I love Maria Popova’s site, Brain Pickings. It’s an endless source of interesting ideas. She has also helpfully provided an online bookshelf so you can explore all the amazing books she consumes so voraciously. She often posts videos and cool stuff about the history of film, for example this post on Grierson: A Documentary About the Filmmaker Who Coined “Documentary.” Basically, I’m urging you to subscribe to the blog and follow her on Twitter without further ado.

“Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.”

Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.

If you feel rather overwhelmed by the barrage of social media information coming at you every day but don’t want to miss any good stories I highly recommend Summify. It sends stories by email – you decide how many and how often – and it always sends me interesting stuff I might otherwise have missed. Of course this does depend on how good/relevant your social media feeds are in the first place which is yet another thing to think about (as if you needed more work to do) but it’s definitely worth exploring. There’s also an iPhone app (of course!)

Well this certainly clears things up! I think I can just give people this sheet of paper from now on and stop doing my Digital Bootcamp workshops altogether. Not sure where this originally came from so I can’t credit it but congratulations to whomever did it!

You have to admit that this fake trailer is right on the money about certain British film tropes. “Is this film going to batter audiences over the head with a message of social injustice?”

Meanwhile I’m waiting with bated breath for the results of Lord Smith’s review of UK government film policy on Monday. I do hope it is more nuanced than Cameron’s simplistic demand that the film industry should support “commercially successful pictures.” As Ben Blaine pointed out, this comment reminded him of the Crystal Maze “when those players not taking part in a challenge would shout redundant advice like “TRY REALLY HARD!” or “JUST GET THE CRYSTAL!!”

This video is NSFW by the way.

Does anyone know what this is from? It reminds me of one of Douglas Rushkoff’s maxims: You may always choose “none of the above.”

I have been waiting in vain to find some time to try Klynt out so I’m just going to post the info here so YOU can all try it.

Give it a go and let us know how it is.

I was honored to be on the jury for IDFA DocLab this month in Amsterdam. It was a treat to be able to spend a couple of days reviewing and discussing interactive projects and no easy task to pick a winner but in the end we went with Insitu, a cinematic and delightful exploration of public space and how we interface with it through art, philosophy, city planning and design.

This is what we said about it:

Cinematic, poetic and subtly interactive, Insitu explores the
way architects, artists, city planners, philosophers and artists intervene
in public space.

Both linear and non-linear, Insitu is a city poem that you can move through
and explore, interrogating efforts to breath life back into our cities and
shared public spaces.

The interactivity is surprising, playful and doesn’t distract from the
narrative experience and the production values are excellent across the
board, from the clear navigation and experience design to the video and
sound quality.

Insitu delivers both technically and creatively with a clear artistic vision
and demonstrates how new technologies in the hands of a filmmaker can be a
truly cinematic experience.

The other nominations went to Barcode.tv and Beyond 9/11. You can explore all the projects on the Doclab site which is a real treat and it’s well worth spending some time investigating everything from interactive infographics (Sexperience), an innovative iPad platform (Condition One), an ambitious and groundbreaking immersive web experience (One Millionth Tower) and a project that started when a bunch of old friends reconnected on Facebook (Goa Hippy Tribe).

If you’d like to read more about the emerging field of web and interactive documentaries have a look at the first few chapters from Mattieu Lietaert’s book on Web Docs