BBC’s Creative Archive wins a BAFTA

The BBC’s ‘Open Earth‘ Creative Archive project has won a BAFTA for ‘Interactive Innovation’. This is good news for the project, which released a load of nature-related video and audio clips under a Creative-Commons inspired license, and will hopefully act as a spur for the BBC to get on with releasing a far greater volume of meaningful content.

The Open Earth archive contains just 239 bits of media, and whilst some are pretty spactacular, many are fairly humdrum and useful only as stock photography or VJ wallpaper material. Most of the video clips seem to either be silent, or contain the mixed-in voiceover, neither of which is particularly useful if you want to use the material to re-tell some kind of narrative. In some cases, such as aerial shots, this can be blamed on the lack of any sync-sound when recording, but when you hear David Attenborough narrating over a natural soundtrack, it would clearly be more useful to any would-be remixers to have both the voiceover and the wild track as seperated audio channels.

I’ve no doubt that the Creative Archive project will have seen plenty of downloads of their material, but so far I’ve seen little evidence of the content having been either remixed by other people or even simply re-distributed. The news feed on the Creative Archive site hasn’t yet showcased a single third-party re-use of the content, or even linked out to blogs discussing the project like this one. If the project is to be a real success, it needs to engage more with the communities it is trying to encourage, and be a bit braver with the material it’s releasing. Why not get involved at the commissioning stage with a tv show - perhaps a documentary - and get it written into contracts from the outset that all material, including the finished programme and all the rushes, get released under the Creative Archive license?

The project is still in pilot stage, and will face an inevitable ‘review’ in October later this year. The BBC should be proud of what the project has achieved so far (including the BAFTA), but treat it as a catalyst for a much bigger change in the way it distributes material to the public, rather than being content with the meagre aspirations of the project as it currently stands.

Oh and just because I can, here’s a photo of a snail, released under the Creative Archive licence, credit: BBC.

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