Sitegeist

The Sunlight Foundation has released an interesting open data discovery app called Sitegeist. Working from a host of open data sets, the app helps to provide another view of a neighborhood, town or city.

Here’s a few of the data points the app provides.

  • Age Distribution 
  • Political Contributions 
  • Average Rent 
  • Popular Local Spots 
  • Recommended Restaurants 
  • How People Commute 
  • Record Temperatures 
  • Housing Units Over Time

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On December 5th, our New Media Producing class produced their final project The Sky Is Falling - an immersive storyworld that aims to raise awareness about the challenges American foster children face when they age out of the foster care system. In partnership with foster care youth advocacy NGO Orange Duffel Bag, elements of the storyline were drawn from the life of Lydia Joyner, who was once a foster child.

About thirty participants came from the public as well as Columbia’s student and faculty bodies. Some attendees included Collaborative Fund Investor Karyn Campbell, Founder/CEO of GMD Studios Brian Clark and Creative Director at G2 Worldwide Nick Braccia. 

Visit our site at: http://theskyisfalling12.tumblr.com/about

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Interview with Christine Vachon, founder of Killer Films, at our Columbia New Media Producing class

Nov 14, 2012 

Rm 511 in Dodge Hall, Columbia University, NYC

Professor Lance Weiler interviews Christine Vachon

Lance: Can you talk a bit about how you balance the director’s creative impulses with your producer’s financial mindset?

Christine: Creative and financial decisions are utterly intertwined. When a director tries to divide them, it has a negative effect on everyone. When you believe everyone is watching your back, it frees you to say what you think. At the end of the day, I know that anything Todd (Haynes) wants to do, I want to do.

Lance: Can you talk about the series? You said you’ve made six films since January. Can you speak to volume?

Christine: Nowadays, we make six movies and we make on six what we used to make on two, so it has turned into a volume business. But you can’t really schedule exactly when you’re going to make a movie.  The casting, the locations, the financing and all these aspects need to come together. Suddenly the movie comes to life and you just have to run after it. But they all follow the model of “let’s take them to festivals and sell them.” We look into new ways of distribution, but the investors still want to do it the old way.

Lance: And why is that?

Christine: We’re obviously in a time of great change. But the sales agents, the foreign buyers… it’s all we know how to do. Even though our piece of the pie gets smaller and smaller, we’re gonna keep doing it.

Lance: You said you’ve done some TV. Can you talk about that?

Christine: My first TV series was This American Life, which won an Emmy. It’s a revered radio show, so the question was how to adapt it. Mildred Pierce was like making two movies. It was like making anything with Todd (Haynes), but there was an airdate that was set in stone. In fact, Todd’s mother died at the beginning of post-production, and HBO called Todd and said, “we’re so sorry…take all the time you need” and then they called me and said, “we are not changing the airdate. Communicate that to Todd.”

Lance: Is there anything Killer hasn’t done that you want to do?

Christine: The only thing we really want to break into is how to work with brands. We did a successful Ace Hotel program with Massify. We had a contest for short films and produced three. But we could have produced ten – they were so good. For me, it was the perfect collaboration with brands and film in a way that everyone benefits. So I’m always looking for that, but I have to build those relationships with the brands.

Lance: In closing, is there anything you wish that someone had told you that you had to find out the hard way?

Christine: I don’t know because I don’t know if there’s anything people can tell you. There are things like, be true to yourself and stick to your guns, but the biggest thing is that as soon as you learn something, everything will change and it will be a whole new thing so you really have to love the time you’re in and don’t be nostalgic. Love the time you’re in.

Lance: (To students) Do you guys have any questions for Christine?

Student: How do you see growth with the product and the brand?

Christine: At the end of the day, I want to make cool work. I’m always looking for opportunities to do that. I like working with first-time filmmakers who are new to the business and aren’t following a traditional trajectory. So I try to leave room for Killer to do that. So how do I do that? I can’t just give grants. So I see working with brands as another way to bring new filmmakers into our fold. And there are things that wouldn’t fit with what we do. But the work with Ace Hotel gave me a cool creative box to work with three new filmmakers and make three cool films. I’m currently looking for brands to sponsor a project with actors directing shorts that feature them doing something they don’t usually do. And I think that’s just cool since it means being able to work with new line producers, DP’s and crew – it’s just good for the new blood of our company. 

