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Thank you
Thank you
The Academy is
extremely grateful
to the following
companies who
generously support the Academy and its work of promoting the best
of Film, Television and Interactive entertainment
in the UK and overseas, through Corporate Membership.
PLATINUM
• American Airlines • Andersen
• BARCO Limited
• Consignia
• Orange Plc. • Radio Times
GOLD
• Baker Tilly
• BBC Scotland
• British Broadcasting Corporation • BSkyB
• Carlton Television
• Channel Four
• Granada Media Group
• Macromedia Europe
• Scottish Media Group
SILVER
• BBC Cymru
• BT
• Carlton Broadcasting
• HTV Group Plc
• Kodak Entertainment Imaging Ltd • S4C
• United International Pictures UK
• KPMG Media & Entertainment
• Yorkshire Tyne Tees Television
BRONZE
• Border Television
• Dolby Laboratories Inc. • Invicta Capital
• Pathé Entertainment
SUPPORTERS
• AVID Technology Europe Limited • Barcud Derwin
• Bermans Solicitors
• Buena Vista International
• Columbia TriStar Films (UK) • Entertainment Film
Distributors Ltd
• Film Council
• Film Four Distributors
• Scottish Screen
• Twentieth Century Fox
• University of Salford
• Warner Bros. Distributors Ltd
For more information please telephone Julie Chadwell, Director of Corporate Development BAFTA, 195 Piccadilly London W1J 9LN tel 020 7734 0022 email juliec@bafta.org
CWreative play
inner of last year’s BAFTA for Interactive Arts, Soda Creative Technologies has been in existence since 1996. A relatively small company, 10 peo- ple at the moment, Soda does a mix of creative and IT applica- tions from software design to digi- tally mediated installation artwork.
“One of the things we happen to do are things involving play,” says Ed Burton, Soda’s Research and Development director, “also creative applications of interface design. The particular thing we won the BAFTA for was an online toy which in some way exempli- fies our approach to design.”
Q. How did you react to win- ning the award?
Ed Burton: “We were absolute- ly bowled over. It was very impor- tant to get that recognition. Winning the interactive arts award was particularly nice. One of the unusual things about Sodaplay is that different people can interpret it as different things. The toy itself doesn’t really pre- scribe how you’re supposed to play with it so some people inter- pret it as education, some people interpret it as a children’s toy and some people interpret it as art. So, in many ways, the interactive arts category was a particularly nice one to be recognised in.
Q. How do you see it yourself?
“I think one of the things that led to it being so successful was that when I first created it I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about the box it would go in. It didn’t cross my mind whether I
was making a toy and artwork or an educational tool. I was simply, in the purest sense of the word, playing and Sodaplay happened to be the thing that I made when I played. The fact that it’s so unselfconscious has led to other people being able to see differ- ent things in it.
Q. Are you planning any changes to, or expansions of, the concept?
“Since the BAFTA award we’ve gone on to get a grant from the EPSRC (Engineering Physical Sciences Research Council) for a new project building on top of Sodaplay which is going to be called Sodarace. That will steer it specifically towards education.
“What we’ll be trying to do there is promulgate a wider awareness of artificial intelli- gence. Sodarace is going to be a race in which people can build robots which they race over landscapes, but universities will also be able to enter com- puter programmes to try and learn to design robots to do the same task.
“So we’ll have a large general public like we’ve already got playing on Sodaplay, engaged
in this game-like competition to build robots but at the same time they’ll be interacting with univer- sities who are writing artificial intelligences to try and do the same task.
“There’s already a very active discussion forum at Sodarace.net where people are discussing the project and it should be up and running sometime around the end of this year.”
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The British Academy Award is based on a design by Mitzi Cunliffe