Make a Musical is  aimed at encouraging schools and colleges to undertake the performance as featured in the programme which also carries workshop footage for use by schools during production development.

Gamelab’s Martin Wright, the producer of I Know Me, said: “This feature has been tailor made for children with special educational needs. The music is great and really easy to sing-along to. We hope that schools with similar pupils to the cast will use this resource instead of reduced versions of traditional musicals, like Oliver.”

“The process of putting this project together has been very fulfilling and empowering for the cast, producers and most importantly we hope the audience.”

“I was particularly moved by one young man in the cast, who is severely autistic. He is normally very shy and doesn’t say too much. But as soon as the singing began he would completely transform.”

The original music for I Know Me has been composed, arranged and directed by Youth Music Theatre UK (YMT) composer Rebecca Applin and was devised with drama director Owen Smith working with pupils from: Abbey Hill School and Performance Arts College, Stoke on Trent;  Haringey Sixth Form Centre, London; College Park School, London

The programme will be transmitted on BBC2 on the morning of June 21^stat 4 am.

The programme will then be added to the online Learning Zone Broadband Class Clips database where they can be viewed on demand – bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips.

Phase 1 produced a proof of concept…See the uKinect page

In Phase 2, Gamelab, together with our partners Hassell Inclusion and Reflex Arc,  will further explore the use of Microsoft Kinect technology to produce games, training and support applications which help users to communicate and express their needs more naturally developing a prototype for both learners and those supporting them. Additional work will include:

• enable learners to show progress in their signing to help them achieve curriculum targets,
• creation of a new engine for minimising the cost of generating ‘sign recognisers’ to allow new sign recognition vocabularies to be created more quickly and cheaply;
• the inclusion of reference videos so signs which are new to the learner can be demonstrated
• addition of new gameplay techniques to allow the level of difficulty in the game to be personalised for the individual learner, and allow the learner to see how they are progressing in their learning and accuracy of signing;
• extending the target audience for this prototype to include students with autism and people whose communication has been limited by them having a stroke;
• creation of a ‘personalised gesture support communication system’ which could help a much larger cohort of learners whose limited use of their hands prevents them from signing, but who can make gestures consistently enough for such a system to provide a more efficient, capable interface than the ‘switches’ which currently constrain their interaction.

Visit the uKinect page for more detail.

more to follow…..

An highly experimental project, currently under development, that consists of a gesture-recognition communication system using Kinect and OpenFrameworks. The application will be ready in October 2011.

client -

www.uscreen.co.uk

A web space, founded by the UK Film Council as part of the 2012 fundings, where aspiring filmmakers can share videos they create, learn about the art of film making and form a social network among other film makers and mentors.

Gamelab developed three ground-breaking applications: a real-time collaborative online video editor; a 3D storyboarding application; a video player that allows for user-generated features such as subtitles, audio description and synchronous video commentary to uploaded videos.

The social site is officially launching in September 2011 and it has been chosen to be part of the Cultural Olympiad 2012.