The results are in for the 2011 UW Pocketmedia Film Festival!
This year’s theme was “Voices in Your Community,” and participants submitted films that illustrated the diversity of community from the University District all the way out to the northwestern most point of the continental United States in Neah Bay, WA.
Take a few moments to view the entries and see if they resonate with your own community experience here at the UW.
First Prize (Kodak Xi8 Camera):Money 4 Drugz! Filmmaker Greg Crowther, Director Ryan Choi. The film was shot on a Sony DSCW 120, a point and shoot still and video camera.
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?
In case you didn’t already know, women rock! It’s an non-debateable fact that gets overlooked far too often in society and a group of graduate students and professors at the University of Washington and Seattle University have organized a two day conference and film festival this week to help change that. On February 17th and 18th, the inaugural Women Who Rock festival is taking place on the UW campus (Thursday) and Seattle University (Friday) aiming to shed more light on rock star women that exist within and around the music world at large. Some innovative media components are expected to be a part of it. And the two day conference is free to the public.
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.”
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.
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…
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