Media Planet at Byline Festival

With a plethora of stories to be told and adventures to be explored your festival becomes the news. The House of Fairy Tales is creating children’s tent at Byline Festival into “Media Planet” a playful dispatch office (complete with ringing phones, busy type writers, the Living Wall of incoming news, and a stage framed as a television).

Media Planet would be a children’s activity hub from which during the day they will be engaged in creative playful activities based within or just outside the tent, (with room to incorporate the writing workshops already scheduled):

✎ Sport, fashion, comedy and news (if not history) will be made during led sessions

✎ The office will always need to be ‘manned’ with phones to an- swer, reports to be typed or illustrated, forms to be stamped and general game play to be had

✎ With the news not writing itself Media Planet will give young people missions to engage with around the festival in order to find the latest and greatest news stories, and event reviews of the festival fun.

The day’s investigations, imaginations and discoveries will then be presented in our interactive Six O’Clock Show, live on stage, where the day’s news will be combed over and mixed with a healthy dose of creative mayhem and audience participation.

The news and views of your youngest festival goers will then be published online in our inter-dimensional playper: The HofT Examiner, for a child’s eye view of the weekend and a precious memento for the next generations’ budding journalists and their grown-ups 

OUTWARD BOUND WORSKHOPS AND GAMES

Tim Ireland, Director of Youthful Enthusiasm, will be running a series of workshops aimed at teenagers, young adults and the young at heart, including: 

The Secret of Fire: Mastering fire by understanding it at a molecular and atomic level is far easier than it sounds, so we will move swiftly on to using knowledge of pyrolysis to create the perfect fire lighter from safe and natural materials. This will allow you to ignite kindling from a single spark like a wizard.

Water Rocket Science: Design and build your own 2L water 'bottle rocket' to compete in our launch challenge on a 100m range. Every rocket built will be launched on a 45-degree trajectory at 45 psi. What happens next, including how far you get, is up to you.

The Obstacle Course Course: Learn how to build a 'spider web' obstacle course with nothing but string and a few bells and whistles, then challenge all comers to take it on.

Basic Navigation: Know where north is, no matter where you are or what the weather is like, and have a good idea of what to do once you've got your bearings.

Night Games: Join us for a lighthearted game of hunting other humans in the woods. Hunters in each game will be armed with PlayStation guns converted into powerful torches. We will also have a very special smuggling game one night called 'War on Christmas': teams will build roughly 50-100 gifts in their colour, which they then smuggle into the woods and must fight to protect in a hostile, unregulated environment. Many valuable life lessons to be learned.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

There will be a range of other diversions and fun activities including our climbing wall with experienced instructors