Hollow
-
The Promise and Realities of Creating Immersive Media Projects — Best Practices: A StoryCode Report
The following report on five pioneering immersive media projects — a report detailing their viewership, audience engagement and creators’ best practices — appears on Filmmaker courtesy of StoryCode, where it is crossposted. Anyone creating immersive media has run into a similar challenge: people outside of the creators’ bubble are not exactly sure what you mean by “immersive”, “interactive”, or “transmedia” experiences. Producers of this new form of media often get questions like: Where is the business model? What are the audience numbers like? How engaged are users/what is the impact? Doesn’t this just distract us from good storytelling? This article […]
by Michael Epstein and Mike Knowlton on Mar 19, 2015 -
Graphic Design: Jeff Soyk on Hollow
Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s award-winning interactive documentary Hollow employs a particularly bold use of graphics, using them to provide bursts of information quickly, to frame interview material and to even provoke calls to action. Of her approach, McMillion says, “I would provide photographs and quotes [to designer Jeff Soyk], and we would talk about what ways they would work in the piece. And then he’d do the graphic design. Below, Soyk talks about the above data visualization. Jeff Soyk, co-producer and lead designer: When reviewing the project assets, I came across Elaine’s photo of the abandoned police department in War, W. […]
by Randy Astle on Oct 20, 2014 -
Filmmakers Behind Hollow Answer Your Questions About Interactive Documentaries From Noon – 1 P.M.
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 […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 21, 2014 -
Elaine McMillion and Jeff Soyk on Hollow
Elaine McMillion, one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of Independent Film for 2013, has been keeping busy since launching her interactive doc Hollow, about life in the hard-hit county of McDowell in south-western West Virginia, in June at http://hollowdocumentary.com. It immediately earned praise and a sizeable audience; she’s since presented for events and organizations like StoryCode and Independent Film Week, and Hollow continues racking up the positive reviews. The project includes an html5 site with dozens of short videos, photographs, text, user-generated content on Instagram, and content such as videos produced by the film’s subjects, many of whom the Hollow […]
by Randy Astle on Sep 26, 2013 -
IFP Announces Filmmaker Conference Highlights
Independent Film Week is less than a month away, and today IFP announced some highlights of the event Filmmaker Conference, which will take place at Lincoln Center between September 15 and 19. The keynote speakers this year include Leviathan director Lucien Castaing-Taylor and musician and filmmaker DJ Spooky while there will be case studies of Ryan Coogler’s Sundance-winning Fruitvale Station, Penny Lane’s archival doc Our Nixon, Dave Grohl’s Sound City and Elaine McMillion’s web doc Hollow. From the press release, here’s the info that was unveiled today: Each day of the conference guides filmmakers in the art, technology and business of […]
by Nick Dawson on Aug 22, 2013 -
Should Documentary Filmmakers Learn to Code?
A decade ago, the question would have seemed outlandish, but today, interactive documentaries have established themselves as a small, but growing, genre. Born out of experimentation, interactive docs are at once hard to define and easy to recognize. Some look like films and some don’t, but all draw on the language of cinematic storytelling, even though they’re native to tablets, mobile phones and the Web. Inspired by the impact of emerging technologies on nonfiction storytelling, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department launched the Open Documentary Lab last March. As our team at the MIT OpenDocLab mapped the field and connected with […]
by Katie Edgerton on Apr 23, 2013 -
The New Digital Storytelling Series: Elaine McMillion
Last week, Filmmaker and the MIT Open Documentary Lab kicked off their collaborative series of interviews with digital storytellers with a conversation with Zeega. (For an introduction to this entire series, read “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code,” by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Sarah Wolozin.) In the second part in this series, Elaine McMillion talks about her work, mainly focusing on her interactive documentary Hollow, a “hybrid community participatory project and interactive documentary” that uses HTML5 to depict a West Virginia community via video, photography, soundscapes and interactive data. From her website, McMillion describes herself thusly: Elaine McMillion is a documentary storyteller […]
by MIT Open Documentary Lab on Mar 14, 2013
