Passionfruit Magazine cover artwork time-lapse

Here's a quick video of the first part of the making of our cover artwork. More to come later in the week, hopefully.

And for those who'd like to know, the video is shot on an iPhone, using a great little app called iLapse. Music done one GarageBand by a Fraser Music student. Video editing on iMovie.

Semi-Permanent

Words of advice from Moffitt &Moffitt

It's been a week since the Auckland edition of Semi-Permanent, and if I take much longer to reflect on it the news will be stale!

About a month ago I attended an event at Wintec with ten of the Passionfruit Magazine crew, at which Simon Velvin, director of the Semi-Permanent creative conferences, spoke about his career to date. He also gave away a few tickets to the Auckland conference, two of which I won! This set in motion a trip up to Auckland, with five of us (two staff and three students) attending the conference.

Ron English in conversation with Radar (conference MC)

Semi-Permanent was two pretty intense days (made up of four 90min sessions, each with two different presentations), and by the end we were all pretty exhausted! Stand-out presentations included those from Ron English, Industrial Light Magic, Swifty, Special, and the rather dodgy lads from Stolen Girlfriends Club (I was glad the students I had with me were mature seniors and not Year 10's).

Next time we'll see what we can do to get along to some of the conference side events, for a chance to interact more directly with the various people who are part of Semi-Permanent. I have to admit that sometimes it felt like a lot of sitting and listening and watching (which isn't too bad when the people presenting are the visual effects art director for films like Rango), and a bit more hands on activity would have been great. Events like the three day intensive hand-made zine workshop with Swifty would have been fantastic to be part of.

UK-based designer Swifty showing work from the Yea Nah zine project run prior to Semi-Permanent Auckland 2012

The best part for me (from the Curriculum Integration Project side of things at least) was the chance for out students to be exposed to a whole range of potential futures for themselves in the 'creative industries'. I think it would be unrealistic to expect many of them to go on to have careers in magazine publishing, but I hope that being part of the project will at the very least open their eyes and minds up to a selection of futures that could become theirs. After all, that's a big part of what education is about isn't it?

Passionfruit - the web media wing

It feels like some real progress is being made with the magazine now.

The website is up and running (although constantly under refinement). We currently have three articles published to it, along with a few other links of interest.

www.passionfruitmagazine.co.nz

The Facebook page is also live, with just over 100 'Likes' and growing. Jessie-Lee, one of our students, is running the social media wing of the magazine as her main role in the project. She's been analysing the approaches taken by other visual and popular culture magazines, and is basing her strategy on what she has learned. There's a Pinterest page on the way too.

facebook.com/PassionfruitMagazine

It took some negotiation to get the students' access to social media (in particular Facebook) from within school, and there was a definite lifting of the mood when they were finally allowed access! Since the access has been granted it's been impressive to see how much more sharing of links to a whole range examples of visual culture there has been in our class Facebook Group, compared to when they only had access from home.

Passionfruit Magazine website goes live

If we're tracking progress against Doorley and Witthoff's emotional arc for a project, yesterday was a definite 'up' in that we (and by we, I mean web editor Lia Ellis and her team) got the magazine website all live and functional. Articles currently available feature designer Christian Pearce and photographer Mark Hamilton.

As a result of that I'm very proud to be able to let you know that the name of our magazine is Passionfruit, and you can find it online at http://www.passionfruitmagazine.co.nz/. There's also a Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/PassionfruitMagazine which we'd love you to 'Like'. A Pinterest for the project is also in development.

In reflecting on the progress to getting the website live, I want to acknowledge Lia's outstanding perseverance. She's worked through many obstacles in the site development, and refused to give up until she had a product that functioned the way she wanted it to. Of course there are a number of kinks that need to be ironed out, but I have all confidence that she will work through these too.

In conjunction with the web version of the magazine we'll be setting up a couple of online 3D galleries thanks to sponsorship from the good folks at Exhibbit - http://www.exhibbit.com. You can look forward to a gallery of our students' work, along with one of work by the artists we are writing about in the magazine.

Downs and Ups

If you've been reading this blog from a macro point of view you may have detected something of the ebb and flow of the project. In one of my earlier posts I mentioned the cycle of 'overwhelmed-ness' as a result of encountering new ideas, followed by a sense of accomplishment as a structure to incorporate the new ideas is developed, followed by the introduction of new ideas . . .

Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft describe a similar experience in their excellent book Make Space, based on their experiences with the Stanford University d.school. They outline (pg 176) an 'emotional arc' as moving through the following phases:  

Up - "A sense of excitement and limitless possibility" as the project begins
Down - "Overwhelming complexity" as the project's participants realise how much they've taken on
Up - "Unifying insights" as breakthroughs to solutions are achieved
Down - "Complete loss of confidence" during periods when it seems as if you won't achieve the goal
Down - "The brutal realities of implementation" as things take longer and cost more than you imagined
Up - "Completion"

At the end of last term we'd come to a bit of an impasse as a group, when it seemed that we had a short period of time to sell an unreasonably large amount of advertising to fund the printing of our project's magazine. Everyone (including me I have to admit) was pretty down in the mouth about it.

When we returned to school after the Easter break we took some time to review what we've achieved so far, and what we had left to complete. We also looked over the feedback that students had provided in the 'How I Learn Best' box and discussed how these suggestions could be facilitated (more structure; tasks broken down more; less things to do at once; more affirmation of successes, among other things). This morphed into a series of 'what if?' questions, which resulted in a small change of focus for the production side of the project (more web-based, less in print) and a request for some new quotes from the printers.

And now, to quote project member Jeremy Healey's in our Facebook Group

Well, everything is starting to come along. Things feel achievable now. Much better than last term.

And by the way, if you are interested in advertising in a magazine that targets young creatives (16 - 19 years) in New Zealand, please feel free to contact me (s.cunnane AT fraser.school.nz). Seriously!

Natural outsiders: Thinking about Jonah Lehrer's 'Imagine'

I've been making the most of my non-teaching time recently to get a bit of reading done, in particular Jonah Lehrer's Imagine: The science of creativity (which also seems to be sub-titled 'How creativity works'). 

The world is full of natural outsiders, except we don't call them outsiders; we refer to them as young people. The virtue of youth, after all, is that the young don't know enough to be insiders, cynical with expertise. While such ignorance has all sorts of obvious drawbacks, it also comes with creative advantages, which is why so many fields, from physics to punk rock, have been defined by their most immature members. The young know less, which is why they often invent more. - Jonah Lehrer

This issue of what young people have to offer (and in my particular case, the young people who are part of the Curriculum Integration Project) is one that I've been reflecting on a bit recently. While it's nice (well, sometimes nice, and sometimes incredibly challenging or frustrating!) for them to be part of an 'authentic learning project', if all we're doing is re-producing a 'real world' experience in an educational context is that really making the most of their potential?

Is a paper and web-based magazine about visual culture the ultimate product that 20 'natural outsiders' can produce? Or can they/we produce something that is properly innovative, that moves beyond the bounds of our current experience, and really connects the visual culture of their world with their colleagues? How can we best help them take advantage of the 'virtues of youth' to create something new rather than reproducing a version of something old?

In five years time when we look back at what they invented you'll be mentioned in the credits Jonah. And in the meantime, when we're cursing the idea of taking on such a big project, you may also get a mention!

The Impact of Kickstarter, Creative Commons & Creators Project

Here's an interesting video (from the PBS series Off Book, produced by Kornhaber Brown) that challenged my thinking about the world we're preparing our students for (and the world they're already operating in). Thanks to Idealog magazine for drawing my attention to it.