Live from X Media Lab Melbourne 2008

I'm currently sitting in the main cinema at the Australia Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, where this year's X Media Lab is being held. This year's event is themed DIY TV, and hence the speakers come primarily from a background in digital video. I've already had a chance to chat to a few of them, and those interviews should be appearing in articles soon.

After an opening welcome from the CEO of Film Victoria, Sandra Sdraulig, the day kicked off with a presentation by American Film Institute director Nick DeMartino, a man nominated as Number 3 on the Hollywood Reporter's list of the most important people in digital media. The AFI has trained directors for more than 40 years, including notables such as David Lynch, and also has a productions unit for film, television and online.

AFI is working on a digitising and making available a huge reservoir of assets to act as a discovery site for people interested in film and television. It is also looking at mixing its own authority with the wisdom of the crowd as it looks to monetise some of those assets. That also means clearing rights with the guilds and getting clearance from the studios, which creates its own legal headaches. He also discussed the need to look at video syndication as a means of getting video to the places where people are already looking for it, such as YouTube, and then finding ways to drive them back to the AFI pages to generate revenue."We've got to balance scale, uniquest and ubiquity to compete - every application competes for attention. we're one click away from the biggest media companies in the world."

I've already had a chat to Nick for an upcoming cover story for Inside Film magazine. While that conversation focused on content mash-ups and fan films, his presentation this morning talked about projects from the AFI's Digital Content Lab, which acts as an incubator for externally-developed concepts.

Another discussion focused on AFI ScreenNation, a hosting and sharing site for kids aged 13 to 18 that helps them make better movies, including issuing a series of challenges.

The Digital Content Lab presentations were of two projects, Players and Filmocracy. The first is an interacive docuemtary on computer gamers that users can navigate as they please, including an innovative video tag cloud that can be used to cue content. It also includes a 'molecule' that acts as the user's profile, with personal information about their gaming skills and interests, which can be shared with other social media sites and game networks. The lesson from Players were the need to develop broabband and mobile applications simultaneously with the film production, to create an interface with features that are aimed specifically for the target audience, and to be able to predict trends that will match the time of release of the final project.

The second Digital Content Lab example, Filmocracy, is a competition for independent filmmakers to mix up their own footage with stock footage and edit it online using EyeSpot. The site also includes tips and tricks from other filmmakers.

His overall presentation was interesting for highlighting the way that Hollywood is exploring the trends that are happening around it, and trying to take an active stance rather than just reacting the events as they arise. Nick acknowledges that there is no way Hollywood can control what it is happening, but it is better to participate than fight it.

Comments

[Con Frantzeskos]

Great stuff Brad, thanks for the update!

...shame I wasn't there, great event.