GameChangers is a game design competition for diverse teams to collaborate, network, share and develop skills in software and game development. Join in at the Open House to get started!  Participation is FREE and teams will be a mix of women and men studying or working in software development and game design.  For anyone interested in joining a team this open house is the first step to get signed up.  The 2-hour open house includes: Snappy Info Presentation, Game Demos, Mix & Meet, and a Game Design Jam Improv.  For more information please visit the GameChangers website, or email GameChangers.

GameChangers is a project of the Centre for Social Innovation, made possible with seed funding from the mesh prize and with support from great community advisors and partners.

transmission: GLOBAL SUMMIT is an invite-only event for thought-leaders in the content and technology sectors who are interested in a completely unique conference that’s focused on shifting the future of global digital innovations.

Taking place in Victoria transmission: GLOBAL SUMMIT (TGS) 2012 is the think-tank conference that focuses on bringing together international creators, entrepreneurs, innovators and thought leaders from the creative content and technology sectors to exchange and leverage ideas linked to the creation and demand of digital creative content.

The conference attracts a wide range of creators and leaders from all content and technology sectors. The format of our events allow people to sit down to have the conversations and make the connections that bring value to their businesses or organizations. TGS is the event where you make new contacts and form new strategic plans in one of the most beautiful cities on the West Coast of Canada.

transmission: GLOBAL SUMMIT 2012 will once again feature over 50 signature roundtable sessions, keynote presentations, B2B discussion forums, and cutting-edge live showcases.

Part of the transmitNOW series, transmission: GLOBAL SUMMIT 2012 is comprised of the following key elements that form the backbone of transmitNOW events:

• 50+ Roundtable Discussions that allow delegates to sit down with each other and have face-to-face conversations about the issues that are affecting their industries.
• 6+ Keynote Presentations- that bring together thought-leaders from a diverse cross-section of sectors who have a story to tell and can relevant knowledge and intel.
• 6+ B2B Discussion Forums- that are specifically tailored to our event partners and like-minded stakeholders to bring together select attendees to focus on a sector-specific issue.  Ana Serrano, director of the CFC Media Lab, will be leading one of these sessions.
• World-Class Facilitation-in partnership with The Value Web, the internationally renowned facilitation team behind the World Economic Forum.

As part of Transmission: Global Summit we will be showing Heart of Stars a prototype completed by Vanessa Shaver and Tsu-Ching Yu.

David Nam of Herd.fm will also be attending the conference:

HERD.FM was conceived at the CFC Media Lab’s NBC Universal Multiplatform Matchmaking Program where co-founders Romeo Candido (2010), Davin Lengyel (2010) and James Milward (2010) challenged themselves to find a new way to share music.  Herd.fm welcomed David Nam as an executive team member and the vision of the product grew from being a geo-locative music discovery tool to a mobile service that solves the problem of sharing and discovering meaningful music in a fun, and easy way on the mobile platform.  Nam is the former VP of Product and Marketing at MXP4 and former Head of Marketing at Last.fm.

TRANSMISSION INNOVATION CAMP

A Monday-To-Monday Acceleration Programme for Startups Between Content and Technology Within the Context of transmission: GLOBAL SUMMIT

Launching for the first time in transmitNOW’s history, the Innovation Camp is a unique acceleration programme dedicated to startups at the intersection of creative content and technology that leverages the expertise from transmitNOW’s international network of creators, academics, and business leaders.

Held over the course of eight days, 3-5 selected startups will be working in focused business modeling sessions in conjunction with a group of renowned mentors and The Value Web, while also having the opportunity to engage face-to-face with decision-making leaders and experts in the content and technology industries through the intimate surroundings established at transmission: GLOBAL SUMMIT.

Mentors to date include:

• Paul Hoffert, CM. (Professor, York University and Chair of Bell Broadcast & New Media Fund)
• Steven Masur, Esq. (Managing Partner, MasurLaw)
• David Neale (President, Neale & Associates)
• Sue McGill (Advisor, IT, Communications and Entertainment, MaRS Discover District)
• Ana Serrano (Director, CFC Media Lab)
• Jacqueline Nuwame (Senior Programs Training Manager, CFC Media Lab)

Conor Holler will be participating in the Innovation Camp and will be working on his project Deebo, a gamified approach to Diabetes management.  Deebo was recently presented at Lean Startup Machine Toronto and was incredibly well received.

