Call for Political Remix Videos

The call for Political Remix Videos (PVRs) is open until December 25th 2011. EMBED, together with the European Cultural Foundation and the Doc Next Network, call for international PVRs. Works participating will become part of EMBED events. Some of them will be included in the Doc Next Network media collection. Since last year, EMBED has been collaborating with the Doc Next Network …

The downloadable report comes to the tablets

The exploration of both new narrative forms and possible ways of doing business for reporting and creating documentaries has started to bear fruit in the tablets, with the iPad as the principal ‘promised land’. Let’s take a look at four examples of apps. In this article I wrote for La Vanguardia four cases are shown: Money & Speed: Inside the Black Box, Condition One, Congo, …

Transmedia views: An interview with Nuno Bernardo

Nuno Bernardo is an award-winning transmedia writer/producer and creator of the world’s first international interactive on-line teen series, Sofia’s Diary. He is also the CEO of transmedia production company beActive and author of The Producer’s Guide to Transmedia. Your background is in advertising and journalism. What element or factor would you say it was decisive to setting up your company …

How can 3D worlds be used in documentaries? A review of One Millionth Tower

Kat Cizek, and her NFB team, have just launched Highrise’s latest baby: One Millionth Tower. This is the fifth experiment in four years of what is now becoming a networked documentary, rather than a simple idoc. When Highrise started at the NFB in 2008 it was described as a “multi-year, multi-media documentary” but I have to admit that the whole concept was not very clear …

A survival book on webdocs

Webdocs, a survival guide for online filmmakers may be the first book devoted to a practical view on this hot topic. His author, Matthieu Lietaert, a documentary creator himself, aims to give some tools to develop web-documentaries.

Popcorn.js and i-docs: the start of a great relationship?

A glance at popcorn.js and its possibilities for i-docs making, one week before the release of its 1.0 version at the Mozilla Festival in London. The last article posted by Arnau Gifreu on the evolution and the future of the Internet invited me to start my collaboration with i-Docs introducing the first proposals that are coming from different studios to …

“La nuit oubliee” a French web-doc for LeMonde.fr

The 17th October 1961 a group of Algerians got killed by the French police. Fifty years after the event French newspaper Le Monde commissioned Olivier Lambert et Thomas Salva (the guys behind the brilliant Breves de Trottoirs) to do a historical web-doc on such mass crime.  Have a look to La nuit oubliee, just out – and produced by a newspaper! …

Get ready to submit your projects to TFI – January 2012

The Tribeca New Media Fund will re-accept submissions in January 2012. This is what you need to know about them (from tehir website): ABOUT The TFI New Media Fund provides funding and support to non-fiction, social issue media projects which go beyond traditional screens – integrating film with content across media platforms, from video games and mobile apps to social …

Global Lives – collective production, open video

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm-VTHCPpHc&feature=relmfu]   Since 2004, getting on for a thousand filmmaker volunteers have between them recorded, translated and assembled footage following one day in the life of ten world citizens, chosen to reflect key global demographic realities. Decisions in the project are made by a collective. All the content is licensed under Creative Commons and is going to become an open archive. The …

The talented user (users as documentary agents)

The purpose of this post is to nudge discussion on the role of the user in interactive documentaries (i-docs), and specifically to consider what capabilities we might want those users to have. I shall refer to those capabilities as their ‘talents’. And I’ll begin with a suggestion that the key distinction to be made between interactive and non-interactive documentary is …

Some Thoughts on Social Change through Story-telling

In addition to their obvious contributions to non-fiction narrative media, the unique characteristics of interactive documentary may find another area of usefulness in cultural and social anthropology, especially as paradigm shifts continue to evolve regarding the power relationships between those being “studied” and those who are doing the “studying.” Beginning in the 1960s, traditional techniques for conducting ethnographic field research …