It’s no secret that I’m excited about the ideas to be shared at the upcoming WIFF New Media Day and about the innovative minds that we have involved in the day. To get you kids charged up too, I’ve listed our panelists bios below. Huge hoorah to Telefilm and BC Film for making this day happen!!!
WIFF NEW MEDIA DAY
Wednesday, March 4, 2009 9 am – 6 pm
VanCity Theatre
Tickets Here
Getting Your Feet Wired 9 am – 10:30 am
PANELISTS:
Dennis Chenard is the Director of Industry Relations at the Centre for Digital Media – Masters of Digital Media Program. In his former role as New Media BC’s Membership and Partnerships Manager he worked to advance BC as a World Centre of Digital Media while growing the scope of the International Partnering Forum at VIDFEST. Also known as a ‘Director of Hook-Ups’ he has a history of connecting creators, producers, and distributors of digital content with peers around the world and has worked with a variety of stakeholders in industry, government and education in Canada and abroad. He produces social media, a recent project being the development of Opportunity Alert, a social networking site for digital media companies around the world.
Bridget O’Neill is a veteran actress with an impressive amount of credits on and off camera. In 2001, she earned her SAG eligibility in the Seattle indie feature Joyful Partaking. She’s off to a strong start in 2009, filming three indies in January and working on two features to be shot later this year. Bridget is also a popular YouTube personality, where she writes and produces her own variety channel, The Lilylulay Show. Her production company, Confluence Creative Media, is “a Seattle based, collective of artists and media professionals who specialize in new media entertainment.”
Founder and president of FanTrust Entertainment Strategies, Catherine Warren is an executive management consultant to the distribution and digital media industries. A digital media veteran celebrating 25 years, Catherine leads due diligence on M&A for major game and animation companies, creates fan strategies for blockbuster television franchises such as CSI and advises mobile leaders including Nokia and Orange Telecom. She has published more than 25 books and magazine series for adults and children on science and computing as well as produced numerous award-winning Web sites and interactive broadcasts. A member of the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Catherine has a degree in physics from Reed College and a masters from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her business FanTrust provides media & entertainment brands with technologies and tactics for building Fan relationships & revenues.
Daniella Sorrentino is Executive Director of New Forms Media Society and a director of shorts, music videos and online content. NFMS produces two annual festivals showcasing local and Canadian artists working with new technologies as a medium for artistic expression. Daniella is currently shooting and co-producing Vancouver City Limits – a weekly webisode of emerging Vancouver musicians, developing on online artist driven film showcase and adapting Angela Carter’s The Loves of Lady Purple for film.
PANELIST /MODERATOR:
Danika Dinsmore is a writer, filmmaker, and educator. She is a past board member and past President of Women in Film and Television Vancouver. Her first foray into “new media” was in 1997 with Telepoetics, which organized live poetry exchanges via videophone and internet. In 2002 she co-curated the Future ForWord multi-media poetry exhibition, featuring voice-recognition / projection of spoken word. Most recently, while working for an internet start-up, she became the showrunner for VJIAM.tv, a broadcast TV series based on the company’s city-focused websites.
Social Media How To 10:45 am – 12 pm
PANELISTS:
Carol Sill is a creative producer and social media consultant with a background in international broadcast and non-theatric distribution. She taught New Media at VFS for many years, and her digital artwork has been shown worldwide. In addition to client work, her current projects-in-process include OpenSourceSpirit, Alphablogs, Cha-Cha-Cha (a very new tea site), and Carol Sill, her personal blog. Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Monica Hamburg is a writer and social media evangelist. She is a speaker, researcher and observer of how social media is used to connect people and market. She runs campaigns for clients, trains people on how to use the tools and many other creative and geeky things. She blogs at Me Like the Interweb , and is a contributor to the popular digital marketing magazine One Degree. She’s also an actor and class clown who now uses her dry humour for speaking engagements and in her Your Dose of Lunacy blog (recently voted 3rd place in the humor category in the Best of 604 awards).
Gillian Shaw is a journalist with The Vancouver Sun and Canwest. She writes on Digital Life for the Sun and the CanWest news service, focusing on technology issues and trends online and off that affect our life, whether at work or play. Even her dog has her own Facebook site. Gillian’s stories and her blog can be found online at www.vancouversun.com/gillianshaw and you can also find her at some social media links listed at krunchd.com/gillianshaw.
PANELIST / MODERATOR:
Erica Hargreave is a creative producer and writer. Thriving on challenges and the desire to solve problems, Erica has been focusing her storytelling on new and social media for the past year and a half and she’s been loving it. During this time, she has been a part of the CBC’s Digital Development Labs and a recipient of a Telefilm Fellowship to nextMEDIA and the Banff Television Festival. She cofounded Bridging Media and helped nextMedia and the Banff Television Festival integrate social media storytelling into their festivals. Erica can be found on-line at Bridging Media, Ahimsa Media, on her personal blog, and numerous social media platforms, including twitter, flickr, linked in and facebook.
Emerging Trends and Technologies 1 pm – 2:30 pm
PANELISTS:
Thecla Schiphorst is a Media Artist/Designer and Faculty Member in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU. Her background in performance and computing forms the basis for her research which focuses on embodied interaction, sense-making, and the aesthetics of interaction. She is a member of the original design team that developed Life Forms, the computer compositional tool for choreography and has worked with Merce Cunningham since 1990 supporting his creation of new dance with the computer. She is the recipient of the 1998 PetroCanada award in New Media awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts. Her media art installations have been exhibited internationally in Europe, Canada, the United States and Asia in many venues including Ars Electronica, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF), Future Physical, Siggraph, the Wexner Centre for the Arts, the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, and the London ICA. Thecla Schiphorst leads the whisper[s] research group an acronym for: wearable, hand-held, intimate, sensory, personal, expressive, responsive systems.
