Victoria Mapplebeck

 

Victoria is a BAFTA award winning artist and director, who has worked in film, VR and immersive audio. Victoria’s works explore autobiographical stories which ask universal questions about our relationship with technology, parenting, health and wellbeing.

Victoria has been experimenting with the frontiers of documentary and creative technology for the last two decades. In 1999, she wrote and directed Smart Hearts, Channel 4’s first interactive documentary series, in which web cams streamed live from the subjects homes for over 18 months. Her multi platform creative works explore the many ways in which interactive and immersive technologies are evolving, exposing new content to fresh audiences on new platforms

a radical collaborative piece of Art

In 2014, Victoria wrote and directed TEXT ME an award winning interactive arts project produced in partnership with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. TEXT ME is a live and online platform which creates an evolving and living archive in which users are encouraged to collect, curate and share stories from their digital past. TEXT ME won The Merging Media Prize for Best European Cross platform Project and The 2014 Pixel Lab Prize. It was also featured in Wired magazine and selected for University UK’s 20 Ideas for Life

More recently, Victoria has begun to specialise in smartphone production and making short form online video with impact. In 2015, Victoria filmed and directed 160 Characters a smartphone short for Film London. Shot entirely on an iPhone 6, 160 Characters brings to life the secrets buried in a vintage Nokia. It won the Best Documentary Award at the 2017 Short of the Week Film Awards and was short listed for the Innovation category of the 2016 AHRC Research in Film Awards. When the film launched online it received a Vimeo Staff pick and has since gathered over a million online hits.

In 2017, Victoria shot and directed Missed Call, a smartphone short which explores her relationship with her teenage son as they work out how to reconnect with his absent father. Missed Call was the first commissioned short film to be shot on the iPhone X .It won Best Short Form Programme at the 2019 BAFTAs, Best Documentary Short at The 2019 Broadcast Digital Awards and Best Social Media Short Award at the 2018 AHRC Research in Film Awards.

In 2019, Victoria was awarded a EPSRC Immersive Documentary Encounters Commission, to create a VR project which tells the story of her breast cancer (as patient and film-maker) from diagnosis through treatment to recovery. The Waiting Room VR piece is part of a wider project which also includes a 30 min smartphone short funded by Guardian Films. The Waiting Room VR premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival and won The IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling . The Waiting Room Film and VR project also featured on BBC Click.

Victoria also received a WFTV Pat Llewellyn bursary to develop Motherboard, a smartphone feature documentary she is currently developing which explores the stories and secrets hidden in the mobile phones she’s owned over the last two decades.

Victoria has enjoyed teaching Film and Digital Media students throughout her career as a multi platform artist and director. She is currently a Professor in Digital Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London where she runs the MA in Digital Documentary.

Contact Victoria

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