Festival2012/Submit/Web native cinema manifesto
- Title of session: Web-native Cinema Manifesto
- Your name and affiliation: Jesse Shapins and Kara Oehler, Zeega; Ingrid Kopp, Tribeca Film Institute; Brett Gaylor, Mozilla Popcorn
- Session format: Fireside Chat
- Preferred Day: Saturday (Ingrid has to leave Sunday)
Contents
What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?
Together, we will channel the spirit of the revolutionary avant-garde and draft the core tenants of a web-native cinema manifesto. The web promises a radically new direction for cinema, combining live data, networked collaboration and on-location access for new forms of storytelling. What transformation of the arts and society does this new medium propose? How is web-native cinema instigating new models of creative collaboration between coders, media-makers and designers?
How do you see that working?
To get in the mood, we will start by performing a few manifestos from the past, including Dada, Futurism and the Kinoks, the Russian documentary arts collective lead by Dziga Vertov. After that, we’ll start manifesting!
The Fireside Chat will be moderated by Jesse Shapins, an artist and media theorist who has written on manifestos and the avant-garde. Other participants will be individuals who over the past 5 years have radically transformed their own professional practices in the context of web-native cinema. Brett Gaylor is a longtime filmmaker who has most recently headed up Mozilla’s Popcorn project and in this context engaged with many filmmakers and coders on collaborative projects. Kara Oehler began her media work making audio documentaries for public radio, but in recent years has joined collaborative teams of designers and technologists to create Zeega, an open-source platform for interactive storytelling. Ingrid Kopp is a filmmaker who worked in the Documentary Department of Channel 4 TV and now is the Director of Digital Initiatives at the Tribeca Film Institute.
How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?
The initial manifesto performances and conversation will be brief, only 15 minutes. Afterwards, we’ll break into small groups working on a single, shared Google Doc. If there are 15 people, we’ll do three groups of 5. If there are 50, we’ll do three groups of 15. At the end, we’ll reconvene to perform the manifesto we’ve drafted!
How long within your session before someone else can teach this?
45 minutes.
What do you see as outcomes after the festival?
Participants will be able to effectively understand the opportunities of the new medium of web-native cinema and will have joined in a collective effort to define the genre in a manifesto that can circulate widely after the festival. Hopefully, the overall outcome will be further catalyzing the transformation of the systems of storytelling, expanding the power of creative agency to more and more people.
