World Press Photo

At the conclusion of the 2011 World Press Photo Multimedia Contest judging in Amsterdam, the jury published a shortlist identifying the three multimedia productions selected in each category. The six shortlisted multimedia productions were chosen from more than 40 nominations.

Linear productions (in alphabetical order):

Blanco
A production by photographer Stefano De Luigi and VII Photo Agency.
Blanco is the result of a four-year journey delving into the life of the visually impaired in 16 countries around the world. >More

The Home Front
A production with photography by Marcus Yam and produced by Nancy Donaldson, Catrin Einhorn and Meaghan Looram for The New York Times.
The Home Front is the story of two boys in the US who struggle to adjust when their father, a single dad and US soldier, is deployed to Afghanistan and they are sent to live with relatives. >More

A Man in the Forest
A production by Lei Wang.
A Man in the Forest is about a forest ranger that has lived in Hainan province rainforest in China for several years, working to monitor and protect the Hainan Black-Crested Gibbon.>More

Interactive multimedia (in alphabetical order):

Powering a Nation
A production with photography by Mike Ehrlich, Jessey Dearing, Lauren Frohne and Elena Rue and produced by Laura Ruel, Chad Stevens and Don Wittekind from The University North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Powering a Nation is an interactive production that explores energy use across different demographics in the US. >More

Prison Valley
A production with photography by Philippe Brault in collaboration with author and co-director David Dufresne and produced by Alexandre Brachet and Gregory Trowbridge for Arte.
Prison Valley in an interactive production that explores the prison industry in Cañon City, Colorado in the US.

A Year at War
A production with photography by Damon Winter and Marcus Yam and produced by James Dao, Nancy Donaldson, Catrin Einhorn, Rob Harris, Meaghan Looram for The New York Times.
A Year at War examines the yearlong deployment of one US battalion in Afghanistan. >More

More information:

Judging for the multimedia contest takes place at the World Press Photo office in Amsterdam from 18 to 21 March 2011. The jury for the 2011 multimedia contest consists of five highly respected professionals in visual journalism and multimedia productions. The members of the jury are:

Chair
• Ed Kashi, USA, photojournalist, filmmaker and educator

Members
• Claudine Boeglin, France, multimedia producer Thomson Reuters Foundation
• Andrew DeVigal, USA, multimedia editor The New York Times
• Kang Kyung-ran, South Korea, anchor and CEO Frontline News Service
• Gideon Mendel, South Africa, freelance photographer

Secretary
• Alan Stoga, USA, president Zemi Communications
The contest is divided into two sections, for linear and for interactive multimedia.
The jury will shortlist three productions per category. First prizes will be awarded a cash award of €5,000. The winning multimedia will be published on www.worldpressphoto.org. First, second and third prizes in each category will be announced during the World Press Photo Awards Ceremony on 7 May 2011. Maurice Lacroix, a Swiss watch manufacturer, is the official watch partner of the World Press Photo Awards Ceremony.

World Press Photo was founded in 1955 and is known for organizing the world’s largest and most prestigious annual press photography contest. Its accolades are coveted by photographers across the world. The organization is now expanding its scope to reflect changes in the media with the judging of multimedia productions in a separate contest. With this expansion, World Press Photo aims to provide impetus to photojournalistic multimedia by recognizing productions of exceptional quality.

World Press Photo receives support from the Dutch Postcode Lottery and is sponsored worldwide by Canon and TNT.

Editors please note:

Please contact Ms. Sasja de Bie at press@worldpressphoto.org or tel: +31 (0)20 676 6096, for additional information and requests for interviews with jury members.

Alexandre Brachet (producer), David Dufresne (co-director), Claire Harford (Eurosport) et Vanessa Mock (Feature Story News for IAB).

2010 ‘AIBs’ recognise creativity and innovation in global broadcasting across TV, radio, cross-media, marketing and technology

Best cross-media/online production (AIB’s 2010, London)

Winner: Arte France (France) for Prison Valley

—” this advanced form of web documentary and truly multimedia production shows the way ahead for content producers aiming to capture the attention of audiences across platforms”—

Best cross-media/online production – sponsored by Eurosport

Winner: Arte France (France) for Prison Valley

—”this advanced form of web documentary and truly multimedia production shows the way ahead for content producers aiming to capture the attention of audiences across platforms”—

Highly commended

Radio Free Asia (USA) for Travelling Down the Mekong
BBC World Service Trust (UK) for BBC Janala

London, UK, 9 November 2010 – The Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) announced the winners of its annual global media excellence awards at a gala event in London 9 November 2010.

The AIB Awards are unique in broadcasting because of their independence from commercial interests – an independent panel of judges consisting of respected professionals from the broadcasting and wider industries selected the winners among a record number of entries submitted from all over the world.

This year, the nominees were:

• The Arbor (winner)
• The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
• Exit Through The Gift Shop
• Out My Window
• Prison Valley (special mention)
• Quadrangle
• The Wilderness Downtown

Jurors were:

• Frank Poulsen – Filmmaker / Denmark
• Zach Klein – Vimeo / USA
• Marc Goodchild – Head of Inertactive & On Demand, BBC / UK
• Julianne Pierce – Blast Theory / Australia
• Ingrid Kopp – Shooting People / USA

Esther Lehoczky (Arte France), à la remise du prix

Today, Prison Valley has won the 62nd Prix Italia for Interactive site linked to a Radio or Television program.

«The Prix Italia is the oldest International Radio, Television and Web Prize and undoubtedly one of the most prestigious. This highly respected event awards prizes for quality productions. The Prix Italia is a particularly lively and dynamic International Community that is continuously changing. It is made up of 90 Public and Private Radio and Television Companies, representing 46 countries from the five continents. It has a unique organizational and decision-making structure among International Festivals. Delegates from the member organizations decide the editorial line and elect the President who, since February 2010 is Eva Hamilton, Director General of the SVT, Public Swedish Television. Eva Hamilton is backed by four Honorary Presidents: Robert Rabinovitch, recent President and CEO of the Canadian CBC, Caroline Thomson, COO of BBC (United Kingdom); Frank Freiling, Vice President Senior, International Affairs, ZDF (Germany) and James Graham, ITV (United Kingdom).»

More info:

• Prix Italia / Rai website
• Italia Prize (Pdf, in English)

More news soon. Ceremony tomorrow night in Perpignan.

Thank you a million to all.

More informations:

• France 24 website and this one
• Twitter
• RFI Website

Bellaria, le festival

Up on stage, you have to say a couple of words. Alora, it’s grazie mille. What else can you say? Grazie mille to all the people who’d come to the screening of Prison Valley a little earlier in the day. Grazie mille to Mario Tolomelli, a peerless translator who’s always there, to the festival staff who’ve been fighting for a certain type of cinema that’s certainly independent for the last 28 years and who decided (for the first time in its history and for the very first time at an Italian festival) to focus on web documentaries; grazie mille to the sun at the festival, to the Adriatic coast at the festival, to the Germans at the coast, already in their shorts, but not really really in the auditorium. Alora, grazie mille to those cheerful scallywags Christian and Nicola (and their ladies) from Peace Reporter who were also in competition with their excellent Empty House. And grazie mille to all those who believed in Prison Valley. We’ll tell you what happened next, that’s a promise. Buonanotte to you all.

Bellaria, le off

Grading – or the magic of colours at work.

Mixing – or the magic of sound editing at work.

Prison Valley has got these over and done with in the last few days – for the film part of the web documentary anyway. The French and American voiceovers have been recorded. Just got to find the German voice. How should we put this? We’re almost there. Exhausted. Thrilled. Anxious. Excited.

A summer’s evening in Cañon City, Colorado.

Ah yes, back to the film and my big, big piece of news is that the narrative version of Prison Valley will also be broadcast on… Arte TV station. The programming commission decided that this week. So Prison Valley will be web and TV – but still a documentary. With some interaction between the two broadcasting modes (shhh for the moment though).

From now on the whole team (writers/directors & Upian developers) will concentrate on the interactive part(s) of Prison Valley. And that’s a lot of work. A lot of craziness. Don’t believe the hype: the only thing flash about Flash is its name. The damn thing is so refined and so complicated – and so time-consuming. But when it works, by god it works.

Otherwise, there’s some good news on the festival front. Arte and the DocLab are going to present Prison Valley this week at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Our web doc has also been selected for the Input festival, an international gathering of state television channels. That’s in Budapest, from 8^th to 10^th May.

Watch this space for my next post about the narrative issues raised by the web documentary genre. And our further adventures

See you soon!

Tuschinski Theater, Amsterdam

We were scared stiff that it wouldn’t work.
That the connection would play up.
That the screening would be a cock-up.
That Amsterdam would see red.

Alexandre Brachet & Caspar Sonnen: the producer and the organiser.

One of us took a sip of beer, the others drained their wine glasses, and we went up to the front. And Caspar Sonnen, a really cool guy and MC for the evening ceremony, the heart and soul of the festival’s DocLab, opened proceedings. Later on, he posted the following on his Twitter page:

“The live screening of new webdoc by @abrachet @IDFADocLab rocked! pure cinema, great Q&A, nice party too. Look forward to the 2010 launch!”

“Did you think about this clash of freedoms?”

The film’s started. Then the lights went up again. Then the applause rains down. Then the questions. About the narration, about our choices, about the interactivity Prison Valley is based on, about the narrative with its fair share of bonuses, the road movie in Colorado, and the many forks in the road.

Philippe Brault and David Dufresne, writers and directors of Prison Valley

The a film student put up his hand:

“You’re dealing with the subject of imprisonment and depriving people of their freedom. And at the same time, you give us viewers unheard-of freedom. Did you think about this clash of freedoms?”

Philippe, my co-director, and I looked at each other. A bit embarrassed and yet quite touched. And we told the young man the truth:

“To be honest, no, we didn’t. In any case, not in those terms.”

At times like this, you feel like kissing everyone everywhere, starting with Amsterdam and its blonde bouncers, its Filipino Dutch women, its festival-goers on their way home, and the young Italians from www.peacereporter.nl or the team from www.6billionothers.org who were both at the cinema. Everyone, absolutely everyone. Including you, my coffee shop friend.

The timeline for Prison Valley

Then another hand went up. A woman. A New York lawyer. She’d cycled across America from prison to prison. One day, she reached the same godforsaken place we had – Cañon City, Colorado, with its 13 jails. Cañon City with Supermax, the prison to end all prisons, half underground, “the Alcatraz of the Rockies”. We had to pinch ourselves. It was as if the interactivity started here in Amsterdam, face to face. We asked if we could interview her. Philippe took her portrait, I took her email; that lawyer will definitely be in the film. The wonders of the Web.

Battles

Pitch at the IDFA ‘Forum’

The atmosphere at the Tuschinski Theater was really very different than that morning at the Forum. The Forum is a bit like the IDFA’s supermarket. You’ve got seven minutes to present your project and seven minutes Q&A with the commissioning editors of the best TV stations in the world. You sit facing three hundred people in serious surroundings with particular customs, a few grouches and some enthusiasts. The two moderators had had the good sense to warm up the audience with a gentle rap. At 9.30, it was Prison Valley’s turn. Up on the platform were Philippe, Alexandre (who was to DJ later) and the team from Arte (co-producer of the documentary), Marianne Lévy-Leblond and Joël Ronez.

As the festival newsletter put it the next day, “Most commissioning editors loved the interactivity of Prison Valley’s site” but some questioned whether the topic of the US prison system would interest European audiences. The BBC’s Nick Fraser went so far as to ask:

“Rather than going to the U.S., why didn’t you tackle the situation in the French banlieue for example?”

There are hundreds of reasons, Nick, one of them being that one of us has already made a film on the subject and, as you know, Nick, you never make the same film twice. Well you can, but it’d be a shame. But the main reason is that the aim of the type of web documentary we’re making  is to move beyond these old notions of borders.

Joël Ronez and Marianne Lévy-Leblond: the co-producers and broadcasters (Arte.tv).

As Joël Ronez summed it up later, the pitch was pretty tense. But a bit of tension makes for a good battle, right? Bring it on; bring on the battle to shake up conventions, a kind of Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, 2009 style. A few soldiers enlisted during the afternoon, European co-producers excited by the stakes and the challenge. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you posted.

“Fucking in Heaven” in Amsterdam

Late, late that evening, we did the same as in Sheffield. We ended up on the dance-floor – at the deceptively named Escape nightclub to be specific (we blush a bit at this report). No one felt at all like running away or leaving such a cool city as Amsterdam or heading off while the DJ was playing Fat Boy Slim again (who everybody knows is ‘fucking in heaven’). The only reason to leave is to carry on editing Prison Valley. We’re back at it today.

See you again soon for further adventures.

David Dufresne and Philippe Brault (photos)

P.S. To find out more about Prison Valley at the IDFA:

• The DocLab’s film factsheet
• The DocLab’s blog
• The report on our pitch in the festival’s daily newsletter
• La Fabrique’s blog
• The announcement by Arte (co-producer of the documentary)

On 19^th October, the Centre National du Cinéma invited every Parisian producer and writer interested in a strange thing strangely called ‘new media’ to the Forum des Images in the centre of town.

And it was strange.
And it was good.
And it was new.
And it was long.
And it was mixed.

In front of the Forum des Images (Paris).

The aim of the whole thing was to present eight selected projects out of the 87 that have been awarded grants from the CNC’s fund for so-called ‘new media’ since it was set up in 2007 – and one of them was Prison Valley (awarded in June 2009). It was a bit of window-dressing for a shop (the ‘new media’) that’s hardly even opened, hasn’t got its sign up yet but already has a queue waiting outside (three hundred bums on those Forum des Images seats, dammit!).

Guillaume Blanchot from the CNC opened the discussion by quoting a few key figures (“50% of the producers are from broadcasting and 50% are producers who founded specialist Internet companies.”) and a few promising signs such as “writers from a wide range of sociological backgrounds” meaning that some of us came from film and TV, some from Internet and video gaming, and some were into photography and publishing.

Which is why it was mixed.
Which is why it was new.
Which is why we’ve got to stop fooling around because it’s obviously this diversity that’s the whole point of the new media (dammit, bis repetitae). Melting borders; styles mixing, influencing each other, changing and shaking things up. Merging professions and knowledge, cultures and counter-cultures. In any case, that’s the type of thing we’re experimenting in Prison Valley.  To blend different jobs, not superimpose them. Photo. Video. Forks in the path. Text. Journalism. Web. Interactivity. Hypertext. Hypermadness. Web and documentary. Web doc.

(Video: Prison Valley’s two-and-a-half minute presentation).

“Video games have been questioning linear storytelling and wondering how to break away from it for the last fifteen years.” Eric Viennot

Then Eric Viennot rolled up near the end. Eric makes video games. He created In Memoriam, one of the very first ARGs (augmented reality games). In one sentence, Eric brought the whole discussion to the point: “Video games have been questioning linear storytelling and wondering how to break away from it for the last fifteen years.” Eric’s a modest guy and what he really meant was this: the video game industry did away with linear narratives fifteen years back.

In the blink of an eye, a whole new world had opened up.

Maybe that was the real issue here: How do we tell a story differently because the technology is there and because it’s high time, for fuck’s sake, we changed the rules? How do you keep the feverish energy and rigour of journalism, but do something different with them because there’s no choice in the current journalistic crisis? How do you interest viewers in a story about the prison industry in the United States?

In a break, just before going out for one last cigarette, we went over to Eric at the bottom of the stairs. “Tell us where it is. And when. And how. And who are the best video game scriptwriters.” Eric smiled. He promised to put a few ideas up on his site. And he has.

To finish with, as always, here’s an original postcard (de)signed by Sébastien Brothier, Upian’s artistic director who’s as fast and good as the Wu-Tang Clan.

See you soon for some new adventures.

Carte postale Prison Valley signée Sebastien Brothier

]]> http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/blog/en/2009/11/20/%c2%abnew-medias-%c2%bb/feed/ 0 http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/blog/en/2009/11/16/at-the-international-documentary-film-festival-amsterdam/ http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/blog/en/2009/11/16/at-the-international-documentary-film-festival-amsterdam/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:06:55 +0000 davduf http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/blog/?p=65 Prison Valley à l’Idfa. We’ll give you the low-down, promise. Everything, right here, the whole lot. Our meetings, out hopes, our illusions and gambles. As well as all the dancefloors we’ll set alight – because we are French and we know no better. We’ll tell you what it feels like to have been selected, along with 42 other projects out of hundreds, for a big thing called Forum, a huge tank full of big and little fish used to swimming in more or less treacherous waters, herrings and sometimes sharks, flush with money or flat-broke-but-mates-with-Rockefeller. We’re not sure we can really swim.

We’ll tell you about the one-to-one meetings, as they’re called, with the same producers, broadcasters and funders, but this time in a smaller aquarium, in more subdued surroundings, like in Sheffield.

Prison Valley @ Idfa

We’ll tell you about our world premiere (that’s the expression they use) on the evening of Tuesday 24^th – the first 30 (more or less) edited minutes of the film. And then the special edition a href=”http://www.idfa.nl/nl/Festival/programma-2009/overige-programmas/doc-lab.aspx”>DocLab evening on webdocs with Austin Lynch (who wrote ‘Interview Project’ with his father), Yann Arthus Bertrand (6 Billion Others) and Prison Valley.

Philippe Brault, co-director of Prison Valley, might even get out his Canon to take some pictures for this blog.

Here’s a bit of news about all the other stuff. We’re currently working with editor Cédric Delport on a new trailer because it sounds as if it’s the kind of thing that’s useful at the IDFA. We’ve now done around half the film.

The guys from Upian are working like mad on the interactive part. Those guys have got this favourite expression they use over and over again: ‘That’s out of the box.’ And it’s true. Well, we’re trying at least, them and us. To get out of the box. Write differently. Tell a different story.

Hell begins here – and it feels good.

To finish with, here’s an original postcard (de)signed by Sébastien Brothier, Upian’s artistic director who’s as fast and good as the Wu-Tang Clan.

carte postale inédite (de)signée par Sebastien Brothier

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