Exploring the Frontiers of New Media Over Lunch

We celebrated the launch of the TFI New Media Fund with a lunch at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 29th. As this was also their wrap day, all the TFI filmmakers attended, along with other film and tech industry guests – resulting in a very creative and receptive audience. Luis Ubiñas, president of the Ford Foundation contributed to the opening remarks with a speech celebrating the renewal of downtown NYC and the power of art and story. This is the first year of the Fund, so we didn’t have any previous grantee work to show but we did invite some innovative filmmakers and technologists to present their work to give a sense of the new landscape we are exploring and building on.

Danfung Dennis presented Condition ONE, a new immersive storytelling platform for tablets like the iPad. He connected his iPad to the screen and proceeded to move around inside the space of a video which focused on recent events in Libya. The haptic, tactile nature of the software Condition ONE is developing is very interesting and it is a powerful experience using it yourself. There were lots of people lining up to play with the iPad software when he was done!

Thomas Allen Harris presented Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, explaining how work on a feature documentary about black photographers (Through a Lens Darkly) evolved into an Antiques Roadshow-style multimedia event that travels around the country, collecting photographs and stories from people to create a new kind of shared archive.

Jigar Mehta and Yasmin Elayat presented their work-in-progress about the Egyptian revolution, 18 Days in Egypt. They showed how they are crowdsourcing tweets, photos and video from the events in Egypt to give them context and a sense of story. They’ll create an interactive timeline of people’s shared experience as the revolution unfolded, as well as a feature documentary consisting entirely of crowdsourced footage shot by those who were there.

Finally Brian Chirls presented the demo he created around 18 Days in Egypt at Buttercamp, a Mozilla hack day, earlier this year. This demo was created in a day to experiment with Mozilla’s Popcorn HTML5 javascript library. Ben Moskowitz from Mozilla's Web Made Movies talked about how essential it is for filmmakers to start thinking about having web developers as part of their team. All the presenters were using my laptop to present, and when Brian and Ben were done I found they had added Web X-Ray Goggles to my browser so I can now easily see how websites are put together. Sweet.

The TFI New Media Fund submission deadline is May 25th, so please spread the word and get your applications in soon! For more photos from the luncheon, check out our Facebook page.