South by Southwest
Conferences and Festivals

How two TV vets turned the TV model on its head, launching the first network-quality Internet series while maintaining ownership and creative control.

Is machinima finally ready to become a mainstream filmmaking platform? Multimedia artist and filmmaker Douglas Gayeton spent nearly a year locked in a spare room on his Northern California farm filming his experiences inside an online virtual world called “Second Life". The result was “Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator", a documentary recently purchased by HBO. This special screening will be followed by a conversation between the filmmaker and James “Hamlet” Au, noted author of the recently published *Making of Second Life* (HarperCollins). They discusse the filmmaker’s machinima methods and strategies, the series of events which led HBO to purchase the property, and offer advice for taking your own machinima projects into the big time.

With the recent rate hikes impacting Internet radio, only the big guys benefit. Or do they? Will Internet radio look and sound like FM in the next five years? If so, how can the little guys survive? And, considering the challenges and costs, why would they even want to? This session will explore the positive and negative aspects of entering and staying in the Internet radio space, discuss how to make independent Internet radio work financially, and provide expert opinion on the future of Internet radio.

Moderator: David Hyman CEO, MOG Inc

The term guerrilla communication refers to unconventional forms of communication and/or intervention in more conventional processes of communication. Communication guerilla is a specific style of political action drawing from a watchful view of the paradoxes and absurdities of power, turning these into the starting point for political interventions by playing with representations and identities, with alienation and over-identification. The talk’s starting point will be a rather trivial insight: information and political education are completely useless if nobody wants to listen. Guerrilla communication doesn’t focus on arguments and facts like most leaflets, brochures, slogans or banners. In its own way, it inhabits a militant political position, it is direct action in the space of social communication. But it doesn’t aim to destroy the codes of power and signs of control. Communication guerrillas do not intend to occupy, interrupt or destroy the dominant channels of communication, they focus on detourning and subverting the messages transported. But what’s new about all this? Nothing. But standing on the shoulders of earlier avantgardes, communication guerilla doesn’t claim the invention of a new politics or the foundation of a new movement. It is merely continuing an incessant exploration of the jungle of communication processes, of the intertwined and muddled paths of senders, codes and recipients.

In 2008, a team of filmmakers will create an exquisite corpse (google ’surrealists’) feature film to explore how narrative changes when it is collectively owned. Each team will create a 5 minute segment on film or video. When they are finished, they will pass the last minute of their film to the next team, along with headshots of the actors involved, and an object featured in their segment. No other information will change hands. The next team must incorporate one of these elements into their piece and will have 2 weeks to write, cast, shoot, and edit their segment. The final product will be a feature-length film, in which all of the elements that make up the narrative will be revealed for the first time. The panel, comprised of the major creative filmmaking roles (director, writer, DP, editor, actor) will discuss the changing rules of content creation, new ways to look at content mashups and their implications. The panel will explore issues of ownership in the world of YouTube, creative control, traditional story structure, and what happens to all of these when they are shattered by an arbitrary set of rules that mandate surrender of control.