AV News 174 - November 2008
Maureen Albright ARPS
International Review of Images with Soundtrack for Under 25 year olds
IRIS-25
It is strange how fate plays a part in our lives.
In 2006 I attended a meeting of The Royal
Photographic Society at Bath.
During the proceedings it was announced that the
Society would be making available grants for Special
Projects. For some time I had been thinking about
organising an event to encourage young people to show
their talents in the digital field.
I immediately started preparing an application for one of the special grants
to finance a new event for young people in the field of digital Audio Visual.
My application was successful, and I began my plans to organise the new
event. I felt that if it were to be a success, I would need to spend a great deal
of time on publicity and try to involve as many schools and colleges in the
project as possible. My plan was to spend 2007 preparing the ground well
so that I would hopefully receive a large number of entries.
Adult Audio Visual competitions have a long history of creating AVs to a
set form, which can then be judged. Since the advent of digital AV, most of
these competitions accept only executable files, making it difficult for Mac
users to participate. I realised that many colleges used Macs with their
students and if we were to encourage the young to take part we would have
to open our minds a little more and accept differing file formats.
The initial planning took a great deal of time. I did not think young people
would be eager to win medals or trophies, so cash prizes would be awarded
and the main winners would also receive a year's free membership of the
Royal Photographic Society. When I discussed my plans with established AV
workers I received one of two responses. Either we would receive thousands
of entries from hundreds of schools or colleges or the total opposite - no
entries at all, with friends questioning how to teach them all AV and get them
to enter?
There were long periods of thought in the planning stages. One dilemma
was about whether it would be best to direct the youngsters to the web sites
where they could download established, traditional AV winners and hope
they would "learn" from viewing the downloads. However I finally decided
that we should learn and listen from the young themselves and avoid trying
to direct them into a set pattern with the possibility of many "clones" of
traditional AVs. We should let the young peoples' creativity take the lead and
find out what they would produce if we gave them the chance with only a few
very simple rules as guidelines.
The name of the event was chosen, "International Review of Images with
a Soundtrack for Under 25s", shortened to IRIS-25, deliberately avoiding a
reference to an 'AV competition'. A new web site was designed and built.
Page 16