Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales http://1001tales.posterous.com tracing the roots & tendrils of storytelling today posterous.com Sat, 11 Jun 2011 06:18:00 -0700 Well Deserved! Canada's National Film Board at the digital forefront http://1001tales.posterous.com/well-deserved-canadas-national-film-board-at http://1001tales.posterous.com/well-deserved-canadas-national-film-board-at
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Excerpt:

"...A third interactive NFB production, the animated Bla Bla, recently inspired “major articles” in the French newspapers Le Monde and Liberation. That’s the beauty of the web: the NFB is getting as many hits internationally as it is in Canada for its productions.

“It’s interesting where it gets picked up, and how it gets picked up,” says Perlmutter.

The new technology is also allowing people to work together from different parts of the country. Dao is currently working with colleagues in Canmore, Alberta and Toronto on Bear 71, a project about a grizzly bear near Banff.

“The park service tracks bears, and they tracked this particular bear over years,” says Perlmutter. “So it has all this video footage. Being able to get hold of this footage, and being able to incorporate it in an interactive work, allows you to see what happens in terms of this human/animal wildlife interaction.”

“The co-creator [Leanne Allison] came to us with several million photos from Parks Canada, trail-cam photos,” says Dao.

“She’s working with Jeremy Mendes, who’s here — they work remotely, they’ve maybe met in person once over the last year. The other interactive designer and programmer is in Toronto, so our team is just spread out all over the country.”

The NFB has a relatively small budget — $65 million — but Perlmutter says it has been able to “find efficiencies internally” to be make the “massive investments” to go online and produce original digital content.

Perlmutter says the NFB has become a world leader in the digital domain, so much so that it’s partnering with a French network on one new project, and has a senior producer from NHK in Japan studying the way it does things.

Why? Because the quality of work is great, and people are actually watching it.

“On the interactive side in 2010 we reached over 1.2 million users, with just the first 30 interactive projects we’re doing in English and French content,” says Dao.

“This year alone, in the first five months we’re at a million users already, with just a couple of new projects added. That bodes well in terms of audiences.”

“It’s an article of faith,” says Perlmutter.

“We’ve got to make sure Canadian audiences have access to this, and are able to see it in some form for free. As we do now, by streaming.”

Welcome to Pine Point can be viewed at www.nfb.ca/pinepoint

Out My Windown is at www.nfb.ca/outmywindow

Bla Bla is at www.nfb.ca/blabla

The NFB website is: www.nfb.ca

jmackie@vancouversun.com

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/Canada+National+Film+Board+digital+forefront/4927...

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Sun, 13 Mar 2011 12:15:00 -0700 Still Loving NFB Interactive Docs: My Tribe Is My Life - Shana, The Emo Kid by Alex Leduc & Myriam Verreault - NFB http://1001tales.posterous.com/still-loving-nfb-interactive-docs-my-tribe-is http://1001tales.posterous.com/still-loving-nfb-interactive-docs-my-tribe-is
via nfb.ca

the interactive site is here:

http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/mytribe

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Sun, 13 Mar 2011 12:11:19 -0700 Love this Project: Welcome to Pine Point: An interview with The Goggles | NFB.ca blog http://1001tales.posterous.com/love-this-project-welcome-to-pine-point-an-in http://1001tales.posterous.com/love-this-project-welcome-to-pine-point-an-in
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Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:11:00 -0800 This Will Rock: The NFB and Mozilla to undertake joint exploration of HTML5 « NFB.ca http://1001tales.posterous.com/this-will-rock-the-nfb-and-mozilla-to-underta http://1001tales.posterous.com/this-will-rock-the-nfb-and-mozilla-to-underta
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Read the full post on the NFB site:

"The NFB is internationally recognized for its technical innovations in animation, as well as for pushing the boundaries in its experimentation with new technologies and new media. In the past year alone, for example, the NFB has produced a dozen interactive projects, launched iPhone and iPad apps and established itself at the forefront of social network management. It goes without saying that we love to create in digital space.

And the surprises don’t stop there. This year, we are embarking on an adventure with a new partner, Mozilla, with the intent of exploring the many possibilities offered by HTML5..."

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Mon, 31 Jan 2011 04:12:00 -0800 TheFWA Site of the Day for Jan 28 2011 - Out My Window - Congrats Kat & NFB! http://1001tales.posterous.com/thefwa-site-of-the-day-for-jan-28-2011-out-my http://1001tales.posterous.com/thefwa-site-of-the-day-for-jan-28-2011-out-my

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Sat, 08 Jan 2011 05:45:00 -0800 Nice Post on NFB's Highrise Out My Window: Thinking Outside The Blocks - Torontoist http://1001tales.posterous.com/nice-post-on-nfbs-highrise-out-my-window-thin http://1001tales.posterous.com/nice-post-on-nfbs-highrise-out-my-window-thin

nice stills Trevor!

