That’s why Mediamatic in collaboration with Synch Festival organizes the Interactive Film Lab: a 5-day workshop where up to 16 film-, tv-, radio- and new media producers from all over Europe get to create an on-/offline interactive film using the ever-evolving Korsakow system in combination with their own footage.
Trajectory
Starting off with a close study of several intriguing interactive film projects on the first day, you will subsequently work on your own project during the next couple of days. The Korsakow system, a powerful but easy to learn editing environment, will help you to develop cross media content for your interactive film. Technical and theoretical support will be provided by skilled trainers.
On the last day, July 6th, a selection of workshop projects will be presented to the Synch festival audience.
Information and Registration
The costs for participation are € 240 (incl.VAT) for people from new EU member states and Greece and € 360 (incl. VAT) for people from other EU member states. This includes lunches, fully equipped Apple computers, technical assistance and free entrance to all Synch festival events! There are some scholarships available. Participants need to have a background in new media production or filmmaking.
You can register via our online registrationform. For more information about our Interactive Film Lab workshop, mail to workshops@mediamatic.nl or call Klaas Kuitenbrouwer: +31 20 6389901.
Information on the Synch Festival here
Reader
Mediamatic.net contains a huge collection of articles, book reviews and project reviews on new media practices from the past 15 years.
The grey bar at the top of this page contains the keywords with which the editorial system (called AnyMeta) finds content in the mediamatic.net site that matches the content of this page.
So, anyMeta automatically creates a reader on the topics of the workshop programme.
The links to this matching content appear on the right of this page.
On the topics of interactive film, interactive storytelling and databased stories a special collection is made of articles that are part of mediamatic.net and articles from elsewhere online.
Please find the Reader for the Interactive Film Labs here
This workshop is made possible with the support of the MEDIA PLUS PROGRAMME of the European Community. The Synch Festival is made possible with the Goethe Institute Athens.
Workshop Report
In the following you will find some notes on the Mediamatic Interactive Film Lab held in Athens in collaboration with Synch Festival.
Thirteen participants gathered together on the first week of July to Athens for Interactive Film Lab. They were left without specific topic this time: everyone had complete freedom to choose the footage and the concept for upcoming projects they were going to construct with a help of the Korsakow-System.
Rephrasing Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (organiser and coach of the Mediamatic workshops), freedom was not taken for irresponsibility: more or less all projects were developed conceptually and represented very different types of possible interactive thinking.
Athens
Neither participants, neither quite a big collective of workshop lecturers, trainers nor assistants didn’t have to suffer from Athenian heat: both lectures and hands on Korsakow trainings were held in chilly premises of Goethe Institute Athens. Five days of individual work (assisted by 8 lab trainers and assistants and supplemented by lectures and common discussions) ended with a presentation of selected works in Goethe institute and in Synch festival event at Benaki museum Athens.
Lectures
Although all the participants of the workshop were supposed to bring already prepared footage for the their own project and more or less developed concepts, the lectures, which formed important and quite significant part of the whole lab, probably made some ideas and perceptions of narrative to be reconsidered from different angle and complemented by theories of story-telling, notions of author-text-user interactivity, importance of context and target audience.
Free form lectures given by Frank Alsema, creative director and producer of crossmedia and interactive television projects, included theoretical issues (followed by numerous examples of interactive projects, mostly crossmedia games, interactive TV advertisements, etc.) on interactive aesthetics, engagement of user and her/his relation to material proposed by the author, etc., whereas Florian Thalhofer and the guest of the Lab Malcolm Le Grice shared their own practical experience in developing interactive projects.
Thalhofer, who is the original builder of Korsakow-System, presented his interactive documentaries, constructed using Korsakow tool, which were here of service for basic comprehension about possibilities of the System (since Korsakow was the workshop tool for Interactive Film Lab).
Show-kind presentation of two simultaneous screens by Le Grice, experimental filmmaker and film theorist, gave impulse to reflect interactivity (this time – interactivity between different texts) of itself: examples of film and expanded cinema projects were on the same time accompanied by digital experiments with colour, sound, movement etc. (and vice versa).
Interactive
Lectures and presentations raised questions (discussed or passed over) what actually interactivity is all about and what it is meant for. Do we use that (the term and/or practical means) to entertain user (as in computer games or in interactive television) or to proclaim the absolute freedom of reader (since the author is dead)? And do we understand interactiveness only as watch-and-click action (thus – in audiovisual case – opposing TV and computer to traditional cinema experience) or as rather mental interplay between the material represented in one or another way by the author to the reader and our willingness to arrange it into one or another text(s)?
And how much interactive projects are about narratives combined within and how much – about interactivity as such?
Synchronizing Korsakow
Since participants of the workshop came from different background (filmmaking, visual communication, journalism, architecture, music etc.), pilot projects, executed during five days, represented a different conceptual and constructional approach to the possibilities of used software (Korsakow system) as well as to the perception what for interactivity can be used: the scale of the works extended from interactive form of documentary/feature film to the projects where the key point was not about choosing different reading trajectories but rather about combining sound or/and image between synchronized screens (e.g. Poulos Panagiotis’ project tended to explore interplay between verbal and non-verbal sound (noise) using for good the poem of Konstandinos Karyotakis -March, Mournful and Vertical-; whereas Marieta Grammatikaki in her work Pendulum used Korsakow for constructing audiovisual music screens).
Thoughts
The practical part of the workshop resulted inter alia with the idea about necessity to search for different interactive ways of constructing/presenting documentaries, movies and interdisciplinary art projects (Korsakow system being one, but not the single way), as well as with some randomly given tips how the latter software could be improved.
by: Lina Michelkevice
