Jenny Goldstick (Class of 2015) writes about her experience as a participant in PBS’s POV Documentary Digital Lab. She got to work with a team to develop a digital prototype that leverages creative tech to tell a true story in a new way.
Take it away, Jenny!
The people of the POV Documentary Series for PBS are definitely on a storytelling exploration wavelength. “Friends of story”, I will say.
I worked with a team who is developing a series of video essays chronicling male archetypes told from female perspectives. The idea is that the video essays “link out” at certain points to reflections (which can be multimedia… text, image, anything) that relate to what is being said in the main video.
For example, we worked on the “Bad Boy” archetype over the weekend. As the video essay about a woman’s personal experience with a bad boy plays, there are moments in the narrative where a related perspective to what is being said is available for a user to “tap out” to and engage with (or not, and the video just keeps playing). Using this hypertext-y approach to tell the story of male archetypes is meant to cultivate and celebrate female voices, and encourage them to upload/tag their own reflections to the video.
Our prototype from the weekend is here (it works best in Chrome on an Android)
This awesome team I worked with, made up of filmmakers Harmke Heezen and Mike Robbins, has made a few other cool interactive film projects together, one of which is here.
Read more about the event here.
The experience was so fun and rewarding; if I am in a place where I have an idea to pitch for next year, I would totally pitch my own, or join another team again…or join THIS team again. They were great and I love the idea!
Thanks for telling us about the event, Jenny! We love hearing about what you’re up to. It’s always fascinating.