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Wed, 05 Jan 2011 19:08:00 -0800 Out My Window: NFB doc glimpses into immigrants’ high-rise world http://1001tales.posterous.com/out-my-window-nfb-doc-glimpses-into-immigrant http://1001tales.posterous.com/out-my-window-nfb-doc-glimpses-into-immigrant

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A scene from "Out My Window": Sao-Paolo, the largest squatted high-rise in Latin America

Take a glimpse into someone’s life that is otherwise invisible to most.

Zanillya Maria Farrell is a musician and the daughter of the recently deceased singer Bobby Farrell of the disco group Boney M. Many would label her part of the huge, immigrant community in a southeast corner of Amsterdam and stop there. But her story, although unique, symbolizes the dramatic changes happening in cities around the world.

In the groundbreaking, Web-based work Out My Window by the National Film Board of Canada, Farrell’s story is one of 13 offering glimpses of lives within otherwise anonymous housing developments.

The interactive page about her (which can found by entering the main site here) opens into a 360-degree view of her apartment and the high-rise community out her window. Click on an image of her, and a brief segment about her life as a musician living in the failed housing project of Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam pops up. In a few glimpses of only two or three minutes each, we hear her music and her story, and learn about her community, which has since been restored as a vibrant multicultural area. Most important, it’s home.

Unlike a regular documentary, Out My Window tells its stories in cursory pieces, which feel like actual visits into people’s lives.

That’s the case with XuLuo Huangzhong and a high-rise cemetery in Tainan, Taiwan, a multistorey building full of memorials to the deceased, where the elderly XuLuo spends her time.

It’s also true of Amchok Gompo, a Tibetan musician living in one of the more than 1,000 residential high-rises in Toronto. Click on images of items around his apartment, including a small statue of a yak to see stories that aren’t voyeuristic, but are polite and welcoming, as well as more thought-provoking than regular documentaries trying to build emotional tension in their story lines.

“What we were trying to do was replicate or mimic this feeling of when you visit somebody’s home and you get to know them in a non-linear, fragmented sort of way," director Katerina Cizek says. “You’re talking about one thing, but over the shoulder you see something, and you say, ‘Oh, can I ask you about that photograph?’ And then that leads to a piece of their history."

Cizek previously directed a NFB multimedia project that captured glimpses of inner-city life stemming from downtown Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. She and NFB producer Gerry Flahive are using many of those same Web-based techniques, such as layering stories across different multiple pages, for the five-year experiment Highrise. Out My Window is the first interactive film in the Highrise series.

Cizek and Flahive are also collaborating with academic research on how cities are changing, such as the multiyear Global Suburbanisms program at Toronto’s York University, which looks at how cities have inverted: The suburbs are now the lower-income peripheries and the inner city is the wealthier urban core.

Many people in this changing suburban periphery “don’t have cars. They’re not stereotypically suburban. ... They are invisible, to some extent politically invisible. But they are also physically invisible because they are not living in Chinatown or Little Italy. They are living in these anonymous high-rise blocks," Flahive says.

“And that’s a really good place for documentaries," he adds. “The overall Highrise project is not about architecture and urban planning. Primarily, it’s about how people live. The attempt is to peel back some of those stereotypes."

The individual segments for Out My Window

Take a glimpse into someone’s life that is otherwise invisible to most.

Zanillya Maria Farrell is a musician and the daughter of the recently deceased singer Bobby Farrell of the disco group Boney M. Many would label her part of the huge, immigrant community in a southeast corner of Amsterdam and stop there. But her story, although unique, symbolizes the dramatic changes happening in cities around the world.

In the groundbreaking, Web-based work Out My Window by the National Film Board of Canada, Farrell’s story is one of 13 offering glimpses of lives within otherwise anonymous housing developments.

The interactive page about her (which can found by entering the main site here) opens into a 360-degree view of her apartment and the high-rise community out her window. Click on an image of her, and a brief segment about her life as a musician living in the failed housing project of Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam pops up. In a few glimpses of only two or three minutes each, we hear her music and her story, and learn about her community, which has since been restored as a vibrant multicultural area. Most important, it’s home.

Unlike a regular documentary, Out My Window tells its stories in cursory pieces, which feel like actual visits into people’s lives.

