Arts & Entertainment

Top Five User-Driven Video Technologies

Panelists at the Palo Alto International Film Festival Sunday discussed technologies they are applying to the ever-evolving landscape of modern film.

From a woman who’s seeking to implant a video camera in her own eye, to the most professional film festival made entirey from amateur equipment, technology is becoming more user-driven.

In the Palo Alto International Film Festival’s final panel, “Ditching the Divide,” five digital media savvy-panelists summed up how they – and anyone can – harness their inner film maker. 

1) Cameras are everywhere -- including, soon, in one woman’s prosthetic eye. When artist Tonya Marie Vladch lost an eye in a car accident, she made an online proposal to engineers around the world to create a new one for her, with a camera linked to a wireless network built in. Through a crowd-sourcing campaign, she has been able to generate $15,000, and lots of philosophical meanderings on how “eye cameras” will change the notion of personal privacy. But she has the broader purpose of “redefining disability,” she said, showing how technology can transform a problem into something innovative.

2) The iPhone Film Festival. Anyone equipped with a smart-phone or camera can make movies. With this idea in mind, Katie Gillum helped launch the San Francisco-based “Disposable Film Festival,” spotlighting movies made with the technology everyday folk cram into their tote bags. “People don’t know they’re film makers when they have cameras in their pockets,” said Gillum, the associate director of the five-year-old festival. When they turn those cameras on, they unleash their creativity into professional appearing shorts, such as a witty narrated photo montage of a relationship from when it began to after it ended -- the winner of this year’s film festival.

3) From 16 MM to the Big Screen. Most families have a treasure trove of home movies, some still sitting on their shelves in 16 MM format. But Michella Rivera-Gravage seeks to merge the traditional with the new, making it accessible to all to convey their stories. “We wanted to take a new media approach to movies, and bring them into another light,” she said. As Director of Digital and Interactive Media for the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), she helps families merge their home videos into documentaries, and converts feature length documentaries into games accessible to anyone.

Most of the young people she knows do not attend film festivals, missing the critical issues they often convey. But that’s where online video can pick up the slack, she said. “We have to be in the spaces and places our audiences are,” said Rivera-Gravage.

4) Connecting the News. Many news services focus on promoting their own content, and agenda. But LinkTV, an international online news service, is centered around aggregating news around a particular topic, said Hannah Eaves, its vice president of digital and engagement services. “We’re more of an issues-based organization, so we’re happy to link out to videos no matter where they’re coming from,” said Eaves. A news program related to Romania, for example, will also include links to Romanian music videos, films, and nearby cultural institutions. In doing so, said Eaves, viewers can get a broader sense of the people they’re watching, and bring their culture and issues closer to home.

5) Participatory storytelling. “We want the audience to play a role in extending the story,” said Matthew Meschery, the Director of Digital Initiatives at Independent Television Service (ITVS). He helps take traditional documentaries, such as the popular doc “Garbage Dreams,” and convert them into an interactive experience for children and adults alike. In a user-driven movie, kids are rewarded for their recycling habits; for example, they can drag an apple into a pile of organic waste, and an animated goat, happily grunting, will appear to eat it. His site archives a wide array of documentaries and associated interactive elements, billing the site as “A film festival in your living room.”


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