SP-ARK online education resource
Collaboration develops unique digital
film archive
The background
Adventure Pictures Ltd. is a film production company whose major client and co-director is the world-renowned filmmaker Sally Potter, author of award-winning films including Orlando, Yes and Rage. The company had started to develop SP-ARK, an online education resource based on the working archive of Sally Potter and wanted to take it to the next level. Students are one of Potter’s most loyal audiences, and so the company aimed to give SP-ARK a revolutionary image browsing interface so that students, academics and film lovers could analyse Potter’s work in a new way and use social networking to exchange ideas.
The issue
Sally Potter’s unpublished archive consisted of thousands of assets, ranging from annotated scripts, screen tests and production diaries, to personal notes, production schedules, budgets and behind the scenes photographs. The scale of this project presented a significant challenge. The company also wanted to ensure that the taxonomy that would be developed to underpin the structure of the website, would have relevance and value for students in Higher Education.
"SP-ARK has tackled a problem that all traditional archives are now facing: how to provide enhanced access to hard-to-find materials in the digital age."
Dr Sanja Bahun, Lecturer, University of Essex
"SP-ARK is a prototype for how you can bring an archive into the digital age."
Christopher Sheppard, Adventure Pictures
The solution
Dr Sanja Bahun, who teaches Sally Potter’s work in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, felt that the project had a good fit with her research into women filmmakers and her interest in innovative educational practises. A talented PhD student, Heidi Wilkins, was recruited to work on the project. Her hard work on this Shorter Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project ensured that the selection, organisation and intelligent tagging of visual data were in accordance with current teaching practises in higher education.
The benefits
By collaborating with the University of Essex, the company was able to introduce SP-ARK into current teaching and provide first hand user input from students engaging with SP-ARK during the project. The result is a unique educational resource allowing students, scholars and film fans to interact with its database of thousands of digitised materials relating to every aspect of filmmaking, and with each other. For the first time, original archive research has been made accessible and affordable to individuals at every level of education.
Who to contact
Please contact Knowledge Exchange Manager, Jenny Young for more details.
