Two years ago a team surrounding journalists Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof and producer Maro Chermayeff released a four-hour documentary and multimedia project called Half the Sky, a companion to WuDunn’s and Kristof’s book of the same name. It dealt with basic human rights issues for women, focusing on topics like women’s healthcare, domestic violence and rape, and girls’ education in countries like Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Somaliland, and Cambodia, and I wrote a piece for Filmmaker about its transmedia components and outreach efforts. Late last year WuDunn and Kristof released their follow-up book, A Path Appears, shifting their focus from women in extreme […]

It seems that everywhere you look these days festivals and conferences for new media are springing up, and one of the fastest growing is Miami’s FilmGate Interactive, running this year from February 1-8. Now in its third year, FilmGate has already hosted numerous screenings, presentations, workshops, and works-in-progress. One of last year’s presenters, Jake Price, showed an early version of his new project The Invisible Season, about the Japanese tsunami and nuclear accident, that went on to screen at the New York Film Festival. Other past presenters have included POV Interactive and the NFB, and this year individuals like Murmur’s Mike […]

Since 1988 transmediale has been one of Europe’s premiere events for showcasing transmedia and technology for art and narrative and nonfiction storytelling. Director Kristoffer Gansing (who spoke with Filmmaker last year) and his team continue to assemble cutting-edge films, installations, performances, workshops, and other events, turning the House of World Cultures in Berlin into a hub for all things new media. It runs this week from January 28 through February 1, and I spoke with a number of artists who are presenting video-based pieces at the festival. British artist Vicki Bennett has been working under the name People Like Us since […]

My knowledge of Cuban cinema is limited to a handful of films — one or two native productions and works by foreigners like Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club and Michael Rubbo’s Waiting for Fidel. So my interest was aroused when President Obama announced his administration’s change in policy regarding Cuba. The political ramifications of the President’s policies are, of course, extremely personal for Cuban-Americans, and discussions about the politics of the announcement and human-rights issues in Cuba are occurring across the nation(s). While not disregarding these discussions, I wanted to take a moment to look at the possibilities normalized relations might create […]

Glen Keane made me want to make movies. As a head animator at Disney from the 1970s until just a few years ago, when he left to create his own company, Keane created iconic characters like Ariel, Aladdin, and Tarzan, plus gorgeously drawn animals like the bear in The Fox and the Hound and the eagle Marahute in The Rescuers Down Under. But what held me spellbound was the moment when the Beast — his character — and James Baxter’s Belle walked into the computer-animated ballroom during the title song of Beauty and the Beast: I’d never seen anything like that before, and I […]

A year and a half ago the Tribeca Film Institute launched the TFI Sandbox, an online resource for documentary transmedia projects with connections to the New Media Fund and other real-world resources. Since then the Sandbox has helped produce some amazing work, such as Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s Hollow, and last week the site received an upgrade, which you can check out here. The new Sandbox, essentially a more robust version of the previous iteration, features everything from introductory information for those just testing the waters of interactive nonfiction to specific funding, technology, and festival/distribution resources for those at work on […]

Björk has been releasing Biophilia, in one way or another, for over three years now, transforming what could have simply been yet another album into a master class on multi-platform releases and extended community-building endeavors. In October 2011 the album came out–though she had begun working on it as early as 2008 and had released its first single that June–and broke ground for the artist as a multilayered concept album dealing with the environment, ecology, and economics, all presented in a highly textured sonic envelope of electronica. Tight on the album’s heels came some remixes, released together in the 2012 album […]

The most notable moment of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival arguably occurred over 6,000 miles away from downtown Manhattan in the Virunga National Park, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Two days before Orlando von Einsiedel premiered his film Virunga — a stunning documentary about the park and rangers’ attempts to protect its wildlife from poachers, civil war, and a billion-dollar oil company — park director Emmanuel de Merode was ambushed and shot while driving alone in his car. He survived the ordeal and has returned to work, but the moment highlighted the issues the film explores, primarily environmental […]

“Every single pixel should testify directly to content.” So says Edward Tufte, a professor emeritus at Yale and pioneer in the field of data visualization. And if this emphasis on clarity and, essentially, story is true in the world of static infographics, it’s exponentially so when content comes at 24 frames per second. In the short PBS film The Art of Data Visualization, Tufte reaches far back in time, before the mundane pie charts and bar graphs that school children are taught to decipher, finding the beginnings of data visualization in stone-age cartography and the rise of science during the […]