Last June, The Sharp Project hosted the Creative and Digital Summit. Invited were Manchester’s digital big-hitters leading organisations such as BBC North, MediaCity, Corridor Manchester and the city council. The issues raised have been analysed by NMP’s managing director Danny Meaney, who last month presented an action plan aimed at maintaining and boosting Manchester’s promising position as a digital hub. Many of the original Summit attendees returned to The Sharp Project to listen and discuss the findings.
Author Archives: Charlie Hankers
Is this our stop? The creative & digital action plan
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Secret Santa ends our first full year
The official Sharp Project 2011 wind-down began just before Christmas with drinks, mince pies, secret Santa and an informal tenant get-together. This has been the first full year of occupancy, and with 75% of the spaces now filled, compared to about 30% this time last year, there was a real sense of progress, even pride, in the air. It was reassuring to see that most of the tenants present at last year’s event were still here, and fantastic to see the newer ones mingling.
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In-house Outsourcing with Zemap
Since it resided on a drawing board, The Sharp Project has made its purpose clear: to be a hub for small creative digital operations and the industries that assist them. Much is made of the potential for a tenant to pick different talents from within the building to fill a need for a particular assignment, and to a degree it happens; indeed it’s almost inevitable with such breadth and depth available. But when Zemap, a video production tenant, needed some holes filling pronto, they decided to keep it in the house – and got a result.
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Event 002: Whose work is it anyway? The future of IP
Event 002. Photograph by Lauren Hyde
Intellectual property (IP) law was introduced to protect the rights of innovators and artists and thereby encourage invention and creativity. Why invest millions developing a product when anyone can copy it and sell it for a pure profit? The language of IP is familiar to us all in everyday terms such as copyright, patent, royalties, licensing etc. But there’s a powerful argument that IP law has gone too far, protecting the rights of creators at the expense of people actually using and enjoying their creations. For example it is actually illegal to pay for a CD and then copy the music to your phone, even though there is software openly available to do it. Although it would take an extreme example for a case of private format shifting to be actually pursued by a copyright holder, it does demonstrate that while the letter of the law on IP is outdated, the spirit can pass through the walls.
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Capturing Sound with 20/20 Vision: 80 Hertz Studios
Bands and musicians spend many an hour writing, learning, arranging and performing their songs, and when recognition comes their way the recording studio inevitably beckons. But taking a performance thrashed out in the heat and energy of a gig and reproducing it in the calm, technical studio environment can have a sterilising effect. We’ve all been blown away by bands on stage only to be left disappointed by their recorded work. Perhaps it’s underproduced due to being rushed out to capture a moment. Or maybe overproduction is the culprit, toiling to extract some core clarity but denuding the rawness in the process. Nightmares about failing to capture this authentic, instinctive sound in the studio make 80 Hertz’s George Atkins wake up in a cold sweat. But now he has opened his own custom-built studio in The Sharp Project, we’re going to start hearing the difference.
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Sky1′s Mount Pleasant – Line Producer Howard Ella talks about filming at The Sharp Project
Mount Pleasant viewers will recognise this hallway
TV shows can be filmed more or less anywhere. Crews are self-contained units that can be deployed to any location and still keep everyone fed, watered, made up and filmed. If you’ve seen the “making of” Planet Earth films, you’ll know that anywhere really does mean anywhere. So why did Tiger Aspect choose to film Mount Pleasant, Sky1’s first commissioned comedy drama, at The Sharp Project? Line producer Howard Ella (Monroe, Joe Maddison’s War, 5 Days, Lewis) postponed his wrap-day beer to talk me through his experience.
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Set Your Dolly Free: Flyka Glides In
People who use swans as a metaphor for grace being driven by hidden exertion must never have visited a film set. The amount of stuff going on behind the camera and dangling over actors’ heads gives little clue about the polished finished product. Inside the industry, though, the quest to simplify the back end has been an ongoing one, the cameras themselves being a case in point. Static scenes are simple enough – just mount a camera and you’re away. And moving along a straight line can be done using rails. But when it comes to filming things that are moving from a close perspective or where rails cannot be put down, the results can be unconvincing or unintentionally amusing.
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Summit to Do in Manchester: THE SHARP PROJECT Opens its Doors
All that was missing was a ringmaster as a circus atmosphere blasted its way into every nook and node of THE SHARP PROJECT on Wednesday night. Coloured light sprayed the darkened walls; the spectrum of musical moods poured forth from invisible speakers; and over 450 people immersed themselves in it all while tenants threw open their doors and invited them in to their workplaces. The occasion? The formal opening of THE SHARP PROJECT – a celebration of what has been achieved and a media-spangled vision of what is to come.
Paul Jones Shoots Sharp
Tours of The Sharp Project are often guided, whistle-stop affairs; it’s too spread out to allow tourists to dwell on any single part, and you end up taking away merely an impression of the place, rather than a coloured-in diagram. The odd thing is that this mental sketch is actually more accurate than the details would be. It’s a space, after all, and it’s what goes on in it and in the minds of its inhabitants that matters. Manchester photographer Paul Jones captures this spirit impeccably in his expertly shot ’n’ shuffled series, the result of a day’s wandering and a week’s Photoshopping.
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Behind ahd168: The Pixel’s Tale
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Sharp Project is proud to present … the return of ahd168! Please be seated as our iconic android sweeps, slides and leaps in exploration of our place of work. Released a few days ago, the video is still creating waves of comment online, and it’s sure to continue doing so.
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