Films go interactive at Sundance

Nominations for the 83rd Academy Awards were announced earlier today in Beverly Hills. The Oscars will take place February 27th, and several nominated films have Bay Area connections. The documentary “Inside Job” – about the global financial crisis – was directed by Berkeley resident Charles Ferguson. “The Social Network” – about Palo-Alto based Facebook – is up for eight awards, including best picture. And then there’s “Toy Story 3,” from Emeryville-based Pixar Studios, which received five nominations, including Best Picture – a rarity for an animated film. And it’s the first time an animated sequel got the nod. It could become more common, now that there are 10 candidates for best film every year.

Two other films nominated for best picture this year are “The Kids are Alright” starring best actress nominee Annette Bening – she’s a veteran of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. And “Winter’s Bone” – a drama set in the Ozark Mountains. Both of those movies had their debuts at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.

This year’s festival is going on right now in Park City, Utah. And Oakland’s Youth Radio, one of KALW News’ regular partners, is there. They’re covering something at Sundance called “New Frontier” – a showcase for moviemakers creating interactive film projects. They call it “transmedia.”

KALW’s Ben Trefny called up Youth Radio’s Noah Nelson at the film festival and asked him about one project called “Pandemic 1.0” that’s really going viral.

*     *     *

NOAH NELSON: The idea here is that a sleep virus, which is turning adults into sleep-walking zombies who have a hive mind and are making weird nests, have been unleashed in Park City, and everyone’s getting sick. And those who participate in the experience have a chance to fight this pandemic, but we only have 120 hours to try and stop the spread of the disease. People here in Park City can run around and look for these golden objects that have been stashed all throughout town, and they can turn to Twitter and to the web to get help from people who are online and playing from home.

One of the parts of this experience actually set up with a short film that is being shown in the festival by Lance Weiler, the guy who created this. And it’s this creepy, nine-minute long horror thriller about two kids who are dealing with their mother who is infected by the virus.

BEN TREFNY: This is the whole social networking, multimedia, experimental game going on – what’s the purpose of it?

NELSON: Well, part of it is story (research and development). There’s a new age here in that we have all these different tools for connecting people on social media, and people have started to play with telling stories through them. But there’s so much more we can learn. These characters on Twitter, and people are able to follow along with what’s happening in their lives and sort of enter this alternate world.

But another thing that is happening is there are 50 Google phones that have been unleashed into the population here at Sundance. And if you find one of these things, it comes in a biohazard bag, it has a hand-crank cell phone charger that you can plug in if it runs out of juice. And when you turn it on, it starts to ask you morality questions. But that’s just part of it. Then the really weird stuff starts happening.

People start calling your phone. Some of the actors have your phone number, and they will start calling you and running you around through Park City, looking for the objects. And in the end, part of it is for them to get a better sense of how these kinds of experience engage the most number of people within the most number of avenues.

But another thing they’re doing with this is they’re actually taking the data they’re getting from the exchanges people have in the game, and they’re handing it over to Medic Mobile, which is this organization that gives text-messaging devices to doctors in third world countries so they can track cholera outbreaks and stuff like that. And those guys are looking for information on how critical pieces of information will spread from one person to another during a time of crisis. And they want to see that, so they’re doing some modeling off that with the phones.

So even though it’s a game and it’s a story, it has a research objective to it. And that’s sort of the nature of the transmedia experiences people are doing. They want stories to not just be an entertainment, but they want to have a real social impact as well.

TREFNY: So there is a Bay Area artist, a director, photographer, videographer – Lynn Hershman Leeson – and she has a big multimedia project going on there as well called “Raw War.” Tell me about that, Noah.

NELSON: “Raw War” exists in two parts. There’s a film, “! Women Art Revolution,” which Lynn has actually been making for 40 years. She sort of started out inadvertently making it by conducting interviews of her artist friends back in the day. And now, she’s gathered up all that material that she’s been working on and cut a documentary out of it. But that’s not the only part of it. What’s interesting is she contacted Stanford, another Bay Area connection for us here, and she’s handed them the entire archive of 40 years worth of material, and Stanford is putting that up online in April.

TREFNY: So this is mostly material of women who have been revolutionary in their art or in their politics?

NELSON: It’s about the role of women in art. And for Lynn, what it’s really about is … the story of women in art is one of those unwritten histories. And she felt like she had been writing it this entire time by collecting this information.

TREFNY: These projects are changing the shape of what movies could be in the future. There’s an interactive element to Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work here, isn’t there?

NELSON: That’s right. Come April, people at home are going to be able to access the Stanford archives and watch these clips at home but also be able to make their own contribution to the history of women in art and upload it to the site. So Lynn sees this as not just a static, watch-this-movie-now-you-know – she sees it as a living story that’s going to continue on into the future.

TREFNY: So KALW airs Storycorps stories, National Oral History Project, in which people share their stories and they’re archived at the Library of Congress and sometimes broadcast on the air – this kind of reminds me of that but with a focus of really bringing to light the contributions of women in art, especially revolutionary women.

NELSON: Yeah, this is something that’s going on in our culture. We’re all storytellers. If you’re a human being, you’re a storyteller. And this is the exciting thing about where the technology is leading us: it’s no longer in the hands of any one authority, and the theory that’s, you know – here’s this storyteller that’s going to lead us through some grand experience – that’s never really even true. A big movie is the work of hundreds if not thousands of people, and now, the owners have sort of shifted to all of us together telling stories. And that’s what a lot of the transmedia experience is about. And I think it’s just fascinating.

Follow Noah Nelson’s coverage of the festival at Youth Radio’s new news service, Turnstyle News.