Republica 08 is already over for some days but I’d like to point a interesting panel out to you guys. The panel was entitled “The same production as every year - Media Aid 2.x”. The speakers introduced some interesting programs and gave some remarks on how to apply.
The MEDIA program of the European Union has a budget for interactive projects. Depending on your project you can get up to 100k €.
Local Aid institutions like The Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg have programs for digital content, too. As their program is in a test run right now, you won’t find any information on their website about it. If you’re interested in the program you can contact the responsible referent Rangeen Kathrina Horami.
I left the panel with hybrid feelings. The idea of gonvernmental aid for interactive content sounds very compelling in the first moment. One important aspects of the issue cool down my enthusiam. First, those programs are always an economic aid, not a cultural aid. Therefore, every submitted project needs a business plan. But would’nt it be great to develop new ways of interactive storytelling without economical bonds? I give you an example: The new webisode genre is desperately searching for new ways of financiation. Right now, product placement seems to be the most profitable method but it’s restricting narration heavily if you have to show a sponsor’s car quite often. Would’nt it be nice to experiment with interactive storytelling to push the boundaries of the genre? Therefore, a cultureal aid would help much more than an economical aid.
Anyway, media aid for digital content is a new possibility of financiation I’ll keep an eye on! Do you guys have any experiences with such programs? If so, please share them!
Last weekend Amsterdam attracted many sound artists and scholars from all over the world who wanted to attend the Sonic Acts Festival. This year’s theme was “The Cinematic Experience”. Although I was in fact only able to attend very little of the Sonic Acts conference, I will try to sum up what was most interesting for me…
The session I attended was entitled ‘Interactivity and Immersion’ with presentations by Jeffrey Shaw and Marnix de Nijs. weiter…
On a rainy morning in Amsterdam (that demanded lots of coffee!), the Video Vortex - Responses to YouTube Conference was kicked off at Club 11. I will be blogging on the conference for movingweb, but I was also there because I have been involved with the project through my work at the Netherlands Media Art Institute where we made an exhibition with the same title and related topics. Well, the program of the conference is quite extensive, and I was very disappointed by some of the presentations today (that seemed unprepared, unfocused, had nothing new to say…a total contrast with the first Video Vortex conference in Brussels!). So I will focus on the gems of today’s presentations!
Jonathan Harris tells the story of a traditional whale hunt by a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska in new ways. He documented the entire experience with a very slow stop-motion-film: a linear sequence of 3,214 images, taken at 5-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeatâ€. But in moments of high adrenaline, this framerate/heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 8 frames per minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of his own heartbeat.
All imagery is presented in a very rich visual interface: Each photo comes with various meta-data like date, time, cadence (level of excitement), context (where it was taken), concepts (which ideas are represented) & cast (who is pictured). All the pictures can be displayed as a mosaic (all photos simultaneously), a timeline (a medical heartbeat graph whose magnitude at each point corresponds to the photographic frequency) or as a pinwheel (circular timeline).
We Feel Fine is an artwork by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar, and it is truly worth exploring!
It is a huge database that collects ‘human emotions’, or one could better say expressions of human emotions, from weblogs all over the world. Every time the sentences “I feel” or “I am feeling” appear in a blog entry, the emotion (sad, happy, etc.) is identified by the system and saved along with all sorts of other data, for example the gender of the writer, his or her origin, even the local weather conditions. This is possible because blogs are largely constructed in standard ways.
Vincent Morisset has produced has produced an interactive Music Video for Arcade Fire’s “Neon Bible”.
Even though the degree of interactivity is rather small it feels quite natural, as the actions taking place respond to certain events in the lyrics.
Found this theatrical trailer for the very interesting HBO Voyeur project at Bannerblog. Fits in very well in the hypermedia marketing concept of HBO. Read my thoughts about the campaign here.
The German television channel ZDF together with gosub launched an interactive version of their detective story Rosa Roth.
One interesting aspect is that they show the complete strucuture of the interactive story in the navigation panel. This is probably not that good for the suspense but it really gives the user a feeling for the interactivity.
When the story splits up into two branches, you can see both of them (one in a bigger frame, the other in a smaller one), which is a little confusing.
Another aspect i like about it are the little information icons on the side. When a new character enters the story you can get some information about him by clicking on this symbol.
The HBO Voyeur Project is an Alternate Reality Game which gives you an inside look on different stories happening in different flats in NYC. There are two interesting facts about the project.
First it’s heavily using spatial montage to show connections between the different stories. There is an option on the website, which shows these connections by highlighting certain flats while dimming others. This technique gives some interesting new options for spatial storytelling.
Second interesting aspect is the marketing claim “Do you like to watch?”. For me it seems like HBO uses the Voyeur Project as an research tool to find out more about coverging media usage of it’s viewers. It’s not only the questions if you like to watch but where (or in which medium) you like to watch.
Get some backgrund information on the project’s blog “The story gets deeper”.
“The HBO Voyeur Project is a collection of multi-media stories that HBO has built around the theme of voyeurism.
See what people do when they think no one is Watching
is the tagline that they have used to describe the experience that starts in the streets of New York City, behind the countless windows that we pass everyday. It comes together in a silent film that will be projected on the side of a building, and extends to the HBO channel, HBO on Demand, and online at HBOVoyeur.com. There are also “artifacts” of the characters everywhere, pieces of story which have been sprinkled around the web and in the real world to heighten the experience for those who like to get involved. However it is experienced in whichever medium, the point of the HBO Voyeur Project is to get the viewer to confront the uncomfortable question: “Do You Like To Watch?”
Link via Bewegungsmelder.
The Little Deviant site is so mean and brutal, I can’t believe that this a marketing campaign of the major car company Scion.
In terms of storytelling it’s an quite interesting site. The setting of the story is intense and the visual appearance really gets you into it. The small games are quite simple but entertaining.