Interactive
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POV Launches Interactive Shorts Including Empire:Cradle
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 […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 16, 2014 -
What to See from the Tribeca Film Festival Online
Screenings have just kicked off in Manhattan for the Tribeca Film Festival, but as always not all the films are showing in theaters–and there’s more available online this year than ever before. Here’s a quick guide to what you can see and how to see it. Streaming select titles: Four feature films and four shorts will be online after their initial theatrical screenings this week and next; they’ll also be eligible for an audience choice award with prize money totaling $15,000. All of Tribeca’s online material discussed below, including these eight films, is available at http://tribecafilm.com/online. The short films include: * Love in […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 19, 2014 -
Five Questions With Last Hijack Directors Femke Wolting and Tommy Pallotta
Femke Wolting & Tommy Pallotta’s experimental doc Last Hijack sees the venn-diagramming of a rigorous interview style and breakout swatches of rotoscoped animation, ala Waking Life (which Pallotta produced.) In lieu of philosophical digressions or convoluted dream sequences, the filmmakers use animation to depict the unfilmable: nailbiting raids by Somali pirates, led by one Mohamed Nura, who casually recounts his adventures to the filmmakers between mouthfuls of khat. Never feeling doctrinaire, the film takes an earnest stab at correcting the way the West considers seaside piracy, delineating a cycle of corruption and violence starting with Mohamed’s father. Wolting and Pallotta […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Mar 14, 2014 -
The Digital Storytelling Lab’s Archive Project
The Digital Storytelling Lab, the Ira Deutchman-run collaborative at Columbia University, is on the hunt for projects. Any form or function, your work or one of historical relevance, that makes enticing use of data. Why? Because the Digital Storytelling Lab wants to archive them. Though their mission is to “design stories for the 21st century,” the Lab is also keen to maintain the foundations modern technology expounds upon, as they examine its democratization’s role in altering the relationship between creator and audience. If you’d like to participate, fill out a form with three projects over at their site.
by Sarah Salovaara on Feb 21, 2014 -
Zero Point: An Interactive Documentary Made For Oculus Rift
Zero Point, a meta-documentary about the virtual reality industry, is about to remove the popular practice of 3D filmmaking from theaters. Founded by Oscar-nominated director Danfung Dennis, the tech company Condition One has created the first film to be viewed with Oculus Rift, those nifty goggles made for 3D gaming. The virtual reality headset will allow the viewer to control the visuals through movement — effectively positioning the audience as a character, or even a real-time cinematographer, in the film. Condition One plans to project Zero Point on “the inside of an imaginary sphere, surrounding a viewer with an [Oculus] Rift headset,” according […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Feb 20, 2014 -
Patrick Wang’s The Grief of Others Accompanied By iBook Detailing Production Process
Patrick Wang, who made our 25 New Faces list in 2012 with the release of his debut film, In The Family, is gearing up to shoot his sophomore picture, The Grief of Others, based on the novel by Leah Hager Cohen. Starring Rachel Dratch, Wendy Moniz and Trevor St. John, the film examines the grieving process of a couple who lose their child 57 hours after his birth. In accordance with the the production process, Wang and author David Chien will maintain a regularly updated multimedia and interactive iBook entitled, “Post Script: The Making of the Film, The Grief of Others.” With […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Feb 18, 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 -
The New York Times’ Year in Transmedia
As a tactile person with a Gen Y attention span, my preferred way of ingesting long form news is with a paper in hand. Make no mistake, I am prone to half-hearted cheating attempts: packed in a subway car, I’ll scroll through The New York Times app with one eye trained on the passing station, comprehending every other topic sentence. With the 24-hour news cycle and a tech-friendly public that is increasingly immune to putting up its feet and paging through a periodical front to back, The Times has found a way to fully utilize the electronic format, giving it […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 3, 2014 -
Femke Wolting on Submarine Channel and the Online Documentary Unspeak
George Orwell claimed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” that English was in a bad way: common consensus (which he was satirizing) held “that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.” His own opinion was more that “the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.” Thus it could be resisted: “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and […]
by Randy Astle on Nov 12, 2013 -
Taking Horror Interactive: Neal Edelstein on Haunting Melissa
As the producer of films like The Ring and Mulholland Drive, Neal Edelstein is no stranger to horror films and thrillers. And with his new project, Haunting Melissa, he’s moved beyond traditional pictures with his first immersive production for iPad and iPhone. Available for free in the App Store, Haunting Melissa centers around the search for a girl who vanished from the farmhouse where her mother had earlier gone insane, but this story is told in a succession of videos released to the viewer in seemingly random bursts. The temporal extension – and unexpected timing – of the narrative through these push notifications […]
by Randy Astle on Oct 30, 2013
