CCC on the road - What happened so far!

It's time to have a look what happened so far: 4 cities, 4 countries, more than 10 different creative projects in a 1 minute short film....

Short film impression from Bremen to Newcastle

CCC known as Culture Culture Culture…

Wow! More than 50 different venues, 2 days, many thousands of visitors, that’s “The Late Shows 2012” in Newcastle. In the city centre as well as on the Quayside, in Ouseburn and Gateshead wherever you go you see the black posters and flags with the yellow letters “The Late Shows”. The variety of the programme is as big as the variety of the places. Art exhibitions, workshops, concerts and jam sessions, circus, interactive installations, theatre, guided tours at places that normally are not open to the public and so on … You don’t have any chance to see everything, even if you try to see the half you will fail. CCC on the road saw 18 different venues within about 9 hours on 2 evenings. The results will be part of the film about the creative life in Newcastle we are going to produce during this project.

The idea for the cultural festival was born in 2007 by Bill Griffiths, who is still The Late Shows Project Manager. Since than every second weekend in May people from all over the region come to Newcastle and Gateshead to explore a different way of nightlife and see their city from a different perspective. In the first year the event started with 14 different venues and grew up in the past five years to 56. In the year 2011 the organisers counted more than 24.000 visitors within two evenings and it seemed to be even more in 2012…

www.thelateshows.org.uk

CCC on the road explores England!

How to get from Bremen to Newcastle? We just took a Ryanair flight to Edinburgh and rented a car. After a two hours driving trough a very nice landscape we landed in Ouseburn one of the creative districts of Newcastle the city along the Tyne river. Ouseburn in the past was an industrial harbour area and has been in the past ten years, more and more discovered by artists and other creative people. Today a lot of galleries, workshops and creative offices are located here. One example is the Toffee Factory a building that was recreated from a ruin into one of the most modern office buildings in the city: offices for 4 to 25 people, located directly at the waterside, biomass heating, a roof top terrace etc. The creative hub scooped a series of awards like the Project of the Year title at the North East RICS Renaissance Awards 2012.

www.toffeefactory.co.uk

One of the creative companies located at the Toffee Factory is Keltie Cochrane - doing all around advertising, design and marketing. We talked to Jason Cochrane one of the company founders about creative business in Newcastle and the importance of the surrounding for creating new ideas. It seems to be magic about the Toffee Factory: “Since we moved here our business is even running better” says Jason Cochrane.

www.keltiecochrane.com

CCC in Northern Germany

Back from Sweden the next stop for CCC on the road was Hamburg. The city is one of three German partners in the Creative City Challenge and an important place for the media world.

Our tasks:

1.     Collecting as much as possible city impressions and pictures from people living in Hamburg within one day.

2.     Learn more about creative projects in Hamburg. And so we did: First we visited the HAW Hamburg University of Applied Science (www.design.haw-hamburg.de) and learned more about the education of creative people in the city. In the evening we followed an event about design in the daily life organised by hamburgunddesign (www.hamburgunddesign.de).

After the trip to Hamburg we went back to Bremen the hub of the CCC film team. These days we spend mainly for the postproduction of the filming in Sweden and Hamburg. That means checking all material, sounds, pictures and name it, sorting ….

At Firday 18^th May CCC on the road goes to Newcastle to see for example The Late Show 2012.

From the road to the boat...

The CCC road trip starts in Sweden!

Since the beginning of 2012 we have been preparing the whole project. Finally, at the 6^th of May we started the big travel exhibition of the Creative City Challenge Project. Our first destination: Gothenburg in Sweden.

From Bremen, Germany we rented a car from Cambio Carsharing to Kiel. By a Stena Line ferry boat we got over the Baltic Sea to Gothenburg. The trip on the ferry was very interesting to film. We got the permission to film at the bridge of the Stena Scandinavia, which is with 240 meters one of the longest RoPax ferries in the world. 30 meters above the sea we had a perfect view and learned a lot about life on board. The crew is living about 8 days on the ship that brings up to 1.800 people daily from Kiel to Gothenburg or the other way around. The ferry is like a swimming hotel with restaurants and bars, a shop and sleeping rooms.

On Sunday, we left Kiel at 7 p.m. and arrived at Gothenburg at 9:00 a.m on Monday. This day was going to be a TILLT day. We met Anna Grzelec, Jon Liinason and Bertil Göransson who are working as project leaders. TILLT is the Swedish CCC project partner and produces artistic intervention in organisations. One of the tasks of TILLT is to help companies to change their perspectives by entering into collaborations with artists, such as actors, photographers, dancers, writers or musicians. For the travel exhibition we recorded a talk between Anna and Jon in order to get a better idea about the influence of creativity on the daily life and the society at all. www.tillt.se

The second day in Sweden we drove into the wild and made a time travel back to the 60’s. In the small city Nossebro the people established a retro project. We visited a flat, a shop and a cinema where everything still looks like 50 years ago. Before the city started the project in Nossebro there was no reason for other people to go there. Today the municipality with about 1.800 habitants counts 175.000 tourists every year visiting the retro places in the town and a lot of events like a big market and a car exhibitions with cars from the 60’s. www.retronossebro.se

From the 60’s we went over to the future that is the main topic of the strategic planning of Skövde, the largest municipality in the region Skaraborg in West Sweden. Today, the city counts about 50.000 habitants and as Christina Josefsson, head of Skövde municipality says: by 2025 it should be 60.000. Skövde has been one of the driving forces for the region, when it comes to supporting the courage to stand out and market the region Skaraborg, not only for its lovely nature, but also for it´s cultural capacities. www.skovde.se

Both municipalities are part of the project Cities That Stand out: www.sssu.se

Back in Gothenburg: In the evening we shared a discussion about the mutual influence of design, society and creativity at the Chalmers University of Technology.

Day 3 in Gothenburg: Equipped with three cameras outside and inside the car we drove through the city of Gothenburg to gather some impressions of the city life and the Swedes. The first travel exhibition trip ends with about 200 Gigabite or more than 8 hours of footage.

To be continued…