In 2008 the Olympic Games seemed a distant concept and not obviously related to Watershed’s usual programme of activity, but it presented intriguing possibilities so we joined up with the RELAYS project.

Thus began a journey that took us to all sorts of new places, led us to meet and work with new partners, brought in different audiences, got us trying out innovative projects with young people and on this four year route engaged thousands of people with a wide range of activity – from film screenings and talks to citizen journalists reporting on sporting and cultural events.

During the RELAYS project 8 short films have been made by young people – some of the Short Cuts films going on to win awards and be included in International Festival screenings – young citizen journalists have covered, amongst other things, Olympic sailing, the People’s Republic of Stoke’s Croft and Bristol’s Mayoral election in eight different projects over the last 22 months, and we’ve run over 20 Media Literacy workshops at Watershed for year 9 and 10 students. Through all these activities we’ve worked with over 800 young people since the project began.

There were also some experimental projects and events such as Robot Relays and Igfest which used various forms of pervasive media, outdoor locations and street games to stealthily encourage physical activity with children, young people and families. New technical skills were also acquired by staff who, for example, rose to the challenges of live blogging with smart-phones.

In terms of audiences we’ve  welcomed almost 8,000 people through our doors to screenings, talks and events and thousands more online – the Weymouth Media Camp citizen journalist blog alone received over 6,000 views in only 6 weeks.

The RELAYS at Watershed project has now come to an end – it’s one of the longest Watershed has undertaken and we feel it’s been a really worthwhile journey. This website will stay online although no further content will be added after this final post – but we’ve produced the film above to give an overview of just some of the extensive range of work we’ve done on the RELAYS at Watershed project.

Although this is farewell from the RELAYS team at Watershed, we are continuing with our successful strand of work on citizen journalism so please visit the new blog documenting the progress of our forthcoming projects at News from Elsewhere.

This quote from the show about the citizen journalism workshop by Ricardo, one of our participants is just the sort of thing we like to hear! He represents SH&NK (Street Harmony & No Knives – a Bristol based anti-knife project for young people:

“Its given me skills in terms of … media coverage for the youth of Bristol… getting involved is one of the greatest things I’ve been ever been into, it’s been fantastic so far. The campaign’s been excellent and I’m glad to be a part of it.”

There’s another post on the Watershed Citizen Journalism Blog reflecting on this project and now that the RELAYS project is coming to an end, some thoughts about where we’ll go next with  ‘News from Elsewhere’ – the citizen journalism strand at Watershed.

We’ve now completed five of the seven planned sessions with our current citizen journalism project ‘News from Elsewhere’ which aims to cover Bristol’s Mayoral Election from a number of perspective. The project is running in conjunction with Ujima Radio and with support from the University of Bristol – both organisations that we’ve visited with the team to learn about making a radio programme and discover some background to the new role of the elected Mayor in the City.

The participants also attended a workshop on using social media to promote the work they’re making and reported on the Mayoral hustings at the Trinity Centre in Bristol on 8 November where they interviewed members of the audience and some of the candidates. The blog they’ve been posting to is called Bristol Mayor Watch and they can be found on Twitter as @BSMayorwatch.

The enthusiasm for the project has led to the participants developing their own programme for Ujima for broadcast towards the end of November that will extend the project for a further week – details to follow, and more information about the project is over on our Citizen Journalism blog

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve been awarded some funding by Bristol University to run ‘News from Elsewhere’ – a citizen journalism project to cover the forthcoming Mayoral election. We’re working with long-term RELAYS /Watershed associate, David Goldblatt, but also teaming up with Ujima Radio which will add another dimension to the reporting process. So in addition to using smartphones for posting content to a blog as we’ve done in previous projects, the participants will also be contributing to Ujima’s live outside broadcast on the election process on 8th November. The participants, 18 – 25 year olds who are being recruited through Ujima, will be introduced to the idea of citizen journalism, receive training in the use of the smartphones (that we provide), blogging, and radio production and learn about the effective use of social media in this context.

