A team at Royal Holloway have won an award for best online education resource at the Learning on Screen Awards 2019 for its ‘how television was made in the past’ project.
Research Officer, Nick Hall, Producer/Director Amanda Murphy, Principal Investigator John Ellis and guest speaker and host Professor Kate Williams (author, broadcaster and Royal Holloway alumni).
Royal Holloway’s ADAPT TV History Project was funded by the European Research Council and is led by Professor John Ellis of the Department of Media Arts.
The ADAPT team’s digital archive history collection about how television used to be made is one of a kind, with the group researching the history of British broadcast television technology between 1960 and the near-present.
The Judges described this as ‘an important piece of work that demonstrates a wide range of production methods.’
The collection of more than 100 hours is available online for free for anyone interested in film and television history or production.
The award is important as The Learning on Screen Awards, run by British Universities Film and Video Council BUFVC, is the UK’s only celebration of film and media in education.
Amanda Murphy, Producer/Director of the ADAPT film collection and project, said: “We are so grateful for this brilliant award.
“The thanks really belongs to the amazing pioneers who feature in the ADAPT TV History video collection; they created television in the 1950s and 60s, an almost impossible task, forging great breakthroughs with synchronised sound and the first ever colour pictures.
“Astonishingly, these pioneers came back in their retirement to work with us on our project, now aged 70 years old to 90 years old and reunited with the original hefty, itself nearly 50 years old and they worked their magic once again to show us how television was made in the golden era.
“It was sheer magic to both witness and film and with the rapid onslaught of digital and immersive media, it is important that these production values and methods are not forgotten.”
