Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

by Wendy Levy, Director of Creative Programming at BAVC

We’ve been talking and blogging a lot lately about the need for artists and technologists to work together to create meaningful innovation, and toward that end, NBPC hosts an annual New Media Institute, or NMI, (http://www.nbpc.tv/comp/btn/ ) to put minority producers in the room with developers, programmers, locative media specialists, and other industry experts with the goal of exploring multiplatform distribution, and creating content for these new platforms. This year, teams of producers at the NPBC Institute worked on the Mississippi Blues Project (www.bluestrail.org), creating original media assets for web, mobile, and UCG interfaces.

It just took one trip to NBPC offices in Harlem a few months ago for us all to realize that NBPC and BAVC needed to partner up on NMI. BAVC has expertise and resources to share out from our Producers Institute for New Media Technologies last June, and NBPC has a thriving community of minority producers to whom we wanted to reach out in a serious way. Producers at the NMI got training in new media field production skills (from BAVC instructor Yoav Potash), learned how to create a vibrant interaction design for their websites (from BAVC instructor Abigail Rudner), got an inside understanding of user-generated content sites (from BAVC mentor and former Current TV executive Anthony Marshall) and pitched original projects to a panel of reviewers (me included). They heard presentations from Pacific Radio Exchange (PRX) and BET about converting documentaries into audio podcasts, learned about opportunities for more extensive project development from BAVC & AFI, saw sneak previews from upcoming PBS programs, and much more. I was only there for a little more than a day, but the energy and excitement was in every single room (even the slightly cheesy hotel rooms).

Stories have power, and hanging out with these particular storytellers, in Jackson, Mississipi, rocked my proverbial world.

BAVC is now accepting applications for its Producers Institute for New Media Technologies. Learn more about it and fill out an on-line application here.

Check out NBPC and the great work they do: http://www.nbpc.tv/
Check out projects from the BAVC Producers Institute: http://bavc.org/prod_institute