Future Creatives - LBWF
Supporting the next generation of digital content creators
With in-person entertainment at a standstill over the last 12 months, we’ve looked for new ways of expressing creativity and contributing to the community. At Sova Audio, we’re always keen to support the next generation of technicians and creatives. When the opportunity to collaborate with Waltham Forest Council for the Future Creatives: Digital Content Creations came up, we jumped at the chance. This project was supported by Arts Council England’s Culture Recovery Fund.
Future Creatives was a four-week course, designed to help people understand content creation and how to disseminate information for this new virtual world that we’re living in.
The course is one of a series of youth focused creative careers programmes that evolved from the Waltham Forest London Borough of Culture 2019. These programmes are designed to help underrepresented young people ages 16-25 years to build the experience, skills and networks that are vital to navigating and influencing the creative, start up, tech and green industries.
Our role as a local partner was to deliver a week of practical content creation workshops, covering subjects such as live streaming, videography, photography, audio engineering, editing and reformatting for multiple channels.
As the pandemic locked down our typical work in creative events, we transformed our HQ and turned our attention to content creation, live streaming and studio-based work. Studio Sova was born – providing a platform for artists to express, create, exchange skills, ideas and network.
Each day of the Digital Content Creations course welcomed five new students, who formed a collective and responded to a brief set by CRATE. CRATE BOOST:ED is business support platform for 16-24 year olds that connects small and growing businesses with high-quality digital and in-person information, support and guidance.
Mornings were spent getting to the core of the need for content before diving into the production work in the afternoon. Each project was assessed on its innovation, sustainability, impact, implementation and presentation credentials.
Projects varied from day to day, but the overriding sentiment from participants was about the positive impact of the course.
Simon Tawfic, an anthropologist who’s writing a PhD on homelessness, explained: “I think that my research is really important. The problem is, no one is really going to be interested in my research outside of the university if it’s just academic papers. So, I came to Sova Audio in order to understand how to present my work in a way that they will appreciate, not in 20 pages of text.
“It’s been a big inspiration talking to the people here, as it has helped me understand how to challenge the boundaries of representation. I've learned that you don’t necessarily need to stick to a particular genre of representation and I’m quite inspired to do something else after this course.”
Singer and multi-instrumentalist Lauryn Miller commented: “I plan on making my YouTube bigger, so learning about lighting, video and audio techniques has definitely been very helpful for me.”
Course participant Xavier Duchen said: “I am developing my Instagram platform. After this course, I have a stronger idea of where I want to go with it and how to take it to the level!”