19th August 2020 - Inject Creativity Live

Tim and I are usually joined by Jerry Wong for our Inject Creativity Chat Show and Deeper Dive, but tonight our special guest moderator was Luke Cathcart from Adobe. He did a fabulous job and his work was much appreciated.

Tonight's Inject Creativity Live was focused on creativity through video production, and we had some wonderful guest presenters sharing both practical projects for the classroom and community projects.

Joel Aarons has been an Adobe Education Leader for many years. He is a very talented and highlight respected STEM & Media Arts Teacher in Melbourne at Camberwell South Primary.

Jamie van Leeuwen also lives in Melbourne but grew up in Sydney. He is a film maker and a Social Media Lead at ESPN.  His connection to our Adobe Education community is as the son of Adobe Education Leader Dr Bronwen Wade van Leeuwen from Macquarie University - I shall have to thank her for introducing him into our orbit.

When we launched into the Deeper Dive, our topics triggered a fascinating discussion on the kinds of video editing software out there. Most of the debate was around the best mobile apps out there for creative experiences - the competing space that Adobe Spark Video, Adobe Premiere Rush and iMovie live in. Alas, we didn't have time to expand on it, but people expressing their preferences (and how they used them) was really interesting!

Joel Aarons presented to us first. He has been an Adobe Education Leader for five years. Joel is like me in that he has learned through tinkering with Adobe to breathe life into his projects. This naturally evolved into his use of Adobe tools in teaching photography, videography, animation and graphic design. His K-2 students use Adobe apps on tablets, and the Year 3-6 students use the Creative Cloud apps like Premiere Rush. 

Two years ago, he published an eBook containing lessons and reflections in Media Arts (which can be purchased here: https://mediaartsconfessions.wordpress.com/about/). Links to this and his other work and projects are in the embedded Spark summary page I created for tonight (below).

Jamie van Leeuwen has taken his life experience from his time at University in Canberra and transformed his self-taught video production skills into a remarkable opportunity at ESPN. As a sports and tech fan, his current role is an ideal cross-section of his interests. 

He felt inspired by his observations at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak to start working on the collaborative #AustraliaLockedDown project, which will be submitted to the National Film and Sound Archive (https://www.australialockeddown.com/). I particularly was blown away with the storytelling in his own video, and how profound the pairing of the poem and clips was in such a short amount of time.

Some of the submissions to his project so far are really interesting, and can be viewed here: https://www.australialockeddown.com/creative.