Lean Startup Machine is not a hack-a-thon or a pitching competition, it is a space where individuals come together to discuss ideas and validate them through real world interactions with potential customers.

Participants were asked to ideate, form groups, and then get customer validation for their products by talking to potential customers.  Validation often came in the form of money, letters of intent, or some other form of commitment to the startup idea.  Participants were encouraged by the organizer, Trevor Owens, to hit the street and talk to their customers and invalidate their assumptions!

The energy at the Burroughes in Toronto was intense, the teams worked quickly and feverishly to validate their startup ideas and pivot to create a minimum viable product to continue to test within their consumer bases all in four days!  The participants all felt that it was an incredibly intense and rewarding experience!

If you want to read the play-by-play be sure to go read out Twitter Feed from the weekend!

Lean Startups To Keep on Your Radar:

Several interesting startup ideas were presented at Lean Startup Machine Toronto to a panel of very interesting judges some being: Max Cameron of Big Bang Technology, and Satish Kanwar of Jet Cooper.  The presented ideas ranged from conference matchmaking databases to solutions to a tattoo artist’s paperwork management.  The winning idea of the event was HireShark a service that sorts resumes and helps you find the right talent for your business.

The CFC Media Lab was well represented at the event, Deebo, a gamified approach to managing ones diabetes was presented by alumnus Conor Holler, and fellow alumnae Simone Maurice joined his team to help him out for the weekend.  Deebo received the award of most niche startup idea.  Way to go guys!

Lean Links to Check Out

http://leanstartupmachine.com/
http://www.torontostandard.com/business/dont-talk-with-your-mouth-full-ten-lessons-from-lean-startup-machine-toronto/
http://www.torontostandard.com/business/lean-with-it/
http://bigbangtechnology.com/post/advice_for_lean_startup_machine_toronto_attendees

Job Description: Mobile Application Developer, Toronto

EDAC is looking for a highly skilled multi-platform mobile application developer to build the first version, and potentially future versions, of Quinzee a mobile application that makes energy use relevant. This is a contract position that will last the duration of the development of the first version of Quinzee.

This project would be a good opportunity for someone already programming in Sencha Touch 2 to add a very exciting application to his or her portfolio. It would also be a great way for an experienced Adobe Flash, and specifically Adobe Flex, developer to retrain and build a best-in-class application for their portfolio on a fast-growing crossplatform development tool.

Responsibilities

1. Understand application’s objectives through discussion with the founders and by interpreting the already completed design brief, wireframes, and graphics.
2. Develop, from the ground up, the application on the Sencha Touch 2 platform (for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry), including design, development and debugging
3. Test the application on all platforms and outline limitations and potential issues
4. Be available for product maintenance for a reasonable amount of time upon completion of the project

Knowledge And Skill Requirements

• Experience working with PhoneGap or Sencha Touch 2 or other multi-platform development tools
• If not the above, experience developing in Adobe Flash, and particularly Adobe Flex
• Experience with social media APIs and API structure language
• Familiarity with relational database concepts

Education And Experience

• Undergraduate degree, preferably in Computer Science, Information Systems, Computer Engineering or a related field
• Masters degree in computer science or a related field preferred
• At least two years developing mobile applications, at least one of which is awesome
• Experience designing simple and compelling user experiences on a mobile

Good Qualities To Have

• Attention to detail
• A desire to build a game changing application that users will love
• An appreciation for the visual arts, social networking and mobile social gaming

Compensation

Compensation will be determined based on the successful candidate’s level of experience and the work schedule agreed upon.

About Environmental Data Analytics & Communications (EDAC)

EDAC is a software-as-a-service company that builds systems that educate and influence individuals to improve resource management and system efficiencies.

Dx3 is the Canadian Trade Show Where Business Gets Digital.

When it comes to the digital landscape, there’s a ton of confusion. Luckily, Dx3 can help. Their educational, informative, and hands-on content sessions will deliver practical advice and help you to move your business and your career forward. Everything from early stage introductory sessions to advanced classes for the seasoned professional is covered.

Dx3 Canada will also have a wide array of companies exhibiting on the trade show floor, as well as unique interactive features that will inform, inspire, and intrigue. You can find our more about these under show features.

Sprout Up is a monthly event for forward-thinking entrepreneurs to gather and mind-meld.

