Executive Summary

The proposed project is focussed around a practice (outdoor projection) that engages with a number of different disciplines, including (but not limited to): film studies, visual culture, performance studies, urban geography, architecture, cultural policy, and fine art.

It grows out of a combination of experimental pedagogy (developed over the previous 2 years), and my involvement as co-investigator on the AHRC funded The Projection Project, which investigates the history and future of moving image projection. It is therefore research-led teaching, but the variety of ways in which it has been used so far has shown the pedagogical value of the practice to potentially extend well beyond the scope of the original research.

This project would take the practice outside of those original modules, and provide a framework within which the students will lead the research, creative, and production work on one or more self-generated projects to be presented as part of Flatpack Film Festival 2015. Students will be invited to engage in research into the history of cinema spaces in Birmingham (linked to Flatpack's Lottery funded 'Celluloid City' project) and use this to inform the works that they produce.

In my modules we have been using the entire outdoor space of the campus as our classroom, with this project a small group of students will extend this principle out into the real world, and make the city-centre of Birmingham their learning space.

The nature of the group as a student-directed, cross-departmental amalgam of students from different disciplines at different stages in their degrees, will in the long term promote the generation of a variety of different projects, giving voice to a diversity of interests.