They’ll also have conversations with a range of people, including academics, about the democratic process and brush up on research techniques with the of support of University of Bristol staff and students. The citizen journalists will apply these new skills to interviewing members of the public and representatives of organisations who are following  the Mayoral election in other ways, such as Knowle West Media Centre’s campaign Mayor for a Day and the Bristol Democracy Project.

There will be the opportunity for the participants to attend some of the hustings and public question-time events that are taking place across the city over the next few weeks – Mayoral candidates will be in Hengrove Park, South Bristol on Tuesday 16 October;  at Watershed a Fair, Sustainable Future for Bristol is the topic under debate with five of the Mayoral candidates on October 24 and Bristol Culture and Colston Hall have a similar event in the city on 1st November with a discussion between the candidates that will have an emphasis on the arts in Bristol.

Keri Facer, Professor of Educational and Social Futures said “The University of Bristol is delighted to be supporting the Citizen Journalism Project, which we see as a very important way of engaging young people in democratic debate. We’re excited to be encouraging greater conversation between our academics and the young people of Bristol about the issues that matter.”

RELAYS at Watershed has teamed up with our friends at Encounters to run a Film Journalism Workshop over the Festival with a group of nine young people at various stages of their training or careers in the film industry. They’ve called their blog Inside Encounters and aim to cover as many aspects of the Festival as they can through video diaries, interviews, reviews, reports and photographs.

The photo above shows the Film Journalist team plus guest speakers at our first session, Zoltan and Zsuzsanna from Daazo (a webiste and magazine for ‘sharing and celebrating short films in high quality’), and Rachel Segal Hamilton from Ideas Tap who helped with promoting and recruiting for the workshop. Head over to our Citizen Journalism blog for more details about the project.

It’s over two weeks since the Bristol citizen journalism crew left Weymouth but their blog is still being added to (see below) and right now it’s been viewed 5555 times! Eleven young people have provided some great perspectives on Weymouth’s temporary Olympic life (being continued until the end of the Paralympics) with observations and reviews on cultural events  and interviews with visitors, residents and businesses, and even a rival Olympic Sailing team from Denmark!

Covering this wide range of topics using smartphones could have created something of a car-crash of documentation but through the briefing sessions each morning with mentors, including workshop leader David Goldblatt, we hoped to provide a focus for the reporting (which largely paid off!) and the style of blog we selected helped give coherence to the disparate contents. What’s been created through the blog is a multi-faceted portrait of small English seaside town which, for a few weeks, has experienced an extraordinary and large-scale invasion. We were in a unique position to document the impact of this since we were representing neither official media nor any organising body, although we did adhere to the #media21012 charter. This was a significant factor as people who were approached for interviews then understood they could give their honest views – some local businesses were very disheartened, some downright angry, but the majority of people were thoroughly positive – especially after the spectacular and beautiful ‘torch wade’.

We were based in a great location in centre of town in a building we shared with the Maritime Mix project – which we contributed to through our blog.  The young citizen journalists worked incredibly hard and very enthusiastically during the four very full days of the media camp and became a team almost instantly, working together to grab and make opportunities for producing content and devising ingenious solutions to technical or logistical problems. They visibly grew in confidence as they approached all manner of complete strangers with requests for insights into their work, opinions, or a quick portrait. Each team member brought different types and levels of technical and creative experience to the camp so knowledge was shared and  skills learnt or developed as they produced and edited content for their posts. You can find out more about the Media Camp over on our citizen journalism blog and photographs of the team at work in the Media Camp gallery.

The Bristol team passed on the upkeep of the blog to students from Weymouth College who in turn handed the task on to James Randell. We first met James in July last year on one of our early citizen journalism pilot projects when we went with Emma Rich from Bath University to the One Year to Go to the Olympics celebrations in Weymouth. We’d been sharing the office space with him at our Weymouth HQ as he’s been an intern with Maritime Mix and involved with the Nowhereisland project for over a year. So, please keep an eye on the Weymouth blog to stay updated with the continuing Maritime Mix programme right up to the closing of the Paralympic Games.