A great chance for startups around the to get friendly, discuss current trends, and network in a casual, open, and focused setting. Sprout Up events have been held in cities around the world including Toronto, Montreal, NYC and London, and regularly have over 300 attendees.

Sprout Up is excited to announce the details of Sprout Up Toronto, taking place Tuesday, January 31st at The Courthouse. The guest speaker will be Dan Martell, an investor and serial entrepreneur. Most recently Dan was the founder of Flowtown, which was acquired in October 2011.

The <stabletalk> perks keep on coming!  We’re asking you to send a pitch of a project you would like to present at Lean Startup Machine Toronto and we will send you and your team to the amazing weekend long event!

What is Lean Startup Machine?

Lean Startup Machine is a metrics-driven startup competition where teams learn to identify the key risks in their business model through hands-on mentorship and our framework of tools. Over the course of the weekend you will do the following:

• Ideate a startup or work on the one you have now
• Practice Customer Discovery
• Research your Target Market
• Practice Customer Development
• Test your Assumptions in Iterations
• Understand your Business Model
• Iterate and Pivot (when necessary)
• Build something you can Launch
• Present your Validated Learnings
   

  

How to win free passes:

Send me (amallozzi@cfccreates.com) a one-pager of the idea you would like to pitch at Lean Start-Up Machine Toronto by Friday January 20, 2012 and the best pitch will be awarded free passes for their team to attend!

Be sure to include the following in your submission:

• An outline of your idea (include the platform for your project and the audience you wish to target)
• Your team (include brief bios of your team members and their role)
• Any mock-up images you may have (not required but always nice!)

Who’s hiring you: A small, well-honed team that have muscled our way to the front of the race to bring thought-controlled computing to the mass market. With limited resources and no small amount of pluck we have created groundbreaking applications that show up in places like CNN, The Wall Street Journal and WIRED.com . We travel a lot, we work hard, we make great stuff, and we take tremendous pleasure in blowing people’s minds. More than anything, we’re out to change the way people interact with technology and move the needle of human-computer interfaces.

Apply to: jobs@interaxon.ca

Job Title: Rock-Star Developer and Team Lead

Summary: We need an exceptional coder who loves challenges and makes insanely good things that people love and use often. You’ll be building and leading a tight team of genius developers in creating the applications that will make thought-controlled computing a part of people’s everyday lives.

Compensation:  Salary & Equity

When Hired: ASAP

Description of role and tasks:

• Development of a cross-platform applications (including iOS and Android) using a revolutionary new human-computer interface
• Executing a complex software development project from planning through delivery and maintenance and upgrades
• Working closely with interaction & interface designers to create magnetic, engaging experiences on the mobile platform
• Working closely with engineering, research and neuroscience teams to ensure that all aspects of the product are fully integrated
• Building a flexible team of developers to handle future software development effort
• Managing all software developers and development efforts.
• Reporting directly to CTO & Executive team
  

Qualities and experience of hire:

• Strong Coder in all languages: Python, C, Ruby, Objective C, C++, Java, Android, iPhone, etc.
• Experience with the following:
  • cloud-based applications
  • real-time signal processing
  • mobile application development
  • encryption
  • mobile gaming
  • user-interface & interaction development
    
• Loves programming and programming languages
• Strong understanding of how to deliver magnetic, engaging experiences on the mobile platform
• Exceptional track record creating solid, successful applications

Job Title: Interaction designer

Summary: You are a white hot designer who eats sleeps and breathes user experience. You have a track record of creating (and shipping!) beautiful, emotionally resonant designs that people actually use, and have experience in interaction design, user interface design, graphic design. mobile app design on iphone, ipad and android platforms. You are going to be creating the language of brainwave-based interaction, and working with a team of genius developers and engineers to realize that language in innovative, magnetic products.

