A new website has launched called WeVee with the aim of opening up West Midlands based archive footage.
You can edit clips together through the sites interface to create your own "WeVee's", this one is a nice example showing the changes in transport over the region:
Pros: Great tool for school kids, nice simple editing tools.
Cons: No easy way to download clips to edit offline.
Full press release below:
"WeVee is a new unique, online tool. It gives anyone the chance to view clips from the region’s fantastic archive collections of film and video, edit them to music tracks and make a short ‘mash-up’ (two and a half minutes max) as your personal take on the region’s history. Try out different effects by mixing the original sound of your selected clips to music.
This approach deliberately uses the latest digital technology as an incentive for the next generation to explore their region’s history. And that history will reflect the different communities, as well as the struggles and successes the region has experienced. The beauty of WeVee, thanks to our region’s archive holders, is the richness of the moving image archive. There is footage from as early as 1901 and as recent as just five years ago, so you can put quite different clips together, add a music track and effects and create your own WeVee. Initial trials have shown the process has a very personal appeal for children, students, parents and silver surfers, because you can use WeVee to say something about yourself, your home and locality and reference past events that mean something for you today.
The ease with which you can WeVee means you can have fun as you create and save, create and change, create and delete while playing with moving images from the past. It’s fun to WeVee, and at the same time it gives you a truly unique opportunity to marvel at how the region has been captured on camera. Cadbury’s have generously made some of their previously unseen archive available for the site. Other archive includes footage from the Staffordshire Film Archive collection accessing the heritage of the potteries and the Midlands Archive for Central England.
WeVee’s official launch is in January 2010. At this stage you’ll be able to share your WeVees, not just on the WeVee Gallery but across social networking sites.
In the meantime you can visit our website www.wevee.co.uk to register for updates and follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/weveecreate
The project is supported through Screen West Midlands’ Digital Film Archive Fund with support from the National Lottery through the UK Film Council."