The first presentation was by Joe Fox who has created a piece of software called Memory Miner.  Memory Miner is billed as a digital story telling tool (a pretty important thing for a room full of documentary filmmakers).  Though its primarily geared towards personal storytelling (like your family history), its very easy to see how a producer could use this as a data collection tool during the research and production part of their project.  

But its not just a collection tool, memory miner allows you to push the content you collect in a variety of ways, including, short flash videos for putting on the web, flickr for photos, and even map coordinates in google maps.  Its a fairly interesting tool, and at $45, pretty cheap.  Oh, and double bonus points for having both Windows & Mac versions.

Next up was Bernhard Drax.  Bernhard is a composer in real life, but has become a journalist in Second Life and showed both examples of his coverage “in world” and talked about the phenomenon of machinima.  Machinima is….   Drax’s Second Life reports can be found here.  

And finally Tony Walsh (who was also a mentor last year at the Institute) held a round table on Game Development and Marketing.  I really wish I had gotten a chance to see this, but am hoping I can pick Tony’s brain later about all of this.  Tony has started a new company called Phantom Compass since last year focused on consulting with companies looking to design, develop, produce games & game content.

What else did we do all day?  Well after I got back from my meeting, The teams were busily working in their various labs and I wandered around help various teams, including the “No Dumb Questions” guys and the “What We Got” team.  Then Joe Rubin (iWitness team) and I sat down for about an hour to go over ways to capture web chat videos (through iChat & Skype) so Frontline can record interviews over the Internet, then package into pieces destined both for broadcast & the web.  How were we doing it?  My suggestion was using iShowU to record a specific part of your screen that had the vide window open.  It let’s you record video as well as 2 tracks of audio (your microphone and the audio coming off your computer) so Joe will have both his interview questions and the interviewee as separate tracks.  Because there are presets for DV-NTSC (how they are editing in FCP already) its very easy o drop these interviews into their existing timelines and cut them down.

Saturday was a mixture of Panels & Presentations for the Institute. First up was a discussion called Sourcing the Future: Marketing & Sustainability for Social Justice Media Online. A panel that included my old boss & friend Megan Cunningham (Zoom In Online), as well as Dan Greenburg, Jim Sommers (ITVS), Jackie Glover (HBO), and Jeffrey Winter (Sundance) and moderator B. Ruby Rich.

As a group we discussed what social justice media is, how the model of new media has changed documentary film, the concept of contributory film making amongst other things. Several members of the institute had great questions around how to give your viewers call to actions, how to leverage existing technologies, and how to gain exposure.

What is interesting is that many of the film makers are quite excited about the idea of dropping the traditional long form film model for a shorter web based model that would be more approachable by their audience (typically younger audiences) and also have tools built around it that allow viewers to easily share it with their friends and peers. The problem they have is they just don’t know the best approach for doing that – they see YouTube and other options out there, but struggle with which platform will best reach their audiences.

After panel and a quick lunch, we had a presentation by several folks from the public TV world. Andrea and Raoul (sorry have to find your last names) discussed their intitiatives, including the Quest series, then John Barth introduced us to PRX a very cool program that helps distribute public radio programs and help the producers directly get paid for their distribution. As their site describes: PRX is an online marketplace for distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming. PRX is also a growing social network and community of listeners, producers, and stations collaborating to reshape public radio.

After all of that great info, we did spend some time chatting about various ideas with the group, but then broke early to have some food and fun!

We also had an introduction to Second Life and how Non profits are using it by Susan Tenby from TechSoup.  I am very impressed by what people are doing with SL, though I myself have never been able to get into it.  I want to understand it better, but just haven’t had the chance.  Ben Batstone-Cunningham is a fellow mentor at the institute and he is a former Linden Lab designer and now owner of his own virtual reality design studio (Ben created the virtual Gitmo for last year’s team led by Peggy Weil).

Day Two will involve a a panel on monetizing and marketing social projects as well as a presentation by KQED and their Quest project (more tomorrow).

Here’s is info about the groups participating:

WHAT WE GOT (sponsored by ITVS)
Project Director: Brad Lichtenstein
What We Got is billed as a “shared documentary/fiction mash-up about what belongs to all of us.” It is a multimedia project that includes a feature documentary/fiction hybrid movie (inspired by Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland) that tells the story of DJ Spooky’s quest to discover the Commons. A social networking site and set of tools and widgets will invite the public to remix and share the movie and its components; and a large-scale public engagement campaign will work to unite disparate groups to promote and protect the cultural and creative Commons. Brad and Spooky (along with Vernon Reid and Sam Pollard) intend to help the public understand how biocultural diversity, language, traditional knowledge, the Internet, public space, and culture itself are commons that sustain us and must not be enclosed, or owned, by anyone. At the Institute they will prototype web 2.0 social networking tools and widgets and begin to conceive a dynamic new interaction design that defies traditional models.