Many thanks for the input, help and support to make the Media Camp happen to colleagues at Watershed; David Goldblatt; Dr Emma Rich at Bath University; Tim Abberley and other Weymouth College colleagues; Sandy Kirkby at b-side; Alan Rogers – Cultural Co-ordinator, Weymouth and Portland 2012 Operations Team, Richard Crowe – London 2012 Creative Programmer; Lisa Worthington and the rest of the Maritime Mix team in Weymouth, and finally the RELAYS project itself – excellent partnership working!

We’ve been so gratified with the outcome of this project in particular but also our overall excursions into citizen journalism that we’re hoping to extend this work to cover some other areas with young people, and maybe older ones too, in the near future – please come back soon to find out where we’re going with this!

Films for our projectionists at Watershed usually turn up in the post or by carrier, but last night saw a more unconventional arrival as a gang of teddy bears from Wotton-under-Edge handed over the material for the final screening in our season of RELAYS films, talks and events. They were accompanied by the Hansel of Film team from Shetland Arts, which included a long-term friend of Watershed’s, Mark Kermode.

The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad show began in the Shetlands in June and has been as far as Southampton and Cornwall -  Watershed was their 14th stop – they still have 10 more venues including Belfast and Edinburgh. The format is to show 30 minutes of film from the Shetlands, 30 minutes from the previous venue (in this case from Wotton-under-Edge) and 30 minutes from the host venue.

Films have been submitted from all over the country by a wide range of people – young and older, groups and individuals, amateur and professional and each venue appoints a runner to take (in an ‘imaginative’ manner!) the Shetland films and those from their own area on to the next location.  The bears did a reasonable job, and our films are heading off today for the next cinema on the relay route, Prestatyn, courtesy of a very small man on a bicycle – a clockwork man – hope he gets there on time!

He had featured in Bearded Gnomes‘ prize-winning film Wind which had won the 0117 Encounters Film Challenge in May, an event supported by RELAYS. The final part of last night’s screening was 30 minutes-worth of films from the 0117 Challenge, including, of course, Wind.

We hope Prestatyn enjoys the varied and entertaining show as much as our audience seemed to – rounded off nicely by a small reception courtesy of Shetland Arts, see photographs of the evening in the Gallery.

Please visit D Shed to see a recording of this fascinating talk.

While the Olympic Games continue (and you still don’t know the difference between all those cycling races!)  don’t forget you can still buy the essential guide to The Games – David Goldblatt’s ‘How to Watch the Olympics’ – from Watershed’s Box Office!

You might also be interested to take part in Mike O’Mahony’s project ‘My Games: The View From the South West’ by contributing photographs of your personal experience of the Olympics here in the southwest.

Follow their reports at http://wshd.to/weymouth2012

On 19th July we were delighted to welcome to Watershed the acting Ambassador for Nicaragua in the UK, Giselle Morales who came to introduce La Yuma – the first film made in Nicaragua for 20 years. Ms Morales explained how important the development of the film industry is to Nicaragua, while bringing different representations of women to the screen in Latin America is also essential – La Yuma is the story of a young woman who struggles against poverty and stereotyping to excel in the male-dominated world of boxing.

Bristol is twinned with Puerto Morazan in Nicaragua, and the date of the screening was selected to coincide with Nicaraguan Independence Day.  Ms Morales was accompanied at Watershed by Alix Hughes from the Bristol International Twining Association, and by The Right Honorable Lord Mayor of Bristol, Peter Main. A percentage of the ticket sales was donated to BLINC – Bristol Link with Nicaragua.

Showing after La Yuma was Counter Punch – a short film made by young people at Knowle West Media Centre as part of our Short Cuts RELAYS project in 2010.