Part conference, part festival – and packed with live events, workshops, parties, and even a “Tech Playground” – FilmGate Interactive uniquely combines cutting edge storytelling with a laidback Miami Beach vibe. I must admit, after reading my colleague Randy Astle’s fascinating interview with FilmGate Interactive founder and executive director Diliana Alexander, my mind’s bar was set high for this young transmedia fest, but this three-year-old event still managed to exceed my expectations and then some. Along with an enthusiastic grassroots team, producer/programmer Alexander — a world traveling Bulgarian and recent Miami transplant — has an uncanny knack for making FilmGate […]

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 […]

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 […]

Regarding her eccentrically beautiful messaging app Somebody, Miranda July has posted this video with Carrie Brownstein about its v.2. “Over the next few months we will be making Somebody 2.0,” she writes. “It’s just like Somebody 1.0 but it works.” If you don’t know about Somebody, it’s an iOS app (Android coming, says July in this video) that allows you to send a communication to someone via a nearby third party, who delivers that message in person. Still confused? Well, Somebody was the subject of a new podcast, Reply All — the second from podcasting startup Gimlet Media. Watch above […]

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 […]

“There are a lot of things I like about your project, but the effects on the videos are not one of them.” “How is this different from Second Life?” “Your video — it’s kind of boring.” Participating in a hackathon, like POV’s which wrapped Sunday, Nov. 9, means opening yourself up to blunt feedback. Forty-eight hours of project development and rapid prototyping, POV’s hackathons pair documentary filmmakers with mentors and programmers and task them with extending non-fiction storytelling beyond the cinema (or television) walls. This month’s event — POV’s seventh — concluded with the five selected teams presenting their projects […]

Access is always an issue with documentary, creating unique challenges in war zones or similar areas where filmmakers would be in physical danger or simply cannot go. The documentary Last Hijack, produced by Submarine Channel and directed by Femke Wolting and Tommy Pallotta, doesn’t just deal with these issues but makes them one of the film’s greatest strengths. In documenting piracy in Somalia, the filmmakers turned to techniques like animation — Pallotta produced both Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly — to show what could not be filmed, and then went one step further by creating an interactive documentary to accompany the traditional linear film. […]

POV, America’s longest running television showcase for non-fiction films, is wading into interactive waters. Yesterday, the doc powerhouse launched an online, short-form transmedia section, with six projects, four of which were created by Hackathon alumni, and three of which will be premiering at NYFF’s Convergence sidebar in the ensuing weeks. The works are driven by timelines, geography, and photography, but my hands down favorite, Empire:Cradle, is fueled by a transcendent moral code. One in a series of four shorts that probes the ramifications of Dutch colonialism, Cradle is shot on location at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport. Pairing clusters of bystanders who watch the takeoffs and […]