Reboot Day #1 summary

The Reboot week began with a mentoring session led by Kat Cizek, the NFB Filmmaker in Residence. The three selected projects formed an eclectic group: Rob Spence's EyeBorg Project follows Rob's adventures as he installs a camera into his eye socket. Patricia Bergeron and Magnus Isaacson's Guinea Pig Detectives explores how advertisers are using social media to predict our wants and desires and sell them back to us. And Mandy Leith and Michelle Mason's Slum Parliament engages global viewers in a dialogue with a youth mock parliament in a Kenyan village. After presenting a 10 minute overview of their project, each participant told a "user story" of how an audience member would experience their project. Producers were asked to describe how a user could participate in their project, how much time they would likely spend, and what would bring them back. Spence's EyeBorg project aims to invites web users into an Augmented Reality experience (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality) - a view of the world through his prosthetic eye that is enhanced with computer imagery and data. This experience is coupled with a documentary film about Spence's process of attaining the camera-eye and meeting other amputees who have enhanced their body through prosthetics. Slum Parliament's viewers will interact with the Kenyan Youth by sending direct SMS messages to the youth, who will respond by creating media in a mentorship program with media practitioners Julius Mwelu and George Hussein Obama (Barack Obama's brother). They will be able to view this media through a timeline that they can view in a linear fashion, or non-linearly by choosing "heartbeats" on the timeline that represent 8 characters from the village. The Guinea Pig Detectives is imagined as a "hub" that aggregates the investigations of citizen journalists who document the ways in which corporations are using the connective nature of social media to more effectively advertise. They proposed and debated whether to have virtual characters (or avatars) guide the experience Mentor Kat Cizek challenged all the participants to better utilize the "live" nature of their experiences, and to manage and highlight the tension between the live and the recorded elements of their projects. She urged them as much as possible to have their projects effect real change for the communities and characters that their documentaries explored. And each Reboot producer gave one other sugestions for how to keep projects sustainable, honest and engaging. A successful and thought provoking day! Along with the mentoring, the first 3 new presentation videos were posted : Filmmaker and story architect Lance Weiler, Web Designer Alexandre Brachet, and Kat Cizek. Watch them all and more in the coming days on Docspace.ca You can participate in the Reboot project by following our team on twitter: @eyeborg, @patricia_berg, @opencinema (Mandy Leith) , @katciz (Day One Mentor) and me, Brett Gaylor (@remixmanifesto ) - the Reboot Producer. Stay tuned for more updates with @rebootdoc , and of course, @docorg . You can also follow us on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ReBoot-DOC/270322563028 Stay tuned for more videos and reports as the week goes by - and if you're in Toronto, please join us as the projects pitch live, followed by a round table with the Canada Media Fund and Keynote presentation by filmmaker Robert Greenwald! Register on Eventbrite!