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Why Storytelling is the Ultimate Weapon

Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, says science backs up the long-held belief that story is the most powerful means of communicating a message.

In business, storytelling is all the rage. Without a compelling story, we are told, our product, idea, or personal brand, is dead on arrival. In his book, Tell to Win, Peter Guber joins writers like Annette Simmons and Stephen Denning in evangelizing for the power of story in human affairs generally, and business in particular. Guber argues that humans simply aren’t moved to action by “data dumps,” dense PowerPoint slides, or spreadsheets packed with figures. People are moved by emotion. The best way to emotionally connect other people to our agenda begins with “Once upon a time…
Plausible enough. But claims for the power of business storytelling are usually supported only with more story. Guber, for example, backs up his bold claims with accounts of how he, or one of his famous friends, told a good story and achieved a triumph of persuasion. But anecdotes don’t make a science. Is “telling to win” just the latest fashion in a business world that is continually swept with new fads and new gurus pitching the newest can’t-miss secret to success? Or does it represent a real and deep insight into communications strategy? READ MORE

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New Media Center in NYC

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The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) will develop and operate a new Brooklyn-based “Made in New York” Media Center, spanning both traditional and new media practices, set to open this coming Spring. The announcement was made an outdoor press conference at 20 Jay Street in DUMBO, the site of the center.

Said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, “New York City stands at the forefront of the media and entertainment industries. The ‘Made in NY’ Media Center will allow us to continue to evolve and meet new challenges in the changing media landscape. By providing affordable workspace, networking events and educational seminars, New Yorkers will be primed to compete for new jobs emerging from this field.” Commented IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente, “The Media Center will be an incubator for great stories and a showcase for new works whether they’re told through film, digital, games or apps. Regardless of what tools are used, we’ll be doing what we’ve done for 30 years: curating stories, supporting artists and connecting storytellers to investors, audiences and other artists. At IFP, we are thrilled.”  —-> Read More

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From Future of Storytelling 

Games have always needed stories, says celebrated game designer Margaret Robertson. For many, the first ever videogame was 1962’s Space War. It couldn’t have been simpler to look at: startlingly abstract wireframes only. Space War could hardly be a smaller story, but it allowed players to make sense of the abstract shapes, of the strange new interaction unfolding before them. And from that point on, games have consistently chased a richer relationship with stories. Technology has always made that hard, though. There were great stories in early games, but ones that you had to sip through the thinnest of straws. Everything we take for granted in other mediums of storytelling was brutally rationed in early gaming.

But now we’ve beaten those constraints. Modern games have scripts tens of thousands of pages long. They record tens of thousands of lines of dialogue and display perfectly lifelike facial expressions and body movement. Natural language conversations are becoming possible with artificial characters. Some game developers even consider that the artificial creations they make can be meaningfully said to be alive. So does that mean we’ve cracked story? Not quite. Story is hard. Story is fragile. Story is expensive. Players chew through it fast, and expect it to be endlessly responsive to their actions. Writing one good straight story is hard enough at the best of times. Producing one that’s expected to last twenty times as long as most feature films and have a hundred credible endings is next to impossible.

So how do we fix that problem? We fix it by letting games work their own particular magic. Games are engines for making stories. Their rule sets and objectives are mechanisms that engender the things that drive stories—courage, failure, shame, greed, sacrifice, surprise—and gives them context and structure. If you build a captivating world and give players interesting rules, then they’ll tell a thousand stories for you. And we fix it by letting games go free range. Whereas you needed to gather round a monolithic PDP-1 to play Space War, now most of us carry one computer in our pocket and another in our backpack. Games are leaking out on to our streets and our parks and our campuses and our beaches, and there is enormous potential to use those environments to tell new kinds of stories. This is what excites Robertson the most as a game designer: being able to give players a stage from which they can start to tell their own stories.

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