Transmedia producers in Canada already have ways to network with and benefit from each other through organizations like the Toronto-based group Transmedia 101. But those specifically interested in creating web series just received an additional resource with the formation of the Independent Webseries Creators of Canada (or IWCC; CIWC in French). Serendipitously coinciding with the announcement of the Vancouver Web Fest, the IWCC is a nonprofit professional association that sees today’s web producers like the television pioneers of the 1940s and 50s: building a new branch of the entertainment industry in uncharted waters, but this time doing so in a …

With all the discussion about the future of Kickstarter in recent weeks, it may be appropriate that a film that began its campaign at the beginning of the crowdfunding movement is finally coming out this Saturday. The Cosmonaut — a Spanish-made English-language film directed by Nicolás Alcalá and produced by Carola Rodriguez and Bruno Teixidor — raised over €300,000 from 5,000 contributors. It was the first crowdfunded film in Spain and helped pave the way for the foundation of Lánzanos, Spain’s Kickstarter equivalent. The Cosmonaut will be available to watch for free on Saturday on the film’s website; the DVD, theatrical …

Richard Dutcher is one of the most important and accomplished directors that nobody’s heard of. Like many independent filmmakers, Dutcher is a multihyphenate: writer, director, actor, producer, editor. In the process he’s created eight feature films that span genres and styles, including romantic comedy (Girl Crazy), intense emotional drama (States of Grace), gritty gut-wrenching naturalism (Falling), supernatural horror (Evil Angel), elegant formalism (Tryptich), and even a passionate period piece with only one actress (Eliza and I). And since his 2000 film God’s Army he’s become something like the Robert Rodriguez of Utah: the most important filmmaker in a region with …

The distance between video games and cinema has been shrinking for years. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the presentation of Beyond: Two Souls last Saturday during the Tribeca Film Festival’s closing weekend, an event billed as the first time a video game has ever been shown in a film festival. Certainly in the packed SVA theater, past the red carpet for actors like Ellen Page and after the enthusiastic introduction by Tribeca’s Chief Creative Officer Geoffrey Gilmore, it felt like a convergence of the two media that we haven’t seen before. This isn’t a game based on a movie …

Trent Harris has paid his dues. The Salt Lake City-based filmmaker has made more films than he can count, mostly shorts, documentaries, and experimental films. But his narrative feature films are among the best examples of underground cult films, including three that will show tonight, tomorrow, and Friday at the 92 Street Y’s Tribeca location. Harris will be in attendance for a post-screening discussion every night. The Beaver Trilogy (Wednesday), his best-known work, is broken into three parts, each filmed years apart. The first is a documentary about Groovin’ Gary (Richard LaVon Griffith), a young man from the small town …

Since Vine was launched a little less than a year ago it’s gotten a fair amount of attention from the technology press but not as much, it seems, from filmmakers. The premise, that all films must be limited to six seconds, doesn’t lend itself to narrative films; it has, rather, been a gathering place for stop-motion animators, encouraged by its use of iOS device screens as the camera shutter, and, more famously, porn. But the app has proven nearly as popular as Twitter, which bought it last October, and just this month it became the most-downloaded free app in the …

There’s no good way to summarize the plethora of information presented last Saturday at TFI Interactive, a full-day conference held, for the second time, during the Tribeca Film Festival. Organized by the omnipresent Ingrid Kopp (who was recently interviewed by the MIT Open Documentary Lab), the day took place at the IAC Building in lower Manhattan, not far from most of the festival’s screenings and the Storyscapes interactive exhibits that Kopp also curated. Over 20 presentations covered dozens of individual projects, discussed entities like Kickstarter, the NFB, and IDFA DocLabs, and included panel discussions on creating adventure video games (think The …

This image is from Empire Uncut, part of the Star Wars Uncut project and one of the five projects at the Tribeca Film Festival’s first juried exhibit of interactive video projects, which ran this week at the Bombay Sapphire House of Imagination on Varick Street. TFI has been supporting digital, transmedia, and multimedia projects for years through programs like its New Media Fund and hackathons, and now TFI’s Director of Digital Initiatives Ingrid Kopp (who was recently interviewed by Filmmaker) has found a way to bring some projects into a physical space to coincide with the film festival in lower …

The most encouraging aspect of POV’s third hackathon, which wrapped with a public presentation Sunday night, was the social commitment of the five projects. When they hit close to home, events like Monday’s bombing in Boston can make you step back and reevaluate your work, its purpose and meaning. So it was gratifying, a day earlier, to see how committed the hackathon teams were to remedying some kind of societal problem, including some situated half a world away. Over two days the participants worked together to use new technologies to make real strides against issues like homelessness, war, and the …

Buzz about the second screen is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, as this recent (and, for me, incredibly thought-provoking) Filmmaker article by Scott Macaulay shows. Coordinating content on two devices to play (in any sense of that word) simultaneously, which some have called “orchestrated media,” is one of the next big things, and it’s causing content creators to search for new ways to make their dual-screen programs stand out. First, as that article points out, it requires new mental paradigms for filmmakers/digital storytellers as they plan and execute their work. But second, and just as important, it requires the technological means to …