• BBC – Viewfinder: No more bright sunny days – The end of Kodachrome – a sad day. In this blog entry Phil Coombes captures something of the magic of using 35mm film – now all but lost in the millions of pixels captured with every shot.

• Short films saved for posterity – I an similar move the digital stories made in the BBC English Regions project “Telling Lives” were handed to the National Media Museum In Bradford. Over 350 stories were told by BBC listeners and viewers in workshops held between 2003 and 2005. Many of them are still accessible on the BBC Website
  I was exec producer of Telling Lives which ran in parallel with the BBC Capture Wales project. My teams were trained by the team in Wales with excellent results.

Digital Storytelling

Ingenious Workshops

The first workshops funded by the Ingenious Fund of the Royal Society of Engineering have been scheduled.

The first is for Railway Engineers at the National Railway Museum in York. The digital storytelling workshop will be held at the museum on three Wednesdays. February 4th & 11th with a final day on March 4th.

The workshop is free and open to professional railway engineers with a story to tell. It’s hoped the stories will raise public awareness of the work of engineers and inspire a new generation of professionals to consider the career. Download a flyer here.

The second is for Broadcast Engineers at the National Media Museum in Bradford on three Mondays. February 9th, 16th and 23rd.

The third is to be held in Southampton on March 31st, April 21st &28th. More details soon.

The completed stories will be displayed at Science and Engineering Fairs  and considered by the BBC for publication on their websites.

I am running these workshops in partnership with the University of Salford and the University of Southampton.

For more details and a booking form contact Dr Zoe Stec. L.Z.Stec@salford.ac.uk

This is the main festival in the UK and it’s well worth booking. It’s cheap too. I’ll be there along with many of my former BBC colleagues from Capture Wales. If you have any interest in Digital Storytelling you’ll  find lots of inspiration, resources and advice. I understand that Thursday focuses on the academic work going on around digital storytelling whilst Friday is more about the practical work and the projects that are running in Wales.

The Arts Centre is on the campus of Aberystwyth University. If you’re going the cheapest and nearest place to stay is on campus. Book through the Conference Office.

This story was inspired by a battery from the magic story bag

I loved electricity. Fascinated by the way a bulb lit, a motor turned, a radio played music and how a battery stored power.

My bedroom was littered with wires, bulbholders, battery clips and bits of old radios.

I suppose I was about 14 when TV replaced the radio in our house. So I fitted the old radio into a cupboard which I called my “shack”. There I listened to distant stations on headphones. It was a Cossor in a wooden box with glowing valves in the back and an orange dial on the front. Hilversum, London, Luxembourg, Light, Home and Third – radio stations illuminated by small bulbs and tuned by the black dial needle with a slow motion drive. 

It’s no surprise that 40 years later when I left the BBC I had spent most of my life in broadcasting. As a technician and a broadcaster I always said – whatever I was doing at the time – “I have the best job in the world,” and I still have.