Compensation:  Salary & Equity

When Hired: ASAP

Description of role and tasks:

• Responsible for the end-to-end development of the user experience from the purchase through to the product including
• Assets
• Experience Flow
• Metaphors & inconography
• Audio / Music
• Product Management – understanding target markets and developing features that appeal to those markets
  • Developing a language that will define all future brainwave interactions
  • Work with external collaborators to realize your vision

Qualities and experience of hire:

• White hot designer
• Have designed multiple successful applications for mobile platforms
• Extraordinary graphic design skills
• Outstanding  ability in motion graphic design
• Skilled in communication in all media (web, video, print, product, applications)
• Passionate about human-computer interaction and how technology can enhance and improve the experience of self
• Experienced in developing winning applications that connect with targeted markets
• Has the ability to create products with the power to significantly change consumer behaviour
• Portfolio of magnetic, emotional, compelling designs and applications that have gone to market and shown traction

There were a lot of great moments at nextMEDIA that in case you missed the event you should really know about, after all, what conference can you attend that hosts Margaret Atwood speaking about breaking into the social media world on the same day that the director of digital marketing for the UFC speaks about MMA fighters engaging with social media?  The Senior Business Leader at Facebook also showed up to talk about the new features in the timeline and also spoke about media consumption in the social world.  Overall, it was a hugely diverse group of speakers with different areas of expertise and interests to share with an incredibly engaged audience.

Steve Irvine of Facebook was particularly engaging, he asks marketers to put people at the centre of their marketing efforts and to answer the question: “What’s social about your brand?”  When writing content for social media, writers should consider these questions: “Why should I care?” and “Why should I share?”  Irvine also highlighted the new Washington Post Social Reader application and also spoke of Netflix’s Facebook app that will be released in the new year.  Facebook users will be able to watch films with their friends virtually and chat during the film all through a Facebook app.  With the success of Zynga’s social games, Netflix on Facebook sounds very promising!

The Digi Awards were also amazing, a special shout-out goes to alumnus Evan Jones at Stitch Media, Stitch Media won a Digi for Best in Digital Advertising for Drunk and on Drugs Happy Funtime Hour!  Way to go guys, you deserve it!

The team at The CFC Media Lab would like to extend congratulations to all of the Digi Awards winners and nominees for 2011. It is always exciting to get a snapshot of the amazing work that continues to emerge and grow across Canada.  Can’t wait to see you all there next year!

As the end of November approaches we are reminded that nextMEDIA and the Digi Awards are around the corner!  We will be there and to make sure that you are able to attend the crew at nextMEDIA has decided to offer a discount for all <STABLETALK> Readers! This is one of the many perks for following us online!

nextMEDIA 2011 is poised to be the most anticipated yet!  Evolve your business alongside leading executives from advertising, publishing, media and technology for two days of strategy, networking and insights at Canada’s most influential media conference.

Some of this year’s participants include:

• Margaret Atwood, Founder of Syngrafii and iDoLVine, and renowned author
• Kevin Roberts, Worldwide CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi
• Robert Friedman, President, Media & Entertainment @Radical.media a FremantleMedia Company
• Eddy Moretti, Executive Creative Director, Vice Inc
• David Safer, Director, Digital Marketing Partnerships, UFC

Also, don’t miss The Branded Entertainment keynote:

The Entertainment Marketplace: Where Buyers Meet Sellers…Yet The Price Is High

Join Robert Friedman on an informative keynote session and behind-the-scenes look at @radical.media’s global company success with well-known next generation entertainment properties. Hear from him how the development and distribution of content across multiple platforms is evolving. @radical.media has created some of the world’s most innovative content; developing, producing and distributing content for television, feature films, commercials, music programming, digital content and design including projects such as the critically acclaimed “Iconoclasts” for Sundance Channel, Emmy®-winning “10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America” for the History Channel, “Oprah Presents Masterclass” for OWN, HBO’s “Paradise Lost”, a wide array of MTV music projects including “Lady Gaga: Inside the Outside”, “Britney: For the Record”, the Award-winning digital experience “The Wilderness Downtown” for Google Creative Lab and Arcade Fire and the the Grammy-nominated digital project “The Johnny Cash Project” with Chris Milk.

After nextMEDIA be sure to attend the Digi Awards!

We are very proud of our alumni for making it on the Digi List for this year’s Digi Awards!

• BEST IN CROSS-PLATFORM: KIDS - Babar and the Adventures of Badou, Caitlin O’Donovan
• CANADA’S TOP DIGITAL PRODUCERS - Stitch Media, Evan Jones (2003)
• BEST IN CROSS-PLATFORM: ENTERTAINMENT - Dating Guy, Johnny Kalangis (1999)
• BEST IN CROSS-PLATFORM: FACTUAL – Storming Juno Interactive, James Milward (2005)
• BEST IN CROSS-PLATFORM: KIDS & BEST IN WEB-BASED GAMES – Wild Kratts Interactive, Shelley Simmons (2006)

Best of luck to all of you, we will be there cheering you on!

