This is the first blog post of a three part series about my experiences as a presenter with fellow MCDM student Katherine Turner during the 2011 American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  Part two Easy Like Sunday Morning

The Road Less Traveled

Last week was the second time I had been home in the last twenty years. Pick any excuse and I will tell you that’s the reason it’s been so long since I’ve been back to Puerto Rico. Truth be told it’s because I’ve been go! go! go! ever since I left developing a career as a visual journalist. I have documented small-town politics, the immigration debate in our nation’s capitol, the effects of the war in local communities, hurricane Katrina, the fall of Enron, and ground-breaking research being conducted by university faculty and students in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve photographed four U.S. presidents… but I haven’t been home.

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The world is watching as Arab citizens in North Africa and the Middle East gather to protest against authoritarian governments, restricted freedom, and poor economic opportunities. Twitter feeds, liveblogs, videos and photos are disseminated across the web almost instantly despite limited internet access in many participating countries.

In Western media, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are being credited with helping to propel this “Arab Revolution.” But in countries like Egypt, where only 20% of a population of 80 million people have ever used the Internet, the question is not if but how could digital and social media possibly become the conduit for tens of thousands of protesters?

Photo courtesy Essam Sharaf

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The 2011 Sundance Film festival wrapped last week and by all accounts the word among industry, insiders and critics alike on Park City’s picturesque Main Street was that the new crop of indy-docs and international features outshone the narratives and documentary premiers hands down.
Two documentaries received a lot of pre-festival buzz came from Sundance alumns –Pamela Yates’ Granito and Steve James’ The Interruptors — were the must-see documentaries in the festival and sold-out before the festival began. Granito is the personalized follow-up to Yates’ 1984 expose When the Mountains Tremble on the Guatemalan government’s genocide against the region’s indigenous people. James’ The Interruptors is an unflinching look at a group of ex-gang members turned community activists in the Chicago area who are trying to break the cycle of violence in their neighborhoods.

For those of us festival folks who couldn’t get a seat at these films, we did have one other opportunity to hear from the directors and ask them questions. Yates and James were on a Sundance’s Filmmaker Lodge panel “The Aha! Moment: Making Change Sticky .  The panel discussion centered on new media outreach strategies and how to break new ground in extending social change outreach for documentaries. They were joined by documentary filmmaker and physician Dr. Maren Grainger-Monson and producer Ted Richane from social change outreach partners Cause and Effect.

All of the projects highlighted by the panel took a long view in measuring the social impact of documentary filmmaking. The panelists agreed that it was no longer possible to effect change by just having a documentary shown in front of an audience (if this was ever really a path to serious impact to begin with). Yates introduced her project by issuing a challenge to documentary film makers: “I want to send out a challenge to everyone here: It is not acceptable, if you are going to make a film about social issues or human rights, not to think about outreach and audience engagement at the outset of making your film … you are going to shortchange yourself as an artist if you don’t get involved from the very beginning and see it all the way through to the finish.” Read more…

Last week, a new “information experience” startup – Qwiki – received a fair amount of publicity after closing it’s first round of funding totaling $8 million and announcing some upcoming features.

Qwiki provides rich media to consumers by scrubbing the web for content and assembling it into a short presentation with narration. Users can suggest content, but unlike Wikipedia, users can not actually edit the presentations.

Qwiki was first demoed last September at TechCrunch Disrupt where it was selected as the top disruptive technology (keynote). Recently, several large news outlets including ABC’s Good Morning America discussed whether or not Qwiki will be able to “flip” Google. With a new round funding and several internet moguls at their side including a co-founder of Facebook, Eduardo Saverin and Jawed Karim, a co-founder of YouTube, it appears there’s nothing stopping them.

On Friday, MediaPost reported that later this year Qwiki will provide a service that allows people to merge their Facebook and LinkedIn data, along with other online content, into a nice little “Qwiki”.

I was a bit skeptical about Qwiki’s ability to auto-magically tell my story but after watching Robert Scoble’s Qwiki, I think this could be a possibility.

What are your thoughts?
Will you tell your story with a Qwiki?
Will you tell your client’s stories with a Qwiki?

Transmedia Storytelling and Net Neutrality were the topics of the night last Tuesday at the MDCM’s first ever Four Peaks public salon. The salon started with a live broadcast of MediaSpaceTV featuring an interview between MCDM director Hanson Hosein and Brent Friedman, CEO of Electric Farm Entertainment. Transmedia Storytelling, an interactive and multi-platform storytelling method, is according to Friedman, a way of exploring “additional tributaries,” and selecting tools from a “digital sandbox.”

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Lebron James isn’t a great basketball player because he wears Nikes. And just like the shoes don’t make the player, the equipment doesn’t necessarily make the storyteller.  Sure, I like nice equipment as much as anyone but a camera is just a tool.

The UW Pocketmedia Film Festival was born out of a conversation between Hanson Hosein, director of the MCDM program, and Harry Hayward, MCDM alum and Director of Electronic Media at UW. A few years back, both had just discovered the Flip video camera and thought, “wouldn’t it be great to create a festival using only these small cameras?” It was as simple as that.

Video capture technology has become smaller, better, and cheaper to the point that you can buy an HD camera that fits in your pocket for under $200. This has opened doors for the citizen journalist, the home-movie maker, the aspiring videographer, and many more. With a small investment almost anyone who wants to can have access to a powerful storytelling tool. It’s leveled the playing field for multimedia content creators. The barrier to entry is very, very low.

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This past Fall, three Communication undergraduates (Lucas Anderson, Nicolette Lock, and Ryan McNamme) and a Master of Communication in Digital Media student (Matthew Franco) participated in the FLIP Brazil study abroad program.  Sponsored by the Comparative History of Ideas Program, The Latin American Studies Program in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and the Master of Communication in Digital Media (MDCM) program at the University of Washington, the goal of FLIP Brazil was is to investigate issues of human rights as they are understood in the Brazillian context, document research with film and photos, and then return with footage for editing into short pieces that illustrate their findings and for possible use as a human rights activist tool.

“The outcome of our project was more than just music but a meaningful bond between people coming from completely different realities critiquing the same social problems which exist in two different countries and across the globe.”  – Jaime Espinoza and Tom Pepe Read more…

“It’s not about what you got…it is how you freak it.”

Our walks be-get our thoughts – which then can be-come steps of action.  In my B-Side Docs about Seattle vignette produced as part of MTV’s $5 Dollar Cover Seattle, I had the opportunity to take a walk with musician Gabriel Teodros to places not typically highlighted on Seattle tour maps.  The sixth cut from his album “Love Works” starts with the lyric, “We got a lot of work to do.”  Indeed, taking a walk with Gabriel is work but just like the beat driving his song there is the tickle of a piano line which be-speaks hints of play and fun.

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