Qualified (Ambtítol). The university, subject of debate.

By Carles Sora and Neus Ballús In recent years, the number of people with university qualifications has been enormously increasing. In a society in which each new academic year sees more university degree holders, it is important to reflect on the role that university plays in our lives. Ambtítol is a compilation of the experiences of several former university students; …

Interactive documentary – what does it mean and why does it matter?

Having just convened our fourth i-Docs symposium, it feels like an opportune moment to reflect on what is meant by ‘interactive documentary’ and why we at i-Docs have always seen it as a way of framing a set of possibilities, as opposed to being a specific medium, genre or platform. This seems prescient in light of the ‘immersive turn’ with interactive …

Webdocs for social change: a guest post from Carles Sora

Original text written by Carles Sora for CCCB LAB Blog (2014) and republished with permission. Over the past few years we’ve seen the emergence of online interactive documentaries, a documentary sub-genre that straddles documentary practice and interactive design. These webdocs are now attracting the interest of European authors, festivals, producers and television networks. In late May, the DocsBarcelona documentary festival organised a …

The Quipu Project: a framework for participatory interactive documentary

Chaka Studio demonstrated their Quipu Project at Sheffield Doc Fest yesterday morning during the continued interactive talks. The session was a great opportunity to catch up with the projects progress since the React Hub Future Documentary Sandbox and gauge the reaction from the wider documentary community. The interactive documentary focuses on the case of forced sterilisation in Peru, which affected …

The Awra Amba Experience: collaboration, crowd-funding and community

The Awra Amba Experience is an incredible project which I first encountered at i-Docs 2012, where Paulina Tervo (project producer/director/lead) presented the initial stages of the interactive documentary and introduced us to this inspiring community. Two years on and the project is nearing the end of a crowd-funding campaign that aims to get the interactive documentary finished and online. I …

A Short History of the Highrise: the debut of the immersive, interactive multimedia series

The New York Times’s Op-Docs and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) have debuted their immersive, interactive multimedia series, A Short History of the Highrise yesterday. Optimised for tablet and comprised of videos on urban highrise living, the series had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival and launched yesterday on NYTimes.com. Incase you weren’t aware already, the series …

My Neck of the Woods: part documentary, part performance, part live-stream online video experience.

This Friday and Saturday, Manchester teenagers are set to tell their own real-life stories through live transmissions from the streets of the city. My Neck of the Woods, a collaboration between Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre and BAFTA winning interactive artists Blast Theory,  is part documentary, part performance, part live-stream online video experience. The online experience will see young people from the Exchange’s Truth About …

Fort McMoney: Two years of research, 60 days of shooting, 50 interviews.

More exciting news from the NFB today; on November 25, TOXA and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), in association with ARTE, will launch Fort McMoney (fortmcmoney.com), a trilingual (English, French and German) interactive documentary game about the issues facing Fort McMurray, Alberta. Created by David Dufresne. an independent journalist and documentarian who was also behind the well-known interactive documentary Prison Valley. Fort McMurray is a …

Op-Docs & the NFB’s “A Short History of the Highrise” to debut at New York Film Festival

The New York Times’s Op-Docs and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) will debut their new new immersive documentary series as part of the Film Society at Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival Convergence program –  a showcase for storytelling that transcends a single narrative medium – on Monday, Sept. 30, at 7 p.m. ET. Following this, the series will premiere on NYTimes.com in October. “We are greatly honored …

NFB & MIT OpenDocLab collaborate on the next production of Highrise

Exciting news from overseas! The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) documentarian Katerina Cizek will be working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenDocLab , the first-ever collaboration between two pioneering interactive media organisations. The scope of the project is to develop the next production in the NFB’s multi-award-winning HIGHRISE documentary project – a multi-year, multimedia, collaborative documentary experiment that explores …

Filmmakers & web developers to join forces at Popathon Hack Jam

Creative technologist Philo van Kemenade and documentary filmmaker Gilles Pradeau have joined forces in bringing together filmmakers and web developers to collaborate on interactive web-based stories. With the web showing more and more opportunities as a medium for interactive storytelling, collaboration beween software and story becomes a key asset in the production of new media narratives. In collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation, …