenscreen and special effects processes as well as giving a general overview of the nature of producing a film.

Greenscreen workshops
December 2006 - March 2007
With DynamicsArts

A number of single session workshops at different youth centres across the West Midlands area, running our greenscreen special effects workshop.

BBC Blast
September 2006

A single day session, running our Taster VJ Workshop.

Taster VJ Workshops
July/August 2006
With DynamicsArts

A number of single session workshops at different youth centres across the West Midlands area, running our Taster VJ workshop

Pix'N'Mix
November/December 2005
With Channel4 IdeasFactory, VJS.Net, BrightonArts and Vivid

Pixnmix was an educational project with 19 Students. The students each attended a week of tutorials on Video Camera work (done by Vivid), After Effects (Vivid, BrightonArts and Syzygy) and VJamm (Syzygy).
The students then had 14 days to create a VJ performance lasting a total of 40 minutes, with assistance from Syzygy and Vivid.
The performance took place in December 2005 in the Theatre Space at the Custard Factory.
Video clips created during this project were released under a creative commons licence by Channel4 IdeasFactory online at: pixnmix

AVITuk
Jan 2003 - April 2005

Syzygy played a central role in the development of an educational programme for AVITUK, a VJ festival with educational seminars, performances and exhibitions. Events took place in October 2003 in Brighton and April 2005 in Birmingham.
Thomas Holness was in charge of curating the educational programme for both events, and also gave talks on VJ hardware setups in 2003 and Music Theory for VJs in 2005.

Taster VJ Workshops
Dec 2004/Jan 2005
With DynamicsArts

A number of single session workshops at different youth centres across the West Midlands area, running our Taster VJ workshop

VJing Democracy
Sept/Oct 2004
With DynamicsArts and THEpUBLIC

VJing Democracy was a one week project organised with THEpUBLIC and DynamicsArts, working with a group of young (16-25) year olds who had previously been homeless or in prison and were rehoused as part of a project to help them to rejoin society.
The project focused on how they connected with local government in their area (or didn't as the case was) and what problems there were in the housing estate and project that they felt the local council should be more concerned with.
The project finished with an audio-visual piece, with both the audio and video created by the young people, that expressed their feelings about their life, the area they were living in and local government.

Taster VJ Workshops
July 2003 - August 2004
With DynamicsArts, St Basils and Barnardos

A number of single session workshops at different youth centres across the West Midlands area, running our Taster VJ workshop.