As always, I will be live-tweeting from these two events as well as writing a wrap-up <STABLETALK> post so stay tuned!

The McLuhan Mashup Challenge is on and amazing prizes are up for grabs. From October 31st to November 12th, CBC invites you to remix, rework and recreate Marshall McLuhan’s message by creating your own McLuhan Mashup.

What’s a Mashup?

A mashup is media content containing any or all of text, graphics, audio, video and animation drawn from pre-existing sources, to create a new derivative work. You are also welcome to use content and elements you’ve created yourself; however, your work must be created from two or more separate pieces of digital content.

What do I need to do?

Start with an idea, gather your media, mash it up in any form you like and upload your most creative reinterpretation of McLuhan’s ideas. Video or Audio submissions must be no more than three minutes long.

More details are on CBC’s site!  Good luck to all entrants!

Want to be part of NXNE Interactive? Have an issue you want to talk about or a unique perspective on a topic? NXNEi wants to hear from you!

Submission deadline is Nov. 11th!

Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN is the new international competition for digital artists to win a residency at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva. It is the first prize to be announced as part of the new Collide@CERN artists residency programme initiated by the laboratory.

The Winning Artist Will Receive:

• 10,000 Euros prize money
• rent
• subsistence and travel are funded from a designated limited fund that is in addition to the prize money. The awarding of this prize is thanks to the generosity of Ars Electronica and the funding of the creative residencies made possible by the generosity of anonymous donors
• insurances for the residencies are funded by the Exclusive Sponsor of all artists insurances for the Collide@CERN programme, UNIQA Assurances SA Switzerland

CERN is looking for digital artists who will be truly inspired by CERN, showing their wish to engage with the ideas and/or technology of particle physics and with CERN as a place of scientific collaboration, using them as springboards of the imagination which dare to go beyond the paradigm. You might be a choreographer, performer, visual artist, film maker or a composer – what you all have in common is that you use the digital as the means of making your work and/or the way of presenting it.

For more details about this program and how to apply: http://www.aec.at/prix/collide/

Another amazing job opportunity that might be right for you!

TITLE: Online Design Specialist

FUNCTION: Reporting to the Director, Marketing, this role focuses on online graphic production, based on Porter graphic standards. This role creates a powerful integrated experience across a wide spectrum of applications, including the Porter website, paid media, social media, etc.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Integrates online and print creative
• Creates and produces final digital files, for internal and external applications
• Supports the current and proposed Porter website, including  product architecture and navigation
• Designs, code and loads eblasts
• Updates and upgrades the marketing portion of  Porter website , including content, format, SEO, static and motion
• Uploads or delivers materials to all media as required, and liaises with outside production departments
• Develops new marketing materials in different formats based on current graphic standards
  • Maintains accurate online files of graphic design materials
  • Develops presentations, including multi-media
  • Actively participate in Porter’s Safety Management System (SMS) including, reporting hazards and incidents encountered in daily operations; understand, comply and promote the Company Safety Policy
  • Any other duties as requested by the Director, Marketing

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Graphic Design degree/diploma from an accredited post-secondary institution
• Minimum of 3 years of experience
• Advanced development knowledge with Flash, HTML 5, CSS, JavaScript
• Advanced knowledge of Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign
• Solid understanding of design and ability to work with complex design specifications
• Working knowledge of Adobe Premiere
• Experience working on public-facing websites
• Knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite including Outlook, Excel, Word & PowerPoint
• Keen aptitude for communicating with both technical and non-technical resources
• Excellent conceptual and creative skills
• Excellent organizational skills and attention to detail
• Superior written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple tasks concurrently
• Ability to work effectively within a team environment and accept direction
• Bilingualism (English/French) is an asset

POSTION LOCATION

• Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport

Please forward your resume to jobs@flyporter.com. 

Hollywood is banking on 3-D breaking its way into the home.  The second installment of Packaged Goods looks at works that have experimented with the 3-d format in new and profitable ways.

Join the experts for a live chat and screening on the 3-d renaissance.

Another amazing festival you can’t miss is coming up!