James Eberhardt is co-founder of Echo Mobile and a Technical Director with over 13 years of experience of leading convergent media projects, delivering content and stories to audiences on the screens of mobile devices. His projects have won awards for their innovation in using mobile technology and how it is used to enhance entertainment content. James has taught at universities and colleges and spoken at conferences on the topic of mobile development. In 2009 James will be conducting workshops on iPhone development in Toronto, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. He is currently authoring a book on iPhone development to be published later this year. In 2006 he was the recipient of the “Programmer of the Year” award at the Canadian New Media Awards.
Jean Hebert is a PhD Candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, studying the cultural adoption of mobile social media. He is also the current Program Manager at Mobile Muse. His research interests include mass participatory media, mobile culture, popular music, political economy of media, and critical theory. He writes a music/mobile/technology blog called Clicknoise, runs a small local record label, and plays in a couple of bands. He has worked in mobile marketing and social media for the past six years.
Shannon McKarney is a 38 year old blogger, writer, and social media enthusiast. Currently working with Overlay.tv, Shannon dabbles in video, advertising and monetization; the rest of her time is spent writing about eco-friendly products, fashion and beauty, and any other current issue that might have gotten under her skin. Previous lives had her working with e-commerce, Communities of Practice, electronic forms and interesting people from around the world. Originally from Nova Scotia, she’s been in Ottawa for many years.
MODERATOR:
Jennifer Ouano is founder and head of Elastic Entertainment, a digital media company that harnesses the power of creativity to develop, produce, strategize and collaborate on original entertainment properties across the digital universe. For over 15 years, Jennifer has worn many media hats as an award-winning multiplatform producer, director, consultant and entrepreneur. She is a recognized leader in the Canadian new media industry, being called upon to present her expertise on digital entertainment and social media trends, technologies, challenges and opportunities.
Monetizing Content 2:45 pm – 4 pm
PANELISTS:
Amielle Lake is the CEO and Co-Founder of tagga.com a mobile bookmarking platform that let’s anyone tag real world items and web snippets to their mobile phone. Like any startup CEO, she handles many hats, including putting together IKEA furniture and ensuring that there is enough Red Rave energy drinks in the fridge for the dev squad. Prior to founding Tagga, Amielle was a marketing and corporate development executive active in the investment, mining and software market sectors. Her expertise lie in working with small companies to develop marketing and growth plans and then devise means to capitalize them. Amielle is also a published author. Her book, The Elephant Hunters, is about how social interactions determine outcomes in the finance world.
Bradley Shende – With 15 years of creative experience as a producer of innovative multimedia content, Bradley has an infectious passion for video and new media. Some of Bradley’s accolades include 4 Telly awards for Outstanding Video Direction and Creativity, producer through six seasons of the show Dave Chalk Connected, and Director of the AMA award-winning Future Shop Digital Camera Starter Kit. He is a pioneer in media-rich computer-based and mobile content and a well-versed commentator on new media and Web 2.0. Bradley is also the
host of Connected Life – Canada’s most popular Web-based technology show and is BCTV’s resident technology expert every Monday on the Morning News Hour.
Prior to founding Strutta, Maura Rodgers was VP of Marketing and Founder at Spinway, where she was largely responsible for making Spinway become the fastest growing ISP in history with over 8 million users in 11 months. In charge of the communications and marketing strategy at Spinway, she worked closely with all partners including Yahoo!, Costco, Barnes & Noble, Capital One and Kmart to streamline communications and ensure the success of their ISP product launches. Prior to Spinway, Maura was founder of Lloyd Edwards, Inc. – a boutique marketing consulting company specializing in marketing communications, training and product launches. Her clients included Forbes 500’s Boston Scientific, Inc. Recently, Maura founded Launch Party Vancouver to promote the bustling start-up scene and connect BC’s growing tech community with other tech hubs in Canada and abroad. RainCity listed her as one of the Vancouver Tech Women to Watch in 2008.
Rochelle Grayson is the President of Work at Play, a leading social media agency specializing in the monetization of digital content for brands and entertainment properties. With an extensive background in business, technology, new media and film, Rochelle has led and launched several innovative digital media initiatives. She was the Co-Founder of Elastic Entertainment, a digital media entertainment company, the Production Executive on Douglas Coupland’s film, EVERYTHING’S GONE GREEN, and the Executive Director at Women in Film & Television Vancouver. In the past year, Rochelle was named one of Vancouver’s Top 10 Technology Women, nominated as one of Canada’s Top 100™ Most Powerful Women, named one of Business in Vancouver’s Top Forty under 40, awarded the Canadian Women in Communication’s Excellence in Leadership Award, and elected to the New Media BC Board.
MODERATOR:
Tracey Friesen joined the National Film Board as producer in spring 2001 and became executive producer at the Pacific & Yukon Centre in September 2007. In this capacity, she works with the independent film community to create innovative, relevant documentaries, animation and new media. Tracey has credits so far on 18 projects, including the multiple award winning titles ‘ScaredSacred’ (Genie 2005), ‘Being Caribou’ (Gemini 2006), ‘Confessions of an Innocent Man’ (Gemini 2008) and ‘Carts of Darkness’. As the multi-platform media landscape evolves, Tracey is striving to diversify her development slate to include alternative forms of narrative expression and new creators. Before the NFB, Tracey was with Rainmaker for five years and prior to this worked as an off-line editor. Actively involved in the Vancouver film community, Tracey is a member of the Academy, Women in Film & Television
Vancouver, DOC, sits as an affiliate guest with MPPIA and recently completed an MBA at Simon Fraser University.
