OK, admittedly this post is going to be a bit of cheating. I already wrote it in Polish, which took all too long because I was emailing and yp-yapping online at the same time. It’s now almost 6 pm, I have an hour until the Bill Hicks movie screening and I’m running out of the boost 2 XXL cappuccinos gave me. So I’m going to more or less translate it and hope there’s not many people who follow both binarylife and zyciebinarne (as far as I know not many follow either, so I’m not too worried, really).
I have been working as the festival’s minion for past 3 days, but today and tomorrow is indulgence time. Yay! So much for that though; I went to the editing master class with the editor of All tomorrow’s parties, then crawled to the delegate center and been sat here ever since trying to get the wilderness of unattended online life under control. In short then:
There are two things I can easily make out from my chaotic notes (they’re in big lettering and capitals):
AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT and
MOVE TO CANADA
Audience engagement is one of these magic phrases of the festival, which everybody is very keen on, but few understand what it means in practice. Perhaps with the exclusion of the Shooting People folk, who ran the digital bootcamp yesterday, about which I’ll write more later. The other magic combination is cross-platform. It had its own summit on Wednesday, rather disappointing when it comes to anything concrete (rather than the statement of good intentions from the BBC North about the Media City etc). But it’s early days. At least Steve Johnson was funny at times. He was talking, among other things, about Twitter changing the way we live. On that occassion we were giving festival goers copies of Times June 15th issue (screw you imdiacy of digital media), in which he wrote about the sam thing. Cover as follows:
We didn’t hesitate to tweet about it too. I believe this is one of them things poetically related to as a mild “mind-fuck”.
The story with Canada is that, from what I can make out, it has the best and biggest funding for documentary filmmakers and cross-platform doers. The rest of the world is less generous.
So far the best movie I’ve seen was Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, thing about, well, yeah – muslim punk rockers. Again, I will write more, for now watch the trailer:
I will also be looking for an ocassion/excuse to have this screened in Poland. Should you have any ideas (even vague ones) – email please ana(at)abnarylife(dot)com
I will attempt writing about these and other things in more detail once I’m back in Warsaw. There is about 1 to 3 odds that I will make my plane, judging from previous achievements. I don’t have a video camera on me – this is how it is, kids, you either film it or you live it and I’m rather selfish. I’ve got a photo camera, which works on 35 mm film (shock! horror!), so the photos will take a while to come out. I might shoot a bit tomorrow with my famous G1 phone. I might not. So for now no rich multimedia coverage. I suggest you do, however, follow my witty ‘live’ coverage here or others’ updates tagged #dfsheffdocfest (isn’t this the most awkward official tag.. erm, ever?)
So details in few days. Really, I write this now just so that you’re jealous.