That’s the case with XuLuo Huangzhong and a high-rise cemetery in Tainan, Taiwan, a multistorey building full of memorials to the deceased, where the elderly XuLuo spends her time.

It’s also true of Amchok Gompo, a Tibetan musician living in one of the more than 1,000 residential high-rises in Toronto. Click on images of items around his apartment, including a small statue of a yak to see stories that aren’t voyeuristic, but are polite and welcoming, as well as more thought-provoking than regular documentaries trying to build emotional tension in their story lines.

“What we were trying to do was replicate or mimic this feeling of when you visit somebody’s home and you get to know them in a non-linear, fragmented sort of way," director Katerina Cizek says. “You’re talking about one thing, but over the shoulder you see something, and you say, ‘Oh, can I ask you about that photograph?’ And then that leads to a piece of their history."

Cizek previously directed a NFB multimedia project that captured glimpses of inner-city life stemming from downtown Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital. She and NFB producer Gerry Flahive are using many of those same Web-based techniques, such as layering stories across different multiple pages, for the five-year experiment Highrise. Out My Window is the first interactive film in the Highrise series.

Cizek and Flahive are also collaborating with academic research on how cities are changing, such as the multiyear Global Suburbanisms program at Toronto’s York University, which looks at how cities have inverted: The suburbs are now the lower-income peripheries and the inner city is the wealthier urban core.

Many people in this changing suburban periphery “don’t have cars. They’re not stereotypically suburban. ... They are invisible, to some extent politically invisible. But they are also physically invisible because they are not living in Chinatown or Little Italy. They are living in these anonymous high-rise blocks," Flahive says.

“And that’s a really good place for documentaries," he adds. “The overall Highrise project is not about architecture and urban planning. Primarily, it’s about how people live. The attempt is to peel back some of those stereotypes."

The individual segments for Out My Window were made by local photographers and crews, with Cizek often directing the segments from thousands of kilometres away in Toronto via Skype, e-mails and phone calls.

Yet, for all of its emphasis on technology, Cizek and Flahive are actually going for something far older: A non-linear way of telling the story of people’s lives in the lower-income high-rises, doing so in the way people in the real world perceive things, in small dollops of information, rather than regular, documentary-length stories.

“Our conventional storytelling narratives don’t really account for this, and that was what I was really most interested in as a documentary filmmaker," Cizek says. “We always think non-linear storytelling is somehow new, that it goes against the grain and is driven by technology. But, in fact, it’s not. It’s very much the way we tell each other our stories in person."

For Out My Window, Cizek stopped at about 90 minutes of content. But the stories are so varied and interrelated, the approach so inviting, it seems that she could have gone on indefinitely. What traditional documentary could accomplish that?

“The scope we have with Out My Window is definitely broad. The diversity in these buildings is as complex as life itself," she says.

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Sun, 14 Nov 2010 04:18:00 -0800 NFB's Participatory Documentary on the GDP post-crash || New stories every week: Canadians confronting the crisis http://1001tales.posterous.com/nfbs-participatory-documentary-on-the-gdp-pos http://1001tales.posterous.com/nfbs-participatory-documentary-on-the-gdp-pos
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Fri, 12 Nov 2010 19:06:00 -0800 Beautiful playful interactive site from NFB: Commarts Webpick of the week - Sacrée Montagne http://1001tales.posterous.com/beautiful-playful-interactive-site-from-nfb-c http://1001tales.posterous.com/beautiful-playful-interactive-site-from-nfb-c
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From commarts.com

"The National Film Board launched this multimedia ode to Montréal’s Mount Royal; the interactive documentary explores the opinions of people who visit the mountain.

Through an interactive narrative, Sacrée Montagne highlights the persistence of the sacred in a secular society by exploring the mountain’s symbolic sites and the rituals observed on it. An immersive experience, that allows visitors to literally plunge into the subject, it engages people to contribute to the site through photos, voice messages, social networks and comments.

Since the entire experience is based on physical areas of the mountain, instead of a traditional navigation users can choose their own path—allowing them to discover the content slowly. There are 7 main sections on the site, the first one representing the mountain as a whole, in 360-degrees, the others representing different physical sections of it: the Angel Statue, the paths/forest, the cemeteries, the Oratory, Beaver Lake and the Cross...."

Read full post on commarts.com:

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Fri, 10 Sep 2010 08:42:00 -0700 GDP || NFB web doc on the human cost of the economic crisis http://1001tales.posterous.com/gdp-nfb-web-doc-on-the-human-cost-of-the-econ http://1001tales.posterous.com/gdp-nfb-web-doc-on-the-human-cost-of-the-econ

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