Showcomotion: The Children’s Media Conference

Showcomotion, the children’s media conference, was held in Sheffield last week at the Showroom Cinema and as part of the wider Showcomotion Young People’s Film Festival. The theme this year was TheirSpace; the media space that young people live and operate, covering broadly the areas of television, social media and gaming, but particularly coming from the TV side in terms of the audience.

It was a packed couple of days, with parallel sessions held in the cinema’s four screens, which provided a well equipped and comfortable environment for the conference. To kick off there was a wide ranging discussion of the current state of play, covering the current challenges arising from the review of PSB funding through to the policy side touching on the Children’s Plan and the Byron Review. It was great to see a couple of young people on the panel brining the experiences to the discussion.

The highlights for me included the session on ‘Thinking out of the box’ where Maurice Wheeler of Digital Outlook delivered a slick presentation on the challenges for brand when the audience is fragmented across many media platforms. There was also a great presentation laying out how todays digital natives use media, making the point that to young people, media is seen as one continuum of interaction and the boundaries we place between real life, texting, social media, TV and so on are boundaries that just aren’t perceived by those who have grown up with the technology.

I also caught up with Michael Smith of Mind Candy, the company that produces the excellent Alternate Reality Game Perplex City, and which is now trying to take Neopets on with its Moshimonsters site. Michael again emphasised this blurring of lines, with examples of offline/online crossover through the use of toy purchases to drive site subscriptions through the use of unlocking codes. My favorite example, which I must check out, was the Pixiehollow bracelet which allows wearers to connect through touching two bracelets together, and then when ‘docked’ in the jewelery box, connected to the internet and also made the friend connection in the online social space.

In the afternoon there was a fantastic session which included  the latest from Lego, which has to be one of the most innovative toy companies when it comes to online. Their exploitation of the ‘long tail‘ of Lego modeling through their bespoke Lego Factory service which lets you design your own model and have it shipped to you had already impressed me, but Sophie Patrikios was there to talk about the imminent launch of their Lego MMORPG, with naturally a heavy focus on user generated content. Her list of unanswered questions (hopefully her slides will appear soon) for companies working within the children’s media space should be uppermost in the minds of everyone working in this field and demonstrated the high level of corporate responsibility that Lego builds into its projects.

To round off the first day I managed to catch Cuan MacConghall talking about his ‘On the Block’ documentary for RTE. His approach of empowering young people to create their own participatory content through the use of film clubs to build skills and then letting them loose to film themselves, and his acceptance of the need for a year long project to get the material needed, was not only inspiring but also something we can be applied to many approaches to peer-to-peer information sharing.

The second day was a shorter affair with the main session of interest being on social media which showcased CBBC’s first forays into this space. It was interesting to understand the pressure that the CBBC works under to absolutely ensure safety online, which comes from the trust parents place in the brand  resulting in considerably less parental oversight. Their first 3D virtual world - Adventure Rock - is a single player only experience focusing on user generated content which can be shared with other participants. The approaches to interaction, such as restricting communication to presets, mean that there are many constraints but the risks are greatly reduced. Important points were made that very young children want only to socialise with friends they know in the real world, but by the age of around 11 kids are starting to expand beyond this to make online only friends through shared interests.

Overall the conference was very positive and well worth the two days. At times I wondered whether it would have benefitted from more input from new media people coming at video innovation from their side, as the TV crowd did seem to struggle at times to really break out of their world and truely innovate. However, that said, there were some great projects to hear about and I certainly intend to make it a regular date.