The Curzon Memories App won a Learning on Screen Award for best General Education Multimedia project. The winners were announced at a formal awards ceremony at the BFI Southbank, London on April 18th 2013, introduced by Shami Chakrabarti (Liberty), followed by a networking reception.
Here’s what the judges were looking for: “work that is easy to navigate and has a consistent interface will be rewarded as will original design and technical features which add to the effectiveness of the material.” Ian Wall summed up the jury’s thoughts of the resource as “an impressive and innovative use of app technology, with strong educational insight into the cinema.”
Winning the award was timely as I was able to show it off in person at the 101st Birthday of the Curzon Community Cinema at the Heritage Lottery Funded Curzon Memories Celebration Day on 20th April, pictured below with Education Officer, Cathy Poole:
The HLF funded the event which enabled the cinema to buy iPads to make the app accessible to visitors who don’t have a smartphone or device. Curzon Youth Panel volunteers are pictured below using iPads to demonstrate the app to visitors at the Curzon Memories Celebration:
It was a wonderful event which enabled people who had contributed memories to come together to celebrate the cinema, watching edited sequences of memories on themes such as Stars, Audiences, Saturday Morning Pictures, Working at the Curzon, World War 2 and hearing about how the Community Cinema came to be set up by Jon Weber when the cinema was in danger of going under in 1995. Memories were a mixture of videos gathered by Education Officer Cathy Poole and me and audio memories gathered by Curzon Trustee, Cathy Mackerras. Maurice Thornton projected pictures in the miniature cinema and there was an opportunity to visit the Curzon Collection.
It struck me what an important role the cinema has played in the cultural life of the town, as well as the range of different experiences and memories it evokes – snogging in the back row, sneaking in the back via the toilets, dancing in the aisles. As the cinema reaches the end of its centenary year, here’s to another 100 years of cinema-going in Clevedon under the new directorship of Gary Topp.
The Curzon Project 