Since 2012, POV has brought together visionary filmmakers and inventive technologists to “re-imagine the documentary for web” in a single weekend. Our 2016 nonfiction labs kicked off in New York City, and the latest edition POV Digital Lab has concluded in Los Angeles. Now, spend some time exploring what six teams of hackers — most of whom had never met before participating — created in just one weekend at Impact Hub LA!
KTOWN 92 (Participants’ Choice Award)
About the project: An interactive documentary about the 1992 Los Angeles riots as experienced by an intergenerational cross-section of Angelenos from the greater Koreatown community. KTOWN 92 engages the user to interrupt familiar mainstream media coverage of this event, allowing alternative images and perspectives to come through.
This prototype is best viewed in Chrome.
Team: Eurie Chung, Grace Lee, Phillip Rhie, Kelly Weldon
Technology:
- Adobe CC: Design, initial prototype & wireframes
- HTML/CSS, ScrollMagic.js, Tipped.js: Web prototype
- Adobe Premiere: Editing of videos
- Keynote: Presentation
Detonator
About the project: Detonator is digital mixtape that platforms underground, emerging and street media artists.
Team: Hanul Bahm, Fabian Euresti, Chris Girard, Evan Sterrett
Technology:
- Adobe Dreamweaver: A combination of Dreamweaver, a website development software, and thousands of lines of hand code were to used to create the prototype’s experimental mixtape interface, or B side.
- Squarespace: An online web design and hosting service, we used pre-existing Squarespace templates to rapid-populate the rest of the web content.
- Adobe Photoshop: A mainstay photo editing software, we used Photoshop to enhance screen grabs from videos, as well as optimize high-res digital photographs, such as those for Joaquin Alt Guzman’s photo essay, for the web.
- Google Drive: Used as a file transfer mechanism to save and transfer photo, text and video content.
- Dropbox: Used as a file transfer mechanism to save and transfer photo, text and video content. Especially useful for large file sizes exceeding 10GB.
- iMessage: We received everything from artist bio’s to headshots and social media handles via text from our millennial contributors.
- Apple Final Cut 7: We used FCP7 as our primary editing and output software for our featured videos, including those by Fabian Euresti and Walter Vargas.
- Handbrake: A free, downloadable online software that allows users to convert between videos codecs. We converted a .mov file to a .mp4 file, for example. This diminished the file size and made it more streaming- and web developer-friendly.
- Apple Compressor: A conversion software that lets users optimize their video footage toward whichever output they intend for it to live, whether on YouTube, DVD, etc. We used it to convert and upscale LA Rising fm’s SD footage to 1920×1080 HD footage.
- Firefox Video Download Helper Add-on: For Walter Vargas’ LA Rising fm, we were faced with a situation where he had uploaded his short film to YouTube, but no longer had ready access to the video file or source material, which our web developer needed. So we used this web browser add-on to rip his video off of YouTube.
- MediaHuman Youtube Downloader: Another app that allowed us to rip a full HD video from YouTube.
- MediaHuman Video Converter: We used this online freeware to convert a .mp4 video file to a .mov video file.
- ClipConverter: Yet another freeware that lets us enter a video URL and rip and convert the video file into something usable by our video editors and web developers.
Good to Know You
About the project: Good to Know You is an interactive film that blends live-action content with a second-screen text messaging style experience. This, in essence, allows the viewer to feel as though they are actually communicating with the main character, influencing his actions and emotions.
This prototype is best viewed in Chrome.
Team: Josh Falkum, Veronica Flint, Ivaylo Getov, Cihan Kaan, Paul Price
Technology:
- NodeJS to serve the webpages and route messages from the phone interface to the movie player
- JQuery and Sass for faster frontend prototyping
- Git for code source control and collaborative working
- Slack for chat and project organization
- iPhone 7 Plus for our film camera
- Zoom iQ7 for our sound recording
- FiLMic Pro for our cinematography
- Adobe Premiere CC for our editing
- Adobe Photoshop for graphic design
View the prototype »
Download the prototype »
21 feet
About the project: 21 feet is a VR series about a truly American problem. The 21ft Rule is a controversial rule authorizing police to fire two shots at center mass when a potential assailant with edged weapon is closer than 21ft. At its heart, the 21ft Rule is about distance. Distance between two people, two communities, two points of view. The farther away we get, the less clear the situation becomes. We recede into platitudes, into statistics. In this experience, we’ll travel the distance from the zero point – where the incident happened – to America itself.
