This is a brief post-mortem on my last interactive live event at a small interactive festival in Miami called FilmGate 2014. Over the past year, I have been focusing on a few core principles in my work. These are not rules, but questions I return to when making a piece of immersive/interactive work. Rules/audience agency. When we go to a movie, we know the rules. Sit in the dark, eat our popcorn, watch. When designing a new experience, it’s important to communicate the rules to your audience so they can let go of their minds and get immersed. Along with this, […]
Yesterday IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced that an annual lab for web series will be added to its existing programs for narrative and documentary films. The Web Storytellers Sidebar, part of IFP’s RBC Emerging Storytellers program, is designed to promote web series through an in-depth consultation during Independent Film Week in September, with additional logistical support extending beyond. Up to five series–in any stage of development, production, or post–will be selected to participate in the conference, which constitutes the largest meetings-based film forum in the United States. As part of their acceptance, the projects also will have exclusive access to additional IFP web series […]
The TFI New Media Fund issued its annual call for submissions today with a deadline May 5. From the press release: The TFI New Media Fund provides funding and support to non-fiction, social issue media projects that go beyond traditional screens—integrating video with content across media platforms, from video games and mobile apps to social networks and interactive websites. We’re looking for projects that activate audiences around issues of contemporary social justice and equality around the world and demonstrate the power of cross-platform storytelling and dynamic audience engagement. Projects can be in any stage from advanced development to production or […]
Film hackathons are spreading. Tribeca Hacks is hosting its first international event in Geneva March 15-19 and now POV, which has been running a successful hackathon in New York since 2012, is expanding to Los Angeles. Under the direction of Adnaan Wasey (speaking at a Tribeca interactive event above), POV is running two consecutive events on each coast, at the Center for Social Innovation in Manhattan on May 10-11 and at Hub LA (in collaboration with CreatorUp!) in California on May 17-18. Applications for both events have the same deadline: 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on Wednesday March 26. Applications […]
The Festival of (In)appropriation, a celebration of “contemporary short audiovisual works that appropriate film or video footage and repurpose it in “inappropriate and inventive ways” is the brainchild of co-founder and co-curator Jaimie Baron (who, not inappropriately, has a book on found-footage filmmaking coming out soon). Presented by Los Angeles Filmforum (no relation to NYC’s Film Forum – more like the West Coast’s answer to Anthology Film Archives, as for close to four decades it’s been L.A.’s longest-running organization dedicated to experimental film and animation, docs and video art) the annual event is now in its sixth year. For more […]
Online dating takes an offline twist in FutureMate, the latest transmedia extravaganza to premiere at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Created by Gyda Arber, Brian Fountain, David Gochfeld and Allen Hahn – all veteran artists whose work spans multiple platforms – FutureMate is set in a post-apocalyptic U.S. where fertile mates are at a premium. Fortunately, hosts Matt and Pam are there to guide audience members through the new and improved, meet-your-match system, which consists of phone-based speed dating and a “series of ice breakers.” (And for those not in NYC for the extended three-week, February run – which […]
A three-time Webby Award winner and a 2009 World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader,” who has exhibited at MoMA and built the world’s largest time capsule with Yahoo!, Jonathan Harris can now add the firestarters IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling – for his latest interactive project I Love Your Work – to his esteemed CV. In it Harris invites us on an online journey not to the Arctic Ocean with Alaskan Eskimos – as he did in his previous piece, The Whale Hunt – but into the lives of nine women residing in a much hotter climate, that of the […]
The interactive documentary is on the rise. Elaine McMillion Sheldon, one of our 25 New Faces, found that countless filmmakers were after her advice on crafting this intricate new medium following the release of Hollow, her comprehensive portrait of small-town West Virginia. As such, McMillion Sheldon and her team — including Sound Designer Billy Wirasnik, Technical Director and Senior Developer Robert Hall, and Art Director/Designer and Architect Jeff Soyk — thought to hold a Google Hangout, in which interested parties can have their questions about fundraising, community building, design, development and other building blocks of the interactive documentary, fielded from those who’ve experienced the […]
Even though technology-focused artist Jonathan Harris has a project at Sundance New Frontier — I Love Your Work, a documentary about the makers of lesbian porn experienced in your own private viewing booth — he’s been stuck. Creatively stuck, that is. And at Transom, he’s penned (and illustrated) an essay, “Navigating Stuckness,” that is both a meditation on creative block as well as, writes the site, “an autobiographical journey with teachable moments.” He’s broken down the stages of his creativity by years, tracking his life alongside projects like the data visualization work We Feel Fine, the storytelling platform Cowbird and […]
Director Michelangelo Frammartino unveiled his latest project at Den Frie Center for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen in November. Alberi, his stunning 26-minute video installation, which first screened at MoMA P.S.1 last spring, was receiving its European premiere at CPH:DOX, a festival that awarded its top prize to his second feature, Le Quattro Volte, in 2010. Like that film, Alberi is a hybrid work that combines documentary and staged performance, but operates in the space between video installation and cinema. It describes a mysterious ritual from the southern region of the filmmaker’s native Italy that is well known but little understood. […]