Just a heads up that I am also blogging over on the Shooting People TOOLS blog about the new(ish) digital, webbified world of production and distribution. Check it out for a link to download the Shooting People/BAFTA Short Sighted book of contacts for filmmakers making shorts (including some tips for filmmaking in a Web2.0 world written by moi), plus lots of other good stuff: most recently links to the Peter Broderick indieWIRE articles on new distribution strategies and The Film Panel Notetaker’s coverage of Independent Film Week. I’m always keen to hear about good blogs/websites/conferences etc. covering the intersection of film and the web so please leave a comment if you have any suggestions/tips.

Instead of yelling at your TV, send your thoughts via Twitter during the debate tonight. Some tweets will be added to the Current live broadcast.

And if you’re in NYC you can participate in Hack the Debate in 3-D at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO:

HACK THE DEBATE - 3D!
video_dumbo presents Current TV’s “Hack the Debate,” an interactive broadcast of the first presidential debate. For visual enhancement, video_dumbo will transform the Broadcast into 3D based on a new polarized filter technique called Chroma-depth®. Ironically, this stereoscopic system is based on the colors RED and BLUE. Each object displayed in those colors will create the illusion of either protrude out of the screen, or retract behind the screen - creating a true stage for this political theater.

More information about “Hack the Debate” is available at
http://www.videodumbo.org/opening-night.html
http://www.current.com/debate
http://www.twitter.com/current

Lina Srivastava, a consultant who works with nonprofits, activists and other change agents, has written an interesting blog piece on the possibilities of transmedia storytelling for nonprofits. The phrase comes from the brilliant mind of Henry Jenkins and essentially describes a multiplatform approach. Jenkins talks mainly about fictional worlds but it can be applied to documentary work too, although of course the process and experience might differ somewhat. Jenkins describes transmedia storytelling as follows:

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.

Strivastava discusses Brad Lichtenstein’s experiences making his latest film What We Got: DJ Spooky’s Quest for the Commons. Lichtenstein found his approach radically changed after attending a BAVC Producer’s Institute for New Media Technologies:

Since the institute, we no longer think of ourselves primarily as filmmakers. We think of ourselves as content producers. This is a term that Jim Sommers of the Independent Television Service emphasized at one of the BAVC institute’s seminars. And we embrace the notion that we are one set among many storytellers telling the story of the commons. We will enable and embolden others to share that mission through our transmedia strategy to transform viewers into doers who shape the story and join a community working online and offline to name, claim and protect commons.

I am thinking a lot about different ways of telling stories at the moment and I think what is really interesting about transmedia storytelling is that, in addition to being of creative interest to filmmakers and artists who would like to explore new technologies and techniques, it also opens up very interesting spaces for proactive participation from the audience because there are so many different entry points.

And there are so many benefits to be reaped from telling stories in this way - in terms of engaging people, encouraging them to have a voice and making sure that the conversation isn’t always one-way. Srivastava points out that from a social change point of view this is building on the participatory ideas explored by Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (who was greatly influenced by Paulo Freire’s pedagogic work). The difference is that now we have a lot more technology at our fingertips as we explore the possibilities of telling stories back and forth!

Calling techynerdygeeky filmmakers! Today is your last chance to vote for your favorite SXSW Interactive panels. There’s some good stuff on there and a lot of it is very relevant to filmmakers. Have a look at all the panels listed under Digital Filmmaking for starters.

But don’t stop there digital citizens! Filmmakers who go to non-filmmaking panels at SXSW always seem to learn the most and get really inspired so have a look at everything on offer and start getting excited about SXSW 2009. It’s only 6 and a half months away after all!

Scott Macaulay had some interesting things to say about how the way that we watch stuff affects our impression of it in the latest Filmmaker newsletter. He writes about a comment left in response to Noah Harlan’s post about new business models:

Rather than debate business models, this poster said, why don’t filmmakers just focus on making a good picture? He (or, perhaps another anonymous poster) wrote, “I don’t see distribution as the thorn in indie’s side. I see quality as its biggest shortcoming. Seriously. Where are the filmmakers with the ambition to makes sex, lies & videotape or She’s Gotta Have It or Reservoir Dogs or Clerks or Gas Food & Lodging or Blood Simple or Stranger Than Paradise or Pi or whatever else?
 Those movies weren’t just made for nothing (though the budgets and name actors varied), they were GREAT MOVIES made by directors who really had personality and style.”
My response was that if the above films came out today, half wouldn’t get theatrical distribution and of the ones that did, half of those would be IFC releases. And I also think that bringing the conversation down to a basic question of “good films versus bad films” is too simplistic. In fact, I think the one of the biggest challenges for the independent scene right now is to come up with new notions of “what’s good” that we can all agree on and share among ourselves. I think there’s a relationship between viewing platform and one’s impression of a film. Buying a ticket and seeing something in a theater places you in one kind of critical mindset while clicking on a website and sitting through three bumper ads while watching a streamed film places you in another. Is “what’s good” when discovered through one experience the same “what’s good” that’s discovered in another? And does the price leveling effect of the Internet, Chris Anderson’s dictum that everything wants to be free, apply to quality as well? Will the dog on the skateboard – or the Burger King employee in the sink – always trump the well-crafted narrative? Lots of people – everyone from Josh Whedon to struggling indies who are dicing up their unsold features into five-minute webisodes – are trying to figure this out.

