An Interview with Jigar Mehta

“For the first time in history, citizens are recording an actual revolution in real time. Throughout the 18 days of the 2011 uprising—in the year since—and now—Egyptians are filming pivotal events on their cell phones, taking pictures, texting, tweeting and facebooking their extraordinary bid for freedom. Now, “18 Days in Egypt”, the collaborative documentary project, aims [...]

99% (The Occupy Wall Street Film)

There are now 75 filmmakers involved in the US 99% (The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film). According to the Kickstarter fundraising site, ”It started with a few filmmakers in NY, but within a couple weeks people were joining in Denver, Portland, LA, Boston, Seattle, Philly, DC, Kansas City, Miami, Pittsburgh, Austin, Dallas, Rhode Island, Nashville, Chicago, [...]

The Lives They Loved

The Lives they Loved is a moving project from the New York Times. Readers have posted a photo and commentary about someone close who has died this year. The simple statements and photos combined are very powerful.

Cowbird

“Cowbird is a simple tool for telling stories, and a public library of human experience.” Jonathan Harris’ latest project, just released, Cowbird is a gorgeous new platform for individual and collaborative storytelling. As Harris describes it on his site, “Cowbird is a small community of storytellers, interested in telling deeper, longer-lasting, more nourishing stories than you’re [...]

Four categories of collaborative documentary

I’ve just been in Barcelona, at the ECREA (European Communication Research & Education Association) Digital Culture Workshop which looked at innovative practices and critical theories.  It was a terrific gathering – small enough to get to know people, focussed enough to be productive – a great mix of conviviality and critical dialogue. (Thanks to the [...]

Britain in a Day

Saturday was filming day for Britain in a Day, the UK version of Life in a Day which is being produced for the BBC by Ridley Scott’s Scott Free company, and directed by Morgan Matthews. Like Life in a Day the project will be made from content shot by the public drawn in through You Tube. [...]

The Interface is the Message

I just came across this TED talk by Aaron Koblin – artist and now lead on Data Arts at Google Labs. It’s a treat. Koblin whips through his work – from his data visualisation projects which began with Flight Patterns, through his meditations on the human and the crowd using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to his standout [...]

The world’s first open source 3D documentary and more!

Mozilla’s mission, as Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, explained at the start of proceedings at the Mozilla Festival yesterday, is about building choice, freedoms and technologies into the web to make it a place where we can be makers, not just users. Mozilla are putting their supporters money where their mouth is, [...]

Life in a day – online

If you’ve not seen it yet, you can now view Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott‘s mega collaborative project – Life in a Day – on You Tube. Alongside the film you can access (all ?) the content on the interactive gallery. It’s interesting that the two propositions are now side-by-side. When I saw the film in the [...]

99 Percent: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film

How to reflect Occupy Wall Street and the actions it’s inspiring across the US?  99 Percent: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film is the response of a group of  US documentary film directors, producers, editors, and cinematographers who are contributing time, skills and gear to document the events taking place in NYC and across America. Ray [...]