Storyscapes
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Tribeca 2017: A Review of Tribeca Immersive
Alongside the Tribeca Film Festival’s film screenings and live events, the Tribeca Immersive exhibit at 50 Varick Street has been regularly packed full of attendees, with the enthusiasm of everyone from industry veterans to neophytes who have never seen a VR project before filling the space with energy. The event’s organizers, led by Ingrid Kopp, have done a stellar job in curating an excellent and diverse group of virtual reality and interactive projects from around the world, making Tribeca a leading global venue for new VR on par with Sundance or any other festival that includes virtual reality. I was gratified to see […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 30, 2017 -
Tribeca 2016: Making Guy Maddin’s Seances Interactive
Watching Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s latest work Seances feels both familiar and utterly strange. Born from the knowledge that over 80% of silent movies have been lost, Maddin and his collaborators at the NFB wanted to resurrect as many titles — both real and invented — as possible: first in 2012 in production sessions at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Phi Centre in Montreal that were open to the public, then last year in the feature film The Forbidden Room, and now in an interactive version called Seances that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes event and is […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 25, 2016 -
Tribeca 2016: Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill on their VR Piece The Ark
One of the most moving exhibits in New York last year was a lone Galapagos tortoise in a corner of the American Museum of Natural History. Lonesome George was the last Pinta Island tortoise in the world, and after he died in 2012 the only way to encounter this entire species was to view his mounted form through glass in a museum. With a mass extinction at least as great as the one that killed the dinosaurs happening all around us, many other species will soon be visible only in the same way. But now Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma, a […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 19, 2016 -
Guy Maddin on The Saddest Music in The World and His Interactive Seances
It only seemed fitting that Portland-based folk musician Michael Hurley would perform a short set of sad songs before the screening of Guy Maddin’s 2003 experimental melodrama The Saddest Music in the World on Friday, March 25 at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland. Maddin himself was in attendance for the sold-out screening, which was presented as part of the Hollywood’s Mississippi Records Music & Film Series. In introducing the film, Maddin said it was a treat to “show this movie I barely remember making. I think what I recall is the movie is about a sad song contest, so Michael [Hurley], I […]
by Paula Bernstein on Mar 29, 2016 -
PowerPoint Transmedia: Choose Your Own Documentary
The Storyscapes section of the Tribeca Film Festival this year was a bit like an oversized playground. Housed in multiple stories of a lofty Tribeca building, the transmedia installations were interspersed with Bombay toting waiters and bars. The majority of the exhibitions I took part in involved Oculus Rift: if you angled your head just so, the “camera” would pan accordingly to reveal another person, object, space, et cetera, much like a video game. One selection that I was sad to miss was Choose Your Own Documentary, which was slotted four times during Storyscapes, since it was not just a transmedia documentary but also a live, interactive show. 1566 variations of Chose Your Own […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jun 30, 2014 -
Storyscapes: Tribeca Goes Interactive
This image is from Empire Uncut, part of the Star Wars Uncut project and one of the five projects at the Tribeca Film Festival’s first juried exhibit of interactive video projects, which ran this week at the Bombay Sapphire House of Imagination on Varick Street. TFI has been supporting digital, transmedia, and multimedia projects for years through programs like its New Media Fund and hackathons, and now TFI’s Director of Digital Initiatives Ingrid Kopp (who was recently interviewed by Filmmaker) has found a way to bring some projects into a physical space to coincide with the film festival in lower […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 23, 2013
