I recently attended Crossover Labs in Australia, working with indigenous filmmakers and storytellers there. I was very inspired by their work and the other mentors were razor-smart on the art and business of storytelling across multiple platforms. While I was there I realized that a lot of filmmakers don’t really know what cross-platform, interactive storytelling can look like, so I created a new page on the Digital Bootcamp wiki to give some examples, across various genres. Please add to it…

Murch discusses Beethoven, Flaubert and Edison as the fathers of cinema. Would be nice to have some mothers of cinema in there too but I like this idea, inspired by Beethoven: “The job of cinema is to put doves and crocodiles together in the same cage.” Walter Murch: “Three Fathers of Cinema” from Old School Cinema on Vimeo.

I think it’s pretty amazing how so many people have rallied to help Haiti’s only film school continue to tell important stories in the wake of the earthquake. On January 22nd a crew of film peeps got together at Eastern Effects in Brooklyn to load a shipping container with film equipment and humanitarian supplies to send to Jacmel. This makes me smile. Keep up to date with the school’s news and videos: www.cineinstitute.com/news/ You can become a fan of the…

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about storytelling and about how narrative shapes our lives. I’m really interested in learning more about digital storytelling – which seems to me to have very different goals than traditional documentary in that it is all about “ordinary” people telling their own stories, and hopefully empowering themselves in the process. The Center for Digital Storytelling are doing some interesting work in this area, training people to use “the tools of digital media to craft,…