DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

Charlotte Crofts is a creative producer and senior lecturer in Film Studies and Video Production in the faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education, UWE.  With a background in filmmaking and editing, Charlotte's creative practice began to incoporate context-aware app development after attending one of the DCRC's paradigm-shifting Pervasive Media Summer Schools.

Since then Charlotte has worked closely with residents at the Pervasive Media Studio. Her Curzon Memories App celebrates the centenary of the Curzon Community Cinema in Clevedon. The project, which was funded by DCRC and a UWE Spur Early Career grant, was developed with studio resident Jo Reid (Calvium) using the AppFurnace platform. Visitors explore the cinema with a smartphone that uses their GPS position and QR codes to trigger interactive site-specific media content to enhance knowledge and understanding of the exhibits. The focus of the project lies in the innovative application of mobile technologies, designing positive user experiences and contributing to DCRC's research into the aesthetics of locative media. The app is available on iTunes App Store and Google Play and is featured in the Pervasive Media Cookbook.

The project also includes the Projection Hero installation, a miniature cinema which you can manipulate with your smartphone, made in collaboration with another studio resident, Tarim (Media Playgrounds).  The installation situates the user as a projectionist - you can dim the lights, open the curtains and play movies which all feature interviews with retired projecitonists, exploring the dying art of cinema projection in the digital age.

Charlotte’s next project was part of the AHRC REACT Hub ‘Heritage' Sandbox scheme to develop City Strata a new mobile curation / authoring platform in collaboration with creative economy partner, Jo Reid (Calvium) and heritage partner, Peter Insole (Bristol City Council). The platform enables developers to create heritage experiences based on different layers of Bristol’s history, drawing on the council's interactive GIS map Know Your Place.  The platform was protyped with the Cinemapping layer, which enabled users to access cinema heritage in the field by streaming live data from the historic cinemas layer in Know Your Place.  As part of the sandbox, the team undertook a number R&D acitivies which resulted in a white paper on 'Making Scalable Location-Aware Mobile Apps' and an award-winning poster outlining the project which was presented at the REACT showcase and at MeCCSA 2013 'Spaces and Places of Culture'. 

Charlotte's most recent app is The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park (available on iOS), a GPS triggered audio tour which spans over a 100-years of cinema exhibition and features 13 cinemas in Castle Park and the immediate area, from the first moving pictures screened at the Tivoli Music Hall in 1896 to the Odeon, Union Street - a 1930s super cinema which is still operating today.  The app will be formally launched on Sunday 24 March 2013 (the anniversary of the opening of Bristol's first purpose-built cinema, The Queens Picture Hall, in 1910).

Charlotte also publishes on the impact of digital technologies of all aspects of the cinema industry, including 'Digital Decay' and 'Cinema Distribution in the Age of Digital Projection' (cited in the DCMS report on the Film Policy Review).