Charlotte Crofts
University of the West of England
Charlotte Crofts is a creative producer and Professor of Cinema Arts at University of the West of England (UWE Bristol).
Projects
The Fleapit
Roll up, roll up for The Fleapit, the cinema that can travel. Small enough to fit in a suitcase, this tiny interactive cinema can be controlled by your smartphone. Dim the lights, open the curtains and play the movies.
City Strata
City Strata is a mobile platform which enables users to explore different layers of Bristol’s heritage, going back to the first maps of the city in 1750. The platform aims to allow developers to author location based experiences which include user generated and uploaded content.
Projection Hero
Projection Hero is an interactive installation that allows you to play cinema projectionist, dimming the lights, opening the curtains and playing movies - featuring interviews with retired projectionists at the moment that exhibitors were converting fro 35mm to digital projection.
Curzon Memories App
The award-winning Curzon Memories App brings the history of the Curzon Community Cinema, Clevedon to life, in the places where it actually happened.Worked on
Nth Screen
Tim Kindberg developed Nth Screen, an innovative video sharing platform which enables groups of people to film content at the same time on multiple camera phones and watch synchronised content across multiple mobiles.
Pop-up Fleapit
The Pop-up Fleapit is an interactive Internet of Things installation that allows you to take control of cinema curtains in a shop window, so you can play at being projectionist.
The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park App
The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park, is a heritage app that celebrates over 100-years of cinema-going in Bristol city centre, now available from iTunes. The app covers 16 cinemas in and around the park, from the first moving pictures screened at the Tivoli, Broadmead in 1896 to the present day.Renowned for her innovative use of mobile technologies to bring cinema heritage to life, Charlotte combines academic expertise with hands-on creative projects.
She is the director of the Cary Comes Home Festival, established in 2014, which aims to celebrate Cary Grant's Bristol roots, develop new audiences for his films, and recreate the golden age of cinema-going. She's taken the festival to Bristol's twin city, Hannover and introduced the 2019 BFI Cary Grant season at London Southbank. This year's festival, marking Cary Grant's 120th birthday (save the dates: November 29 to December 1), focuses on his background as an acrobat and culminates with an expanding cinema screening with circus performance in the Bristol Spiegletent. She developed Raising Cary Grant an immersive actor-led theatre walk in partnership with Show of Strength Theatre Company, which explores Cary Grant's Bristol, retracing his steps as Archie Leach. This feeds into her research and publication on cinematic tourism, digital humanities, and mapping Cary Grant, thinking about stardom through the paradigm of mobilities, location and place.
She initiated the successful bid for Bristol to join the UNESCO Creative Cities Network as a City of Film in 2017 and currently stands on the steering committee, developing the Cities of Film research network to explore synergies between member cities to collaborate on research bids and projects. Charlotte is the lead for the albert Education Partnership, teaching sustainable filmmaking at UWE Bristol, and is passionate not only about sustainable production tools but also about developing a toolkit for compelling climate content on screen.
Charlotte is on the Board of Trustees of the Curzon Community Cinema, Clevedon, building on a longstanding relationship with the cinema. Her previous practice research project, her previous practice research project, funded by DCRC and a UWE Spur Early Career grant, resulted in the award-winning Curzon Memories App which was developed with Jo Reid from Calvium using the AppFurnace app development software. Visitors explore the cinema with a mobile handset that uses their GPS position and QR codes to trigger interactive site-specific media content to enhance knowledge and understanding of the exhibits. The app won the best multi-media production at the BUFVC Learning on Screen Awards 2013 and was selected for AppCircus.
The Curzon Memories project also features the Projection Hero installation, made with Tarim from Media Playgrounds, which is a miniature cinema which you can manipulate with your smartphone. The installation situates the users as a projectionist and explores the dying art of cinema projection in the digital age. 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 has now been published on iTunes App Store and Google Play. Tarim and Charlotte have since gone on to collaborate on a smaller version of this called The Fleapit.
Charlotte’s next project was part of the AHRC REACT Hub ‘Heritage Sandbox’ scheme to develop 'City Strata' a new mobile curation / authoring platform which enables users to explore different layers of Bristol’s heritage, going back to the first maps of the city in 1750. The platform aims to allow developers to create different layers or ways of experiencing the city, that their users can then enhance by uploading their own content. The platform was protoyped with the 'Cinemapping' layer – which provides a way of navigating the city and experiencing Bristol’s cinematic heritage in the spaces where it actually happened. This developed into The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park App, which explores over 100-years of cinema-going in Bristol City Centre, from the ghost of Robert Partington-Jackson, the murdered manager of the Odeon, Union Street, to Cary Grant’s childhood cinema on Clare Street. This project deepened her understanding of Cary Grant's cinematic history in Bristol, which inspired her to establish the Cary Comes Home Festival and initiate Bristol's successful application to join the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.
Charlotte was the academic partner on another REACT collaboration with studio resident Tim Kindberg called Nth Screen: a new platform for sharing synchronised video across multiple smartphones' and Nth Camera (with DCRC director Mandy Rose) a platform for filming sychronously across multiple smart devices.
Charlotte is also an expert on digital cinema, and has published on 'Digital Decay' and 'Cinema Distribution in the Age of Digital Projection' (cited in the DCMS report on the Film Policy Review).