The International Startup Festival is a two-day conference on the business of startups. It brings together industry veterans and fresh faces, thought leaders and technology giants from around the world, for a series of lean, fast-paced events. It includes startup launches, inspiring keynotes, and deep-dives into hot sectors like mobility, social networking, and gaming. The festival brings a global audience together to cover the entire startup lifecycle: early-stage innovation; scaling the business; and achieving a successful exit.

There are two amazing Kickstarter projects that need your support, help these two teams reach their goals!

Jeremy Diamond and Denny Silverthorne of Smiley Guy Studios are looking to raise funds to produce an animated short film as a tribute to the work of illustrator Bruce McCall.  The short film, Love in the Time of Dendur, is based on a cover of The New Yorker that depicted two mummies, having their photo taken by another mummy in front of the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  More details about this project and how you can DONATE can be seen on their Kickstarter page.

Liz Gallo and David Goorevitch are also working on a project that needs your support!  The Love Gun uses directional speakers to focus songs in a specific direction.  With The Love Gun, even the dullest streets will turn into spaces for people to connect and dance!  To learn more about this project and DONATE, you can check out their Kickstarter page.

Good luck teams!

Onestop Media Group, Canada’s leader in digital out-of-home networks, is looking for a creative, problem solving developer. This position requires someone with experience taking a significant role in several projects, including design and maintenance of our customer web portals.

You will be expected to design, build, document and test your solutions in a team environment. The company wants your input on software development processes and system design. Your skill set should include:

The job will challenge and provide amazing opportunities for learning new things. The company provides a comprehensive benefits program, a powerful dual-head workstation, great coffee, in a lively and friendly downtown office environment.

Please apply to jobs@onestopmedia.com with a cover letter describing why you would fit into our company. They are read, and it’s a good way to differentiate your application from the hundreds of bots who will also apply for this job.

Only applications in PDF or plain text format will be accepted. Links to examples of your work on-line and salary expectations would be appreciated.

As part of World Wide Shorts Film Festival, the CFC Media Lab is presenting an amazing panel, and you are invited to attend it!

More than just cat videos and double rainbows, YouTube presents opportunities for interactive storytelling and new models for distribution that give you the power to connect with your audience directly.  Learn how to re-imagine your distribution strategy and get more views for your films.

This panel will look at the following themes:

• Case studies of the Staten Island PS 22 choir; 27 million hits on YouTube
• Interactive stories on YouTube
• How emerging talent is using YouTube for audience sourcing and as a new model for distribution and audience participation/generation.

Moderator: Jacqueline Nuwame, Sr Training Programs Manager of CFC Media Lab

Jacqueline Nuwame is currently Senior Training Programs Manager, at the CFC Media Lab, overseeing the Telus IAEP training program, working with industry partners on strategic relationships on numerous special projects and national training activities. With her company Eventide Media she is in development on three documentaries, most notably The Hanging of Angelique, based on the novel by Afua Cooper. With her company she has worked as a consultant with several Canadian production companies and convergent projects such as Direct Current’s 4Real.com website. In the past, she was the Director of Communications at DECODE Entertainment Inc., in Toronto. She has an award-winning portfolio of work ranging in both television and multimedia, and has an array of experience in entertainment production, new media, marketing, and corporate communications.

Davin Lengyel: Web Series Producer, Pur Pwnage

Davin Trent Lengyel is a Toronto-based television and New Media producer. He is currently Co-Producer for the world-famous television series Pure Pwnage and is preparing to release his own indie series Brotherhood of Leet. Holds a degree in Engineering, Math, Education and was called to the bar in Ontario. Creator of internet series Brotherhood of Leet. Producer of internet series Pro at Cooking. Co-producer of Gemini Award nominated television series Pure Pwnage. Co-founder of online marketplace Ethical Ocean and music app Herd.fm

Yenie Ra: Strategic Partnership Development Manager, YouTube

Prior to joining YouTube in 2008, Yenie worked in the music industry at Zeitgeist Artist Management, a boutique artist management company located in SF.   Yenie’s clients included: Death Cab for Cutie, Postal Service, Feist (at the time), Bob Mould (of Husker Du), Matt Nathanson, She and Him.  She worked there from 2005-2008, and was the day-to-day manager for Death Cab, Postal Service, Bob Mould and She and Him.

