Created in Birmingham

• CRAIN report « D’log
  “A useful seven page report from the West Midlands Cultural Research & Intelligence Network conference (PDF link), held in Birmingham on 2nd June 2010″
• Audition Call « Stan’s Cafe Theatre Company
  Quick, bright female capable of playing between 18-30 wanted to perform with Stan’s Cafe in Beijing in November. Click the linky for details
• Birmingham Post – New chairman for Cre8us
  “Professor Michael Tovey, responsible for leading and co-ordinating design education and applied research at Coventry University, has been appointed to the board of Cre8us”
• Birmingham School of Media runs best courses in the country
  Huzzah!
• Screen WM & BAFTA Present: Filmmaking and Archive Workshops
  Courses. Not for horses
• Artist Talk @ Eastside Projects and Durational Performance @ The Rea Garden | Behind Closed Doors
  “We would like to invite you to the finale of Brigid McLeer’s residency at The Rea Garden on Saturday 19th June”
• art hamster in the city
  Don’t think I’ve linked to this one before, but probably should have. Contains mentions of arts stuff happening around Brum. Sarah Silverwood is the author
• Signal box L
  Someone’s built a fairly impressive model of the New Street Signal Box
• The Interview: Ben Javens « The Internationalist
  Ben did some stuff for 8th Continent, a Californian soy milk company. Someone interviewed him about that
• A seismic shift in the UK landscape
  CiB got props in PR Week at the end of April: “the artistic and creative community website Created in Birmingham, which won a Blog Award in 2008, is popular”. Not sure why that made me laugh so much, but it did. The award was 2009, btw

A team of computing students from the University of Wolverhampton and University of Birmingham have picked up the BAFTA ‘Ones to Watch’ award at the GAME British Academy Video Games Awards.

The team, named DarkMatter Designs designed Boro-Toro, a platform puzzle game which uses an innovative control system using Wii technology.

Since leaving University two members of the team now work for RockStar North, the British games company behind the hugely successful Grand Theft Auto games.

Guardian writer and professional grumpy man Charlie Brooker wrote a hilarious and unfortunately accurate article on the British Games industry this week.

…despite being about 10,000 times more successful than the British film and TV industries combined, the British videogames industry continually balances a pathological inferiority complex with a wounded sense of pride. Quite why it still wants validation from these older, fading forms of media is a mystery. It’s like a powerful young warrior disgruntled at being ignored by an elderly and irrelevant dying king.

‘Codswallop’ by The Brothers McLeod has been nominated for a BAFTA in the category of Short Animation, pitching them against Aadrman’s Christmas TV big-hitter ‘Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of of Loaf and Death’.

The short had it’s first screening at a 7 Inch Cinema event back in September. Ian gave some context to the film:

Codswallop is based on a series of postcards Greg McLeod sent to his son, and it’s similar in atmosphere to their Spamland shorts. Some nice mucking about with splitscreen and stereo sound too, so we’ll have to make sure we don’t get our left and right mixed up.

Also, Ian Ravenscroft interviewed Greg McLeod for 4Talent and they discussed Codswallop.

If you want to see the short for yourself, go along to The Victoria on 14 March for the next Animation Forum WM event, Shorts on Walls (always recommended), taking place as part of the Flatpack Festival.

Here’s the film’s trailer:

It’s a heck of an achievement, so all the best to the Brothers on the night (8 Feb).

(Via Louis from Dice Productions)