Viewable on HTC Vive and uses hand controllers. Demo can be supplied upon request.
Team: Lisa Biagiotti, Ezra Clayton Daniels, Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong, Julian McCrea, Alex Moro
Technology:
- HTC Vive this is the VR headset we displayed the experience on.
- NVidia 970 Graphics Card this is the graphics card used to render the Unreal Engine model
- Unreal Engine 4 this is the game engine that was used to develop the models, animation, lighting and interactivity of the experience.
Prototype coming soon »
#erased
About the project: #erased is a crowd sourced documentary platform for families to share their stories of having relationships with their children erased by divorce courts. These testimonies will expose this growing public health crisis that causes lasting harm to children.
Artist Statement: #erased is part of the “Erasing Family” documentary film and impact campaign. We will use social media and machine learning to empower (currently voiceless) broken families to tell their stories, with a dual goal: educating society about the harm inflicted on children and encouraging children to reunite with their erased parents. The videos we collect will be used in our feature film and as stand alone content. We will also present data collected as a mosaic and a timeline to illustrate the memories parents have missed.
In order to get great content, users will have the option of following written instructions or being interviewed virtually by the director. Combined with editing, we will give families a space to open up their hearts, but also ensure that their message reaches the audience in emotionally impactful way. As we will have each participant’s email, we can ask for further participation, such as a photo of the holiday that they missed.
Our challenge is that when we started talking about the film Erasing Family on social media, thousands of moms, dads, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and children reached out to us, desperate for their story to be included in the film. For many, it was their only hope that this would encourage the family courts to take action or for their child to find them one day. It would be impossible for us to travel to record each story, so we will create an easy to use web platform powered by machine learning to empower families to do so, and to enable us to better utilize these videos.
Team: Dimitar Bounov, Ginger Gentile, Mariya Petkova, John Sarracino
Technology:
- Linux
- Apache
- Javascript
- html5
- Bootstrap
- Google Maps
- python
- YouTube
- mysql
- jquery
View the prototype »
Facebook »
Twitter »
PECX (Private Encrypted Content Exchange)
About the project: PECX which stands for Private Encrypted Content Exchange is the first mobile app to “automate” and “streamline” test screening of proprietary digital content using advanced analytics, advanced anti-piracy, and advanced anti-hacking protocols in the early stages of a production.
This prototype is best viewed in Chrome.
Team: Gagandeep Singh Bawa, Herman R. Brignoni, Lisa Goshon, Mark Lawrence, Craig Wilson
Technology:
- We are writing app in Swift and using Alamofire library for client network code. We are working on Xcode 7.3 and supporting minimum iOS 9.0
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Photoshop
- 1-2 minutes video created from iPhone mobile app directly. For this we are using apple AVFoundation framework. Large duration videos will be recorded & uploaded from dynamic website only. Videos’ format will be MP4
- Backend code written in php. We are using Amazon S3 bucket to store media files. However my sql database and php API code will reside on GoDaddy server.
- GoDaddy
- Github
View a demonstration of the prototype »
Mentors
POV Digital Lab mentors play a critical role in providing feedback, project management, therapeutic counseling… whatever is needed at any time to help the teams get their prototypes presentation-ready over the course of the weekend.
- Jason Brush
- Terrence McNally
- Kel O’Neill
- Alex Rivera
- Evette Vargas
Additional thanks to judges Jason Brush (Possible), Jennifer Kushner (Film Independent), Kamal Sinclair (Sundance New Frontiers) for lending their expertise and advice to participants at the POV Digital Lab prototype screening.
Thanks to our partners Impact Hub LA, CreatorUp! and IDA.
Want to see more? View the prototypes from past POV Digital Lab at pbs.org/pov/lab »
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