IN THE BALANCE: THE DEATH PENALTY GAME
Project Director: Susana Ruiz (lead developer of Darfur Is Dying, MTV’s refugee game-for-change)
This game seeks to illuminate the flawed nature of the American prison system and the irreversible nature of the death penalty. It is based on an ongoing documentary project about six Kentuckians sentenced to life in prison as teenagers. The goal of the interactive project is to offer a range of perspectives and foster discourse about the complex and flawed methods of sentencing, incarcerations, and state-sanctioned death. Key features include: real data (interviews, stats & testimonials) shaping narrative content & game play, live data (via RSS) continuously affecting emergent aspects of the narrative, and an “Emotion On/Off Switch” to influence game methodology. The team wants to design mobile connectivity, a Wii platform, and tools for both activism and evaluation.

INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVE
Project Director: Paco de Onis
The ICC is the first permanent international tribunal set up to try individuals for crimes against humanity. The Reckoning is a documentary about the critical early years of the ICC as it issues arrest warrants in Uganda and puts two Congolese warlords on trial and shakes up the Colombian justice system. Through the Institute, the team will develop a social network, a casual game application for educational distribution, and a cell phone/text messaging tool to bring stakeholders into the network in order to increase understanding and awareness of the ICC, and generate a global discussion about international justice and the role it can play in deterring mass atrocities.

ADOPTLINK (sponsored by Sundance Documentary Institute)
Project Director: Deann Liem
AdoptLink is envisioned as an online space for Korean adoptees worldwide, and is a companion project to the documentary Precious Objects of Desire; a follow-up to Ms. Liem’s award-winning First Person Plural, a documentary about Ms. Liem struggle with identity when she was adopted by an American family. The site will enable Korean adoptees from around the world to share stories, upload video, provide advice & support, etc. The central feature will be an interactive map of the world where users can see the Diasporas of Korean adoptees (for example, 11,000 Korean adoptees ended up in Sweden, 10,000 in France). Characters in the film will populate some of the locations and submit creative and historical content to encourage participation by this global community.

PARALLEL STORIES/HISTORIAS PARALELAS
Project Director: Marlene Velasco-Begue
Monica is a twenty-year old pregnant gang member from San Salvador who went to prison for murdering a girl from another gang. Hers is only one of many stories explored in this documentary/new media project about gang life, violence and intercultural identity. Parallel Stories will allow a global audience of at-risk young people to engage in a dialogue across borders and languages. At the Institute, the producers seek to develop a “youth and violence” pov in nontraditional ways and explore alternative modes of storytelling – prototyping webisodes & mobile downloads, a videoblog, and an embedded game interface.

NO DUMB QUESTIONS
Project Director: Melissa Regan
No Dumb Questions is a short documentary about three sisters whose Uncle Bill becomes their Aunt Barbara. An HBO film, it won awards at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001 and currently has national educational distribution. For the Institute, director Melissa Regan proposes an interactive platform to create a new model for learning and storytelling online. It will be a moderated user-generated content (UGC) site. Users can submit questions, answers, and their own stories via video, audio, photos, or text. There will be “take action” features designed in consultation with LGBT nonprofit partner organizations.

iWitness FRONTLINE/World Web Channel
Project Director: Joe Rubin
With iWitness, Frontline/World hopes to bring a greater number of unheard voices from around the world to the web & other platforms. More in tune with the Facebook/YouTube generation, “iWitness will encourage voices from beyond the mainstream, through video dispatches, web cam and phone interviews.” This project, currently in development, brings content like experimental web chat with Pakistani students, and raw eyewitness activist footage from Burma during the violent crackdown on protesters by the ruling military junta to Frontline/World programming. At the Institute, the team will work on new media marketing and fundraising strategies, prototype the web design and template to integrate with the Frontline/World site, and develop best practices for utilizing interactive web video.

TURNING UP THE HEAT
Daniel Grossman
Turning Up the Heat is an independent radio documentary and multimedia project to raise public awareness about the human impacts of global warming. It is collaboration between Daniel Grossman and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. There will be a series of radio features produced for Public Radio International’s show “The World” along with an interactive website. The Institute project will be the “proof-of-concept” phase for what is planned as a suite of interactive-climate change-impact applications. They are planning to prototype a 3D geographically based browser game app called “Adopt a Coastline.” Players adopt a piece of coastline on an actual globe, and using modeling tools, are able to construct streets, buildings and civic infrastructure, virtual towns and cities. They can raise sea level, and take a variety of preventive measures to ameliorate the effects of flooding.

DIGITAL DIASPORA FAMILY REUNION (NBPC)
Project Director: Thomas Allen Harris
This project is based on Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, a two-hour broadcast documentary that explores how African American communities have used the medium of photography to construct political, aesthetic, and cultural representations of themselves and their world. At the Institute, the team is looking to refine a “new model for interactive filmmaking” that employs UGC in conjunction with the production of the documentary, and develop a prototype of a portal where audiences can investigate and create personal and community narratives. They propose to prototype a multimedia Google map interface to contain multiple “visual vectors,” or media streams allowing users to “reach in” and release or retrieve media. Key cities with large African American populations have been identified as geographic portals for outreach.

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