Barbara Abrash at BAVC Producer's Institute

I was in San Francisco last week, participating in a Round Table at Bay Area Video Coalition Producer's Institute. The panel included Elspeth Revere from the MacArthur Foundation, Cara Mertes from the Sundance Documentary Institute, Sam Gregory from WITNESS and Ellen Schneider from ActiveVoice.

The Producer’s Institute is a 10-day residential workshop, focused on storytelling for social change, that brings together documentary filmmakers and technologists to work together on digital applications that propel social issue documentaries into multi-platform interactive projects.

This year’s projects included work by first-time filmmakers Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapily. The duo’s documentary, The Way We Get By follows a group of seniors in Bangor, Maine who welcome servicemen and women returning from the Middle East. Also included was veteran documentarian Connie Field’s multi-part history of the anti-apartheid movement.

Paco de Onis, a graduate of the 2008 Producers Institute, talked about Skylight Pictures using technologies like Flip cameras, Twitter, Google, mapping, and interactive websites to turn human rights documentaries into social networking sites. Paco’s son, Alejandro and his colleagues were at the Producer’s Institute this year with American Meat, a multi-part project that includes crowdsourcing, Google mapping and Flip Cameras to highlight small-scale farming.

G.com and The Waiting Room show how websites can connect the stories of isolated individuals and bring, for example, the issues of gender and health into public discussion. Virtual Mine and Sounds of Silence are designed to bring embodied experiences of environmental depredation and sexual slavery into popular understanding of sometimes abstract policies. In The Elders Project, photography, oral histories and video come together in virtual and physical interactive spaces for intergenerational dialogues.

Filmmakers experimenting with interactive tools, games, networks, and maps are realizing that making and distributing a long form documentary is only the beginning of its productive life. Multi-media producers need to know who they want to reach and how they want to engage with those people. That means knowing goals and having some real ways of measuring impact. Next year’s Producer’s Institute will bring NGOs -- organizations who also are focusing on goals and measurements -- into the mix. With any luck, I’ll be back, seeing BAVC taking documentary onto yet another frontier.