Bay Area Video Coalition Announces Participants of 2008 Producers Institute for New Media Technologies

Nine documentary filmmaking teams have been chosen to prototype innovative interactive, mobile, multimedia, and game projects to engage and build audiences for their social issue storytelling during the 2008 Producers Institute for New Media Technologies taking place May 30 - June 8 at the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC).

As filmmakers and people trying to create the right media tools for them, we have been under funded and have had such a lack of institutional support (the Producers Institute) is the most support we've received in twelve years. And it has been incredible.

shared documentary/fiction mash-up about what belongs to all of us.

iWitness will encourage voices from beyond the mainstream, through video dispatches, web cam and phone interviews.

new model for interactive filmmaking

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) April 9, 2008 -- Nine documentary filmmaking teams have been chosen to prototype innovative interactive, mobile, multimedia, and game projects to engage and build audiences for their social issue storytelling during the 2008 Producers Institute for New Media Technologies taking place May 30 - June 8 at the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC).

Still From Unconstitutional

Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Producers Institute for New Media Technologies connects independent producers and their socially relevant content to emerging models of storytelling and distribution. Through the Institute, documentary production teams from across the US and South America spend ten days at BAVC working with technologists, designers, and programmers to develop new models of participatory media. Mentors from leading technology companies, including Apple, Adobe, Google, MobiTV, Current TV, and others, work with teams to design and develop working prototypes, which are then presented to funding and review panels at the end of the Institute.

Projects from the 2007 Institute included the creation of a virtual, 3D Guantanamo Bay prison in Second Life (now used by the ACLU), an interactive timeline and mobile content platform for award-winning documentary Calavera Highway, and a hate crime social network and Google map mash-up based on the national PBS broadcast series Not In Our Town.

Patrice O'Neill, from Not In Our Town has said of the Institute, "As filmmakers and people trying to create the right media tools for them, we have been under funded and have had such a lack of institutional support (the Producers Institute) is the most support we've received in twelve years. And it has been incredible."

Projects selected for 2008 include stories from local, national, and international producers on a wide range of topics including gang violence, global warming, transgender issues and tolerance, the International Criminal Court, the death penalty, and African-American photography:

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.

The Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) was founded in 1976 to support freedom of expression by making advanced media technology accessible to independent media makers and nonprofits. We teach. We empower creative expression. We preserve the past. And we develop future media makers and innovators. BAVC's mission is to be the nation's most advanced noncommercial media access and training center. Visit BAVC on-line at www.bavc.org.

Contact;
Wendy Levy
415-558-2170
wendy(at)bavc.org

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