8 Smart Things Things Said at Tribeca Innovation Week About The Future of Film, Technology and Storytelling
With the ongoing goal of narrowing the gap between the creative and tech worlds, The Tribeca Film Festival introduced Tribeca Innovation Week this year. Incorporating the already established “Future of Film” series, the week also featured a
variety of events which emphasized collaboration between
storytellers
and innovators in the film world, including Games for Change, Storyscapes and TFI Interactive.
Here are 8 highlights from the week which focused on how filmmakers are utilizing technology to create the the future of storytelling:
1. “Our world has changed so much since we started the festival. When you think back 12 years ago, there wasn’t Vine or Google. We weren’t talking about tweeting. The ways we communicated with each other and told our stories was vastly different.” — Jane Rosenthal, introducing two interactive films, “Possibilia” and “The Gleam”
2. “You have to join the dots between funding the work, supporting the work, distributing the work, exhibiting the work and building a community around the work.” – Ingrid Kopp, Director, Digital Initiatives, Tribeca Film Institute at TFI Interactive
3. “I see these human yearnings to virtualize reality fully and– when
we
are in the movie world, that magical border land, we’re in the realm of
the imagination where anything is possible. The appeal of cinema as the
most immersive technology is appealing because it allows us to soar at
the speed of thought. One of the coolest ideas behind the film ‘Inception’
is that the entire film was widely reported on the internet to be a
metaphor for cinema. Cinema creates an artificial dream world and
invites the audience into that dream that we then fill with our
subconscious. We already have dream sharing technology. It’s called
cinema.” — filmmaker and futurist Jason Silva
4. “Every day we’re taking seemingly random events in our lives and finding
the narrative within it,” The Daniels, Daniel Scheinert and
Daniel Kwan, creators of interactive films “Possibilia” and “The Gleam” said. “We wanted to explore how we
could make films in which the viewer searches for the narrative instead
of being fed it. Interactivity is simply an opportunity to explore
themes we find very compelling. We didn’t set out to create anything
groundbreaking — we just want these films to be good stories like any
other film.”
5. “Movies are awesome. Look where we are.
Films have nothing to worry about. There is no war going on. Film is not
going to lose. Television is not going to lose and theater is not going
to lose. No matter how much binge-watching there is…I don’t believe
anything is ever going to replace the feeling of sitting in a theater
with a bunch of strangers when the lights go down and something happens
on the stage or the screen.” But, he acknowledged, “maybe I’m living in
one of my own romantic fantasies.” — Aaron Sorkin
6. “We consider ourselves curators of great stories. Once upon a time, a
documentary was a film you saw in a movie theater, a news report was
something you watched on 60 Minutes. Now all of these things are
happening in the same place, and these labels and formats matter less
than they ever have. The content isn’t being described by the shape of
the container anymore.” – Upworthy’s co-founder Eli Pariser at “All The News That’s Fit to Shoot, Print…Or Tweet” panel.
7. “Cinema is a mirror we hold up to ourselves.” – filmmaker and futurist Jason Silva
8. “What is the pan or the close-up? How do we write this language of what it is? This is a whole new language.” — Nonny de la Peña, creator of “Use of Force,” part of Storyscapes, at TFI Interactive.
Below you can see the Storify version of TFI Interactive 2014:
