The jury concluded: This production Prison Valley is a magnum opus visually, conceptually and in terms of the reporting and information offered. It is also an example of immersive interactivity, where the viewer can take a journey that they control, learning new information along the way. This work should be a challenge to everyone producing non-linear multimedia to raise their standards in terms of how the technology can be utilized.

Jury member Kang Kyung-ran said about Prison Valley:”The focus, the effect of this work is in the innovation of techniques and editing muscles. I was very impressed by the editing and graphics. In the meaning of interactive, I think it is excellent.”

This chat will give an insight into how an organisation like IOP works, how it is funded, who its supporters are, and what it campaigns on.

Maison d'arrêt de Fresnes, France. Mai 2005.

See you Thursday 20 May from 6 pm if you’d like to post some questions and live from 7 pm.

http://arte.tv/prisonvalley/chat

You’ve just explored Prison Valley and its 13 prisons. You’ve been rummaging around in your room at the Riviera Motel. Maybe you’ve even ventured out as far as the forums, where other visitors are starting to discuss and reflect about some of the issues addressed in the webdocumentary.

Next step : the live chats.

This Thursday, April 29th at 7pm (CET), our first guest will be Gonzague Rambaud, co-writer of “Travail en prison : enquête sur le business carcéral” (Inmate labor : an investigation into the prison business), éditions Autrement, 2010.

This remarkable book raises awareness about an often neglected side of the daily lives of inmates. The investigation exposes the taboo surrounding a business that is more than profitable for the companies who use it.

It also tackles the question of the partnership between private sector and public services in the French prison system. In another word: of the ongoing privatization of a part of our prisons.

This Thursday, April 29th, join us from 7pm to 8pm and chat live with Gonzague Rambaud on Prison Valley.

You can submit your questions from 6 pm onwards by clicking here. Come discuss with us!http://arte.tv/prisonvalley/chat

7.17 pm, THE moment Prison Valley went public.

7.17 yesterday evening, rue Saint Maur in Paris. One of the developers working on Prison Valley, Maxime Quintard, types four letters on his keyboard: “true”. “True” as in the hour of truth. “True” as in a line of code, a release, well 7.17 pm, 21 April, the hour of truth for Prison Valley as it went on line on the sly.

Developers love doing things on the sly. It helps them test things in real conditions. To see how the server behaves. How the ‘beast’ deals with the connections – or not.

Hans Lemuet, David Déspres, Bertrand Tronsson — three guys from Upian.

Producers like doing things on the quiet too. Because nothing stays quiet for very long these days. ‘On the sly’ is the open secret updated to 2010. At 7.30 pm the secret gets out on Twitter. The connections kick in and there’s a surge.

10. 22. 55. 77. Champagne. Arte, the broadcaster, turned up out of the blue. With our partners from Libération (cf. their special report on Prison Valley), Yahoo! and France Inter (its dedicated Prison Valley pages). Journalists too, bloggers, total strangers, the managers from the Centre National du Cinéma, without anyone… etc. etc.

Got to tell you something. Prison Valley has been like this since the very beginning.

On the sly.

“True.”

Surprise.

Hour of truth.

Sébastien Brothier (from afar): the artistic director of the Prison Valley website.

And then it spirals.

In the early hours of 22 April it’s still climbing. 84. 150. Then 1,000. Then France Inter (cf. the radio programme “Comme on nous parle” hosted by Pascale Clark). Then the page goes black. The server’s bust. Down.

A new confession. A broken server gives developers a secret kick, it’s their venal sin, the thing they live in fear as much as in hope of. The machine has tamed them – and they’re going to take their revenge. Never trust their worried expressions; their half smiles of pleasure are closer to the truth. True vs False. You have to know to recognise it.

Alexandre Brachet - one guy from Upian

In the early hours a few pieces of feedback show there’s some confusion out there. How the documentary works is announced at the start of the programme and seems intelligible (on Twitter and Facebook – luckily the user can ALWAYS choose whether s/he wants to carry on with this type of automatic publication). At 11.30 a.m. we take a decision. We unplug the beast. Temporarily. Long enough to tame it. Long enough to put an alternative in place.

Bertrand Toty: the original soundtrack to Prison Valley

Meanwhile more and more people connect to the site. The first posts appear on the forums. Characters from the film log-in too. A year and a half after the first work, Prison Valley is no longer just our baby. “True.” The programme is living its own life. At last, already. Reactions come in on Twitter, on the chat forums, on blogs, almost in real time.

A rock’n’roll moment.

We met Gary at Louie’s Bar. He was the first person we met in Cañon City, Colorado, the world prison capital. A town in the middle of nowhere with 36,000 inhabitants and 13 prisons including Supermax, the new Alcatraz. That was a year ago to the day. Gary’s the nice guy propping up the bar, a symbol of a smiling America with one knee on the ground. No one wanted to hire him. Gary failed the entrance test to become a prison warden. We bought him a beer or two and had a laugh together. Today, April 22, 2010, the day ‘Prison Valley’ goes online, we spare a thought for him.

That’s what ‘Prison Valley’ is about – it’s a road movie in a prison town, where even those living on the outside live on the inside. A journey into what the locals proudly call ‘the prison industry’.

Have a good stay in the valley of prisons. Your ‘Prison Valley’ experience starts here.

PS As we reach the very end of production work, it’s impossible not to mention Typhon, the company that hosts the SQL (the database) and the FMS server (Flash interactive elements) for ‘Prison Valley’. Once again Jules and Arnaud and their teams (Laurent, Julien, Adrien) have shown quite awe-inspiring reaction speed and generosity. This isn’t really the place to go into all the details, but we do want to say a massive THANKS to Typhoon.

PS2 The iPhone app has also been available since this morning… What a day.