25 Oct Tribeca New Media Fund
Last April, the Tribeca Film Institute launched a New Media Fund to provide startup grants to transmedia documentaries. Just weeks ago, TFI announced six winning projects. Exciting across the board, the TFI grant recipients provide a glimpse into the future directions of nonfiction storytelling.
18 Days in Egypt
This crowd-sourced documentary will draw on everything from videos to tweets to photos to emails to tell the story of Egypt’s Arab Spring. The filmmakers also plan to develop an open source platform that can be used by other interactive doc projects.
Map Your World
Map Your World is a dynamic mapping tool that helps youth track community issues using SMS and mobile phone cameras. It grew out of a feature documentary, The Revolutionary Optimists.
The Interrupters
The Interrupters is a web component of a forthcoming Frontline documentary of the same name (directed by Steve James of Hoop Dreams). The interactive project will delve into the stories of Chicago ‘interrupters,’ former gang leaders who protect their communities from violence.
Afghan Lives
Over the course of a year, Afghans in Helmand Province will record their lives using mobile phone HD video. The footage will be uploaded onto the web, creating a dynamic record of life during wartime.
Dadaab Stories
FilmAid International will create an interactive storytelling platform for the nearly 450,000 people living in Somalia’s Dadaab refugee camp.
The Tillman Story Interactive Edition
This groundbreaking project will allow users to interact with filmmaking “marginalia”—outtakes , archival documents, and news stories—while viewing the 2010 documentary, The Tillman Story. Watch filmmaker Amir Bar-lev describe the project here.
Map Your World, The Interrupters, and The Tillman Story grew out of linear feature-length documentaries, suggesting that there’s a real opportunity for “traditional” linear docs to explore interactive components. The Tillman Story, in particular, blurs the increasingly blurry line between linear and transmedia documentaries. I’m excited to see how Bar-lev and his team reintegrate material usually designated as “cutting room floor” or “DVD extras” into the viewing experience.
Per TFI guidelines, all six projects have a civic component. Each seems to ask how interactive documentaries can foster community engagement. In a lot of these cases, the key seems to be the technology: mobile phones in Map Your World and Afghan Lives, all of that and more in 18 Days in Egypt. New tools open up fresh storytelling opportunities.
MIT’s Center for Civic Media (our neighbors here on campus, housed a few doors down from the Doc Lab) have been wrestling with a lot of the same issues and developing a host of exciting tools, such as Aago, a mobile platform designed for community storytelling. I can’t wait to see where it’s all headed…
And for all you filmmakers out there: TFI will be accepting submissions for round two of the New Media Fund in January 2012.