Formule i revs up at the Festival de nouveau cinema

For the fifth year in a row, Montreal’s Festival de nouveau cinéma staged a "cyberpitch" competition allowing young new media producers to pitch their work to a jury of professionals drawn from the city’s new media community. This year, however, through an adjunct program called Open Source: Creative Encounters, the festival’s organizers invited members of the public to comment on the competition’s submissions as well as other festival material, spawning a new event dubbed Formule i - the i standing for interactivity. "I think the way we managed the contest this year...is a good model that will hopefully be repeated," says Catalina Briceno, one of two programmers responsible for the Open Source lineup. "By talking with the professionals, the creators, the users and the public, we for the first time created that synergy between all these people." Submissions to the competition had to be in at least the prototype stage so that the concept could be demonstrated to an audience, and be created by producers with some rudimentary experience working with new media, either through education or through employment. Nine projects were submitted to Formule i, with three eventually being short-listed as finalists. Those three works were then aired to a test group of new media laypersons, set up through the Open Source component of the festival. "The group we formed was...as close as possible to the general public - they weren’t geeks or people from the industry," says Briceno. "It was 50-50 women and men, the average age was 34 years old, there were people responding from Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver, and all of that was done online." After the test group’s feedback was gathered, the three finalists were given 10 minutes to pitch their proposal to the panel of professionals. "The participants were ready for that, because they already had this first with the public comments," Briceno says, adding that each pitch session took an average of half an hour, since a vigorous dialogue ensued after each presentation. Montreal-based new media developers Ghassan Fayad and Mat Donnelly took home the Grand Prix for City Speak, a web-based project that allows urban denizens to create interactive poetry by piecing together words commonly associated with their city. "It’s like a big fridge, where you put messages and magnets and words and you play with them," says Claire Dion, assistant executive director of the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund in Montreal. The prize includes $5,000 from the Bell Fund, as well as $5,000 for a creative residence at Vidéographe, a Montreal studio catering to video and interactive artists, and another $5,000 in marketing counseling services with Fjord Marketing, a division of advertising and marketing giant Cossette Communication Group. Through those three separate incentives, the Grand Prix is designed to help new media developers who are in the early stages of their careers find a channel for bringing their work to a wider audience. "The City Speak team will continue their development not only in terms of creation...and production, but also they have to think of their project in terms of promotion strategy, market strategy, marketing, etcetera," says Briceno. "We really hope that these projects can become...a calling card for these creators, to help them go out there and actually find a producer to produce them." Another prize, the Prix du Public, was awarded to filmmaker and web designer Brett Gaylor for his Open Source Cinema project, a homage to the open source and free access movements. Open Source Cinema allows cinema buffs to edit and virtually remake films from shared online sources, including older films in the public domain. Unlike the Grand Prix, the Prix du Public is based solely on the reactions of the test group of users. Gaylor will receive a residency and training session at the Banff New Media Institute, complete with airfare, worth $2,000. "I think it’s very interesting to give a chance to these creators to get a certain distance from their projects," Briceno notes. "It’s the first time they have to let go and receive what the public says about , and what the professionals say about it. I think also this is a very interesting aspect of having two prizes: you notice that the verdict of the professionals is not the same verdict given by the public. So what the experts thought was the best project wasn’t the opinion of the public. That’s very interesting, and it was part of this exercise to actually see if what we call an industry expert can actually see the same thing as the user." Briceno adds that understanding both points of view is key to growing audiences for and interest in new media projects in the future. "That’s the reason we tried to move...from very artistic or conceptual projects to much more applied projects. I think we’re on the edge now between very artistic projects, but also those that have this ‘commercial’ appeal instead of very niche-oriented." Briceno says the festival also hopes the winning projects will "tell us something very important about the way the interactive media industry is financed right now." She points to the fact that a large portion of the funding available to new media can be accessed only by projects with a tie-in to other media forms such as television or film. "So, that means that some creators have to come back again to these kinds of contests - it’s very hard for them if they have a stand-alone web project to finance it. Hopefully, producers and investors and financiers will come more and more to realize that these projects have huge potential, even if they’re only web-oriented." For instance, City Speak is based on an online-only model, but Briceno says the judges came up with numerous potential commercial applications for the work. The blurring between those old and new forms of media is accelerating, Briceno adds, so perhaps distinctions between linear and interactive productions will soon be obsolete. "Open Source Cinema is about making films, so it’s very coherent with being in a film festival," she says. "Yet it’s about doing film with new tools, with free tools, with tools accessible to everyone...it’s this traditional media - the film or the cinema - that is actually coming to the web." The Open Source roster of events also included seminars on interactive television, video games, and "micromovies" on mobile devices, further proof of the increasing penetration of interactivity into traditional media. "The contents are changing," says Briceno. "The way we’re actually making narratives - the rhythm, the aesthetics, the subjects, the way we treat cinematography - all of that is changing too, so the creative processes are changing. That’s the interesting part; it’s not only about bringing film and television through new technological channels, or bringing them to new platforms, it’s also about the whole mutation that is happening in creation also, the way this content is created and for who."

Formule i revs up at the Festival de nouveau cinema

News | 10/27/2005 4:00 am EDT

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