Transmedia
Filmmaking - Transmedia
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Jessica Oreck on her new Web Series, This Working Man
Less than three months since she premiered her documentary, Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, at the Tribeca Film Festival, Jessica Oreck is both on the road and back with new work. This Working Man is a web project combining video portraiture, travel, and crowdsourced curation. From the project’s website: This Working Man is a series of short portraits of men at work. It is about practiced motion, kinetic movement, bodies, and forms. It is about a particular type of man: exceedingly capable, strong, confident, and diligent. The project is a search for humble masculinity and an unapologetic admittance of […]
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Going Digital in the Desert: Currents 2013 New Media Festival
Perhaps the one word that best describes the Currents New Media Festival, an annual event hosting an international array of artists that steams into Santa Fe for the last half of June, is “overwhelming.” This year cutting edge-curious New Mexicans and tourists alike are being treated to futuristic video installations and interactive artwork, art-apps and animation, multimedia performances and experimental documentaries (including Denis Côté’s disturbing study in the banality of human evil towards animals, Bestiaire) – all taking place inside El Museo Cultural, a cavernous warehouse in the Railyard District. Then there are the satellite happenings. Digital Dome screenings – […]
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What Indie Filmmakers Need to Know About Mobile Video Viewing
As of January 2013, comScore reports that 129.4 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, accounting for more than half (55%) of mobile devices. A recent study by Harris Interactive for Telly, a social networking video service, conducted with 2,000 smartphone users projects that 78 million mobile device owners watch videos on their smartphones. One of the study’s surprise findings is that Apple’s iOS devices do not dominate the mobile video viewing market. Rather, Android devices are viewed by nearly one-half (46%), while Apple captured only a little more then a third (36%) while a little more than a tenth […]
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What Does Xbox One Mean for Independent Filmmakers?
Right now the answer is not entirely clear. The Xbox One, which was unveiled in a presentation last week, represents Microsoft’s latest bid for domination of the living room through a single multipurpose device. It’s not a complete reinvention of the Xbox brand, but it integrates and advances several technologies Microsoft has been working on over the years. Microsoft’s accompanying efforts to expand away from hardcore gaming into other areas of entertainment such as streaming video make it a viable contender to the PS4, Apple TV, and other devices/platforms. Here’s the video of the device’s entire reveal. The discussion of […]
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The New Digital Storytelling Series: Caspar Sonnen
For the final installment of Filmmaker and the MIT Open Documentary Lab’s interview project with the foremost thinkers on transmedia, IDFA DocLab’s Caspar Sonnen answers our questions. Sonnen is the new media coordinator for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and curator of the festival’s IDFA DocLab, a competition program for new forms of documentary and interactive storytelling. In 2008, Sonnen founded IDFA DocLab to create a platform for interactive and multimedia documentary storytelling that expands the genre beyond traditional cinema. Besides his work at IDFA, he is co-founder and programmer of the Open Air Film Festival Amsterdam. For an […]
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Canadian Web Series Creators Organize
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 […]
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Crowdfunding a Transmedia Phenomenon: Director Nicolás Alcalá on The Cosmonaut
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 […]
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The New Digital Storytelling Series: D. Fox Harrell
In the penultimate part of Filmmaker and the MIT Open Documentary Lab’s interview project with prominent transmedia figures, D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Digital Media in the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, answers our questions. Harrell’s research explores the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. He develops new forms of social media, gaming, computational narrative, and related computational media systems based in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. The National Science Foundation has recognized Harrell with an NSF CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He has worked […]
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The New Digital Storytelling Series: Katerina Cizek
In the tenth part of Filmmaker‘s interview project with prominent figures from the world of transmedia, conducted through the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Katerina Cizek gives her take on the way digital technology is shaping contemporary storytelling. Cizek is currently the director of the NFB’s HIGHRISE project, exploring new forms and new approaches to content. HIGHRISE is a multi-year, many media series of projects. You can see it at highrise.nfb.ca and her previous project Filmmaker-in-Residence at filmmaker.nfb.ca. For an introduction to this entire series, and links to all the installments so far, check out “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code,” by MIT […]
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Solving Storytelling Problems at Tribeca Hacks
Technology-centered hackathons identify real-world problems and then attempt to solve them through rapid prototyping. Artistic hackathons — 48-Hour Playwriting contests and the like — use compressed time periods to stave off creators’ perennial demons (procrastination, usually manifested by a compulsive desire to clean one’s apartment). But hackathons that merge the creative with the artistic pose unique challenges. There’s the artistic element, the technology element and then also the fusion of the two, which is actually a third thing entirely. Storytelling craft, choice of content but also appropriateness and originality of UI and methods of engagement all become the criteria by […]
