This next challenge is to attempt to produce a piece of media that creates a real impact in the world and is distributed in a way that will get the work noticed

It could be to take one of the ideas that you have been developing over the last 6 weeks and taking it further or you can come up with an idea for a new piece of media.

You can work in any media that you feel will be suitable for making an impact (including a documentary, short film, facebook campaign, advert, sound piece, a news item, website, a poster campaign, sticker campaign).

The important point is though that you should attempt to create an impact with your work. Getting people to see it so that it might actually make a small difference to something you feel passionate about.

For this project you will need to consider the following:

1. What area you want to focus on (do you want to raise money for a charity, do you want to raise awareness of an important issue, do you want to reveal a truth that is hidden from the world, do you want to ridicule the media by creating a meme or spoof story etc etc)
2. What form you would like to use to do this (a transmedia project, a documentary, within social media, through video or short film, a web campaign etc etc)
3. How you are going to measure the impact of the project you do (is it about getting a particular person or group to recognise something, do you want as many people as possible to share and spread the idea, what will define success for your campaign?
4. How are you going to get it to the people that matter (can you use digital media, social media or do you have a more creative idea for spreading your message, how are you going to get people talking about it)

In this weeks lecture Chris Jury discussed the role of music in social change. For this weeks additional task we would like you to have a look at the Agitpop Programme Tracklists – ALL that Chris has put up during the talk

Choosing one of the songs do a short case study/analysis considering the following points:

1. What is the context of the song? (When was it created? Why? For Whom? Who wrote it and why? What is its purpose?)
2. Why is this context significant? (Where historically is it located and how does this relate to its meaning? What was happening at that particular time in history?)
3. What elements within the song help to convey its meaning (What is the mood? What narrative elements and lyrics within the song help to give it meaning and significance? How does it relate to the audience?)
4. How much impact has it made? (What did it provoke? If it is an older song what does it still tell us? What is its historic significance? Did it provoke anything to happen.
5. Lastly, during the lecture Chris talked about the way that popular culture promotes certain normalising and common sense notions (through a process known as Hegemony). We want you to consider how music might function in order to normalise certain behaviours and ideas.

For challenge 5 you will be producing a short video project within one of the areas of your Creative Activism.

You have the choice of two tasks for this challenge. Either the Positive Story Task or the Empathy Task:

1. Telling a Positive Story

For this project you should produce a short 2-3 minute documentary piece about a person, project or organisation that is making a positive change. This could be a person in your local community who has done something remarkable (such as a community initiative), a student campaign, a social enterprise, a charity in your local area, an initiative that is making a positive impact on you, a march or demonstration that you support, an event, or even a national or international campaign that you feel that you could help with your time.

What is important is that you should use your time to help promote a person, initiative, organisation or campaign that you believe is acting in a positive way. Ideally this should be an organisation who does not normally have the capabilities to make a film and promote themselves.

You should aim to get an interview with at least one person, or someone from the organisation, to tell their story in a positive way. You should consider the following questions that will give a structure to your film:

• What is the project, person or organisation?
• What have they done to make a positive change? What issue have they solved/are helping to solve?
• What help do they need

2. Empathy Project- Putting Yourself in Someone Elses Shoes

Using yourself as the subject for a short documentary, based on the ideas that you developed in the Week 4 Empathy Workshop, produce a short documentary piece where you do one of the following:

1. Experience a subject position that is different to your own. You should aim to experience this for an extended period of time- so that you can give an insight into what it is like in someone elses shoes. (so for example could you go for a whole day without being able to see, without being able to hear, without the ability to walk)
2. Try and live with without something that other people don’t have (such as the internet, money, clean water, facebook, supermarkets) for an extended period of time. Document your thoughts and feelings throughout this time.
3. Or perhaps you can think of another, or a better, way to put yourself in someone elses to create empathy for your cause. Feel free to experiment with this task.

Each week we will also be posting up an additional task for you to carry out. Although we are not expecting you to do all of these it would be excellent if you could manage to do a few. This week there are three short (ish) tasks:

1. Find an example of a Creative Remix and post it to the Creative Activism community on twitter by tagging it with the #creativact hashtag. Feel free to add more than one if you come across any good examples in your research.
2. Comment on at least one of the last weeks case study tasks with constructive feedback and suggestions.
3. Watch the following speech given by Tony Benn to the Protesters at Occupy London and respond to the questions below.

How Progress is Made… Occupy London with words from Tony Benn #occupylsx from Peter Woodbridge on Vimeo.

As a response to this think (and blog) about the following questions- a) What have the global ‘occupy’ protests done in terms of questioning and challenging contemporary power structures?  b) How much power and capabilities do we have, as social actors and media producers, to affect positive change?

You should aim to draw upon some of the theories that we have looked at over the last few weeks.

In this weeks lecture and workshop we looked at some examples of culture jamming, detournement and subvertising.

Your task this week is to produce your own piece of media that uses some of these ideas to subvert meaning.

Here are your steps

1. Find a piece of media that says something you are uncomfortable with or that doesn’t tell a truth in the way the way that you think it should (such as an advertisement, a piece of film, a tv show, a painting, a piece of news etc)
2. Remix or Mashup that piece of media to subvert its meaning – to say something different from the intended meaning and reveal a truth or an issue.
3. If it’s an image upload it to the Creative Activism workspace on flickr, if it is a video upload it to the vimeo workspace
4. On your blog do a post that shoes the original version and your remixed version with a short commentary on what you were trying to achieve
5. Once you have done this tweet a link to your image or video using the #creativact hashtag

Each week we will also be posting up an additional task for you to carry out. Although we are not expecting you to do all of these it would be excellent if you could manage to do a few. This week there are two tasks:

1. Write a short review of the ideas in Century of the Self (2002) by Adam Curtis. Thinking about questions such as:

1. What was the film arguing and why is it important?
2. How did Freud’s Theories and Writings influence the development of advertising in the early 21st Century?
3. How is this connected to wider issues of power and social control? What are the issues at stake here for the filmmaker?

Challenge Two is an ongoing task that includes:

1. Participating in the #creativact community through actively sharing your work and your findings- as well as constructively commenting on the work of others involved in the class

2. Using your blog to show the context, development and analyis of the work you are doing.

This should include:

• Idea and Process Development (showing how, and more importantly why, you have produced the work, why is it important?)
• Research (showing the context of what you are doing in relation to the work of others practitioners, showing a good level of research into your chosen area of activism, showing how you will use this to inform your own work, considering how your work relates to wider social, cultural and political questions such as questions of power)
• Analysis (analysing the work of other creative activists, projects, theories and campaigns as well as analysing your own work in relation to these)
• Evaluation and Reflection (thinking about the effectiveness of the execution of your work and the feedback you have received)