In just two weeks’ time, a project I have been working on for the last six months with Ravenbourne students, The Royal Shakespeare Company, networking company Cisco, and educational Internet provider Ja.net will be reaching its conclusion. The event is primarily based around a play written by Tim Crouch called I, Cinna (The Poet), which takes the incidental character Cinna The Poet from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and tells the story from his perspective – a tactic Crouch has used in a series of plays about secondary Shakespearean characters. On July 2nd, at 10:30am, the play will be streamed for the first time to up to 3,000 schools across the UK – tens of thousands of schoolchildren – who will also have opportunities to upload their own poems relating to the subjects of the play, during its performance, as well as pose questions for key personnel in a Q&A session after the play. Some students from the Web Media course I run at Ravensbourne have put together this microsite to host the play. Ravensbourne students have also shot and are currently finishing off the edit of the film of the play. A promo of their work can be viewed here:

It’s an incredibly exciting project, which has brought together students from lots of different courses at Ravensbourne, as well as more than four different major institutions – the four mentioned above, plus LOCOG, because the play is also part of the Cultural Olympics. The project is very much “transmedia” in action, bringing together film-making, TV-style studio broadcasting, the Web and social media into one event. It has been hard work, but an amazing journey so far. And there are still two more weeks of graft to go…