I think that it is absolutely true that context changes our viewing experience in very important ways. If you are watching something at home or in the office (especially if you are watching it on your computer with other applications open) you will often be in a state of continuous partial attention. Kathy Sierra’s Twitter Curve gives us some idea of the contemporary assault on our attention:

I think one of the wonderful things about going to a movie theater is that it serves to remove us from the world of cell phones, IM and Twitter for a couple of hours - in theory at least (and hardly ever in press screenings!). All we need to do when we go to the cinema is sit in a dark room and watch the flickering screen - like an updated version of sitting around the campfire and listening to stories - and this experience fulfills a primordial need in us. Nicholas Carr’s recent Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? made me think about the parallels between deep reading and deep cinema experiences:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

I’m not claiming that watching a movie will do what reading War and Peace does to our brains but there is something thoughtful and contemplative about the space of the cinema (although perhaps not The Dark Knight at 7pm on a Friday in Union Square!) that you simply cannot get when you’re at home surrounded by technology and other distractions.

I’m not a luddite. In fact, the older I get the more I love to delve into the possibilities of technology. I even have aspirations of geekdom. But I am becoming more and more aware of how much the space and context of a viewing experience affects my feelings about the film I am watching. This was one of the many things I really appreciated about the Flaherty Seminar that I attended back in June. It was simply a huge pleasure and privilege to watch films in such a highly-curated atmosphere, where we were introduced to the bodies of work of directors and given time to talk to the filmmakers and to debate and think about what we were watching. I feel a connection to all the films I saw at Flaherty as a result, even the films that I didn’t much like and I have a much deeper appreciation for filmmakers like Pedro Costa, Bahman Ghobadi, Oliver Hussain, Syliva Schedelbauer, Alison Kobayashi and Ursula Biemann, many of whom I wouldn’t have known about if it hadn’t been for Flaherty and the excellent curation of Chi-hui Yang.

So what is my argument here? I guess it is just to say that I absolutely agree that the way we live digitally now is opening up all sorts of exciting possibilities - and it is a given that new distribution models will have to be figured out because the technology is going to continue to change, and us along with it. But the medium is still the message and I still long to be thoroughly immersed in films. Long, difficult, beautiful films that I pay money to see in a dark room full of strangers. I don’t want everything to be reduced to “content” because this obfuscates the very different experiences we have when we watch work in different contexts. And I don’t think it is anti-progress, or anti-technology, to argue that spaces for deep-viewing, deep-thinking and deep-curation are perhaps more important now than ever.

Another new post is up on TOOLS, this time about The Conversation “a two-day conversation — definitely not a conference — about the future of cinema, video, games, and telling stories with new media” coming up in Berkeley, CA later this year and bought to you by Ken Goldberg, Scott Kirsner, Tiffany Shlain and Lance Weiler.

I definitely plan to attend this because I know many of the people involved and I’m sure it will be a really useful and inspirational couple of days. Plus I’m determined to be looking forward, not back, as we figure out how to live digitally as artists (who need to eat and pay rent!)

As a card carrying feminist (except they don’t give us cards which is very unfortunate!) I am embarrassed to admit that I’m not half the geek I would like to be. I can’t code much more than an html link and I don’t really understand what the Semantic Web is although I like the sound of it very much. I got a bit obsessed with solid-state drives over the weekend but am still not really sure what is so good about them to justify the $1,300 price difference between the MacBook Air with a regular hard drive and the one with a smaller but no doubt fabulous solid-state drive.

Despite these shortcomings I have been getting very excited about the line-up for the Interactive Festival at SXSW this year although I will be too busy attending the Film Festival to actually go to any interactive panels. I hope that they podcast lots of them because I finally got around to listening to the podcasts from 2007 recently and found them fascinating - and very amusing to see how of-the-moment so much of this stuff is, there’s lots of excited talk about what the super-secret iPhone oooooooh will be like for example. I think it’s a shame that there isn’t more film/interactive crossover in the panels because there are so many business and marketing panels in the interactive fest that are increasingly relevant to filmmakers as they pursue new distribution strategies. I found out about so many amazing websites, projects and ideas from the 2007 Interactive podcasts and that was a mere smidgeon of what was covered at the event itself.

Speaking of distribution, I’ll be moderating a panel for IFP Industry Connect tomorrow to talk about alternative distribution options with Ryan Werner from IFC Films, Slava Rubin from IndieGoGo and Jordan Mattos and Bob Alexander from IndiePix. Will be interesting to hear what they’re all up to and where they see things heading in 2008.

I want to write more on this at a later date but Chris “Long Tail” Anderson’s next book is going to be about how more and more stuff will be offered for free. Gratis. Nada. Zip. Read this post to understand how Ryan Air can offer $10 flights across Europe and how Moore’s Law and the Gift Economy will change our future as producers and consumers.

I discovered the Whole Earth Catalog when I was at college and working in a small independent bookstore in Brighton in the UK. The catalog was originally published in 1968 and contained a wealth of information from books to tools to classes and beyond. It had a joyful DIY, countercultural feel and every page contained huge amounts of amazing ideas. I discovered Buckminster Fuller through Whole Earth and immersed myself in his ideas about “whole systems.”

Whole Earth had a profound influence on many technologists. People have described it as a kind of pre-internet internet. Steve Jobs called Whole Earth one of the bibles of his generation, “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth colleagues have shaped many aspects of our contemporarty digital world, inspiring the birth of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) and WIRED magazine. As Tim O’Reilly says, “A huge amount of the O’Reilly sensibility, a mix of practicality and idealism, was learned from the Whole Earth Catalog. And of course, the Whole Earth Catalog is one of the wellsprings of the modern DIY movement, for which Make: magazine is now carrying the torch.”

The sections of the catalog included industry and craft, communications, and community, all ideas that continue to inspire us at Shooting People as filmmaking moves into the world of Web 2.0. In this spirit we have launched our new TOOLS blog where we will continue the fine tradition of communicating and sharing resources with each other. It’s not quite as nice as the Whole Earth Catalog to hold in your hands but I hope that it will be useful nonetheless.