We held our 13th POV Digital Lab of all time this past weekend in San Francisco! Since 2012, we have brought together visionary filmmakers and inventive technologists to “re-imagine the documentary for web” in a single weekend. The last — but not least — edition of our 2016 non-fiction lab POV Digital Lab has concluded… Now, spend some time exploring what six teams of hackers — most of whom had never met before participating — created in just one weekend at KQED!
My Secret Country
(Participants’ Choice Award)
About the project: My Secret Country is a multi-platform journey into the world of imaginative play through a documentary and Minecraft Adventure Map. Inspired by the film’s three children who invented imaginary friends and worlds, Minecraft intersects with the documentary as a curriculum for teachers to help kids 8-10 explore the creative process.
Team: Ali Hart, Alexandra Jayeun Lee, Marlo McKenzie, Laura Wigod
Technology:
- Minecraft Realms to collaboratively build a 3-player adventure map designed for educational use. The map is composed of challenges like collecting seeds, harvesting wheat and sugar cane while battling skeletons and the inner critic or the (Kritik). At the end, players bake a cake at the bakery run on redstone.
- Google Docs to outline the game and design a lesson plan
- Adobe CC for design, sound, video editing and animation
- iPhone voice memo to record audio of game playing
- Vimeo, Tumblr and HTML to display and distribute the game
- Curriki.org and similar websites to eventually distribute the game, our lesson plans and short clips from the related documentary film, to teachers of children ages 8 to 12.
Adi | At the Confluence
About the project: Adi | At The Confluence is an interactive documentary. Through a series of encounters with the indigenous Adi people around the old town of Pasighat in the remote Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh on the border of India and China, Adi | At The Confluence portrays the resilience of this unique tribe amidst a confluence of issues related to their land, water and identity.
Team: Joor Baruah, Devin Peek, Patricia G. Antelles, Bennett Buchanan, Antonia Antonova, Alan W. Tu
Technology:
- Adobe CC for all design, sound editing, and texture manipulation
- Node.js and Express.js for web application development
- Git for code source control and collaborative working. Git lets multiple users work on branches of the project simultaneously
- Slack for chat and project organization
- Spotify for inspiration
Entale
About the project: Entale is a news visualizer that converts traditional journalism into archetypal story formats that are easier for the public to understand.
Team: Eric Chuk, Hannah Lael Martin, John Osborn, Raymond Ou, Dan Turner, Michelle Zaffino
Technology:
- HTML/CSS/Bootstrap for quick construction of the website.
- Javascript/JQuery to add dynamic elements.
- JSON for backend data read/write functions.
- Sketch to make sample wireframes and layouts.
FUTURE SHOCK!
About the project: In Future Shock, we explore the past, the present and the future in a virtual reality immersive experience, one in which participating viewers get guided down interactive multiple plot story-line where YOU are the central character, and where your decisions result in variable consequences, related to your choices around consuming energy.
Team: Jeffrey Barbee, Neil Brandt, Haley Jackson, Tommy Lindestroem, Russell Rive
Technology:
- Custom 6 x 360 camera rigs
- AutoPano Pro and Auto Pano Giga for video stitching and calibration
- Unity to build the VR application. This allows us to port to other platforms and have three dimensional control of all videos, interface elements, data visualizations, and soundscapes
- Coding in C#
- Built on Google daydream’s SDK. We wanted to experiment with the latest VR specialized phone hardware and set the base to take advantage of Daydream’s 3D environment for future data visualization studies.
- Git for source control
- Google Cardboard for visualization
- Google Drive for assets and files and folder collaboration
- Google Docs for collaborative script and story tree editing
- Final Cut Pro for editing
- Adobe Premiere editing
- Adobe Audition for Sound editing
- Basecamp for project management
- Skype for communication
- Keynote for presentation
STEP in: SF
About the project: The first interactive and fully immersive travel series. Take a hyperlocal journey through a city with a guide in 360 degrees. For the first time, you can experience a location like the locals do, but pick where you go next. Where will your journey take you?
Please view YouTube and InVision prototypes in a web browser (Preferably Chrome).
Team: Kristina Aksenova, Damla Gungor, Ernest Leo, Denis Malkov
Technology:
- Adobe Premiere Pro
- YouTube 360
- Samsung Action Studio
- Samsung GEAR 360
- Zoom H4N Mic
- InVision App
Play Loops
About the project: Play Loops is a platform for social media activists to create and share interactive gifs about issues they care about.
Team: Webb Phillips, Kedar Reddy, Theeba Soundararajan
Technology:
- HTML + CSS were used to generate the webpages used to house our prototypes and style different aspects of them.
- Phaser + Javascript Some of our interactive GIF prototypes were developed using Phaser, a lightweight javascript game engine. When we didn’t use Phaser we used straight javascript with helper jQuery libraries to support various sub-features such as touch gestures, social media share buttons, charts etc.
- Giphy API We used Giphy’s API to pull gifs and stickers from their collection in to our editor.
- Adobe Photoshop + Illustrator were used to generate and manipulate art assets.
- MongoDB + PHP were used for the backend of our editor to enable users to save their interactive GIFs and retrieve them as needed.
- Heroku was used for its scalable server solution that also allowed us to easily manage the deployment of our web applications.
- Git We used Git to collaborate on the programming. It allowed us all to work on it at the same time.
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.
- Libby Falck
- Karolis Karalevicius
- Kelly Kowalski
- Yvonne Leow
- Michael Scherotter
Additional thanks to judges Douglas Phillips (Minard Capital), Keir Winesmith (SFMOMA), Suzana Greco (Skoll Foundation), and Pete Billington (Oculus Story Studio) for lending their expertise and advice to participants at the POV Digital Lab prototype screening.
Thanks to our partner KQED.
Want to see more? View the prototypes from past POV Digital Lab at pbs.org/pov/lab »
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