At YouTube, she worked as part of the team that built the YouTube Partner Program–notable YouTube stars/partners include Fred, Smosh, Nalts, Khan Academy, Rebecca Black.  In 2010, she transitioned from that team to the Business Development team, where she is currently spearheading the Indie Music space efforts on the site.

Josh Raskin: Filmmaker

• Josh was involved in YouTube Play .
• Josh also directed the daytime Emmy winner ”I Met the Walrus“.

EIGHT pitchers will race the clock to win over a live Banff audience with a 30-second elevator pitch for a cross-platform branded entertainment project that fits our creative brief.

THREE finalists will go head-to-head pitching to the judges – a star panel of industry gatekeepers from across the media ecosystem.

ONE winner will be crowned the ultimate deal maker by the judges and audience taking home a VIP Deal Makers Prize Pack!

Enter Now!

Stay tuned for details about the CFC Media Lab’s involvement at Banff World Media Festival!

The Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF), the only festival of its kind in North America, is a public film festival that reaches over 1.3 million subway commuters daily. Recently named one of MovieMaker Magazine’s “20 Coolest Film Festivals,” TUFF takes place September 9 – 18, 2011 on Onestop platform screens across the Toronto subway system.

Award-winning Canadian filmmaker, Atom Egoyan, will guest judge the fifth annual Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF), selecting the top films of the festival.

Filmmakers, animators and video artists are invited to submit one-minute silent films an urban population. TUFF pays artist fees and awards thousands in cash and prizes.

Deadline for submissions to TUFF is July 15, 2011. TUFF is free to submit prior to June 1, 2011. After that date, there will be submission fees: $10 (June 1 – June 30) and $15 (July 1 – July 15). Films can be submitted through the TUFF Website.

5 Years and Still TUFF!





X Media Lab Perth: Storytelling in a Digital Age

The printing press, the movie camera, the television; over the centuries: all these have changed the way that stories are told.  But now the interactivity of the internet has shaken up the communication process in ways which we could never have imagined before gamification, 3D, and location-based services

Viral audience collaboration…total immersion…these are just some of the many enablers of the new forms of narrative.

New developments are coming thick and fast with massive opportunities for those at the forefront and severe penalties for those who fall behind.  That’s why the next X Media Lab event is on the subject “What’s Your Story? Storytelling in a Digital Age“.  It’s taking place in Perth, Australia starting April 15th 2011.  To discover more and reserve your place at X Media Lab Perth: Storytelling in a Digital Age click here.

We’ve brought together over sixteen of the world’s leading authorities in Digital Media; Strategists, Creatives, Producers, Commissioning Executives and Technical Experts, all with the intention of sharing their knowledge and insights to you.  At the 1-day Conference you’ll receive concentrated, actionable information.

EVENT DETAILS

XML Perth Conference Day (Friday April 15th 2011: 9.00am – 5.00pm, followed by Networking Reception)

State Theatre Centre WA, Corner of Roe and William Streets, Northbridge

General Admission: Independent/Entrepreneur $250, Corporate/Government $395, Student $99

Thanks to some very generous partners registration fees for this event are very low. We expect it to sell out quickly, so please act fast to secure your place.

The Lab (Saturday April 16th – 17th, 2011)

Nominate your digital media project to be mentored by the XML Perth International Mentors, and you may be eligible for a $20k XML Perth Development Award.

X Media Lab @ The Sydney Opera House (June 10-12, 2011)

X Media Lab: Global Media Ideas: is our annual international summit at iconic Sydney Opera House as part of Vivid Sydney, a festival of light, music and ideas.

XML: Global Media Ideas consists of two parts: the Conference Day on June 10th, General Admission, for which just three hundred spaces are available; and then the Lab itself (June 11-12th) during which selected digital media businesses and project teams work one-on-one with the international mentors – gaining high-level elite personal consultation and entering into an impeccable international network.  The line-up of international mentors and speakers will be announced and tickets will go on sale after XML Perth: Storytelling in a Digital Age.  Sign up here to be the first to hear the announcement and to secure your place (this event sells out!).

If you want to explore hosting a targeted CCIX delegation to your city, or organize an inbound visit to the Creative Industries hotspots and powerbrokers in China, please contact us at: info@xmedialab.com.

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GestureTek, a leading developer of gesture based interactive systems, is recruiting a Content Development Intern. Participate in the creation of video games controlled by body movement, multi-touch kiosks for museum exhibits and large scale interactive installations for corporate showrooms.

The Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC)

Annual General Meeting (AGM), April 5, 2011

Come and join the MEIC during its inaugural AGM. This will be an opportunity to hear from companies the MEIC has worked with over the last year, learn how you can benefit from becoming involved as a member, and meet others working in the mobile industry.

The Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC) is a recently incorporated not-for-profit association that has grown out of an industry/academia consortium, founded by OCAD University in 2007, to form Canada’s only organization focused on design leadership and experience innovation in the mobile industry to accelerate sector growth in mobile content, services and computing.

MEIC now offers the first mobile-focused design incubator in the Greater Toronto Region operating on OCAD University’s campus at 205 Richmond Street West.

The association offers applied research and commercialization support, advisory services, conferences and workshops, and international outreach.

Since the MEIC is a brand-new association, we are offering attendees a Charter Association Membership.

This is a one-time offer to join for FREE, so please be sure to save the date!

This classification of membership will provide you with voting privileges at the AGM as well as discounts to workshops and partner events.

Indie games are hot!  If you weren’t already convinced, this April marks the launch of a new games program called Future Games within TIFF’s Sprockets, a film (and now games!) festival for children and youth.

Gentrification: The Game! was selected to be part of this inaugural Future Games program, which aims to showcase a selection of the ‘most challenging and innovative’ games created by Canadian post-secondary students.  Alumni and faculty, Kate Raynes-Goldie, co-creator of Gentrification, who is also a visiting PhD student at Ryerson University’s Experiential Design and Gaming Environments (EDGE) Lab (who was the technology sponsor for Gentrification) will be talking to high school students about the development of the game as well as her work at the EDGE Lab.  She’ll be joined by game co-designer David Fono, who is also a Research Associate at the EDGE Lab.

Atmosphere Industries is thrilled to have this opportunity to talk to the next generation of pervasive game designers.  One of their overall goals is to encourage a thriving pervasive and urban gaming community in Toronto, and they believe this starts with students.  To this end, they would also like to announce the official launch of our monthly sandbox event – recess.to – which is open to anyone to come and run a game test, get feedback, or just along to play some fun innovative games. Whether you’re a pro, a hobbyest, a student or have never made a game before, they are looking for you!  The first sandbox is March 26, 2011.  See you there!

Canadian Heritage is requesting proposals for the research & development of mobile applications for the Virtual Museum of Canada. The Experimental Lab of the Virtual Museum of Canada tests digital technologies on behalf of the Canadian museum community, providing museums with strategic advice and ways to increase their visibility.  Using technology designed for mobile devices, this project will research and develop three Apps, in both official languages:

• Mobile WebApp for the Image Gallery and Museums in Canada on the VMC website. This involves mobilizing the page so that it is readable on mobile browsers.
• Mobile WebApp for Surrey Art Gallery. Walking tour that can geo-locate artworks within a certain radius.
• Native Mobile App for the Centre des sciences de Montreal. This mobile App will use Augmented Reality (AR) and will be downloadable. The App must be device-specific and use a touch framework.

Please click on this link for full details: http://meic.us2.list-manage.com/track/clicku=4aa77904811cd66c643869613&id=f4a2744aa9&e=d9bfee5e1d

The closing date is March 18, 2011, 2:00 PM.

Launching with a minimum viable product, iterating based on validated learning and pivoting are key Lean Startup ideas that have quickly taken hold in the entrepreneurial community. This panel will quickly review the fundamentals of the lean startup method and then focus on sharing lessons learned by founders and entrepreneurs in applying the principals to their own businesses.

Panelists include Ash Maurya (@ashmaurya, founder of WiredReach and authour of Running Lean), Satish Kanwar (@skanwar, partner Jet Cooper and co-organizer of #Leancoffeeto), Leila Boujnane (@leilaboujnane, cofounder, CEO at Idée Inc.) and David Crow (@davidcrow, cofounder of Influitive, StartupNorth, DemoCamp)

From storyboard to screen, the Screen Industries Research and Training Centre (SIRT) brings it all together at a conference dedicated to previsualization and virtual production – two innovative processes that are changing the face of film and TV production. Hosted by SIRT at its Pinewood Toronto Studios facility, the conference will look at how digital technology and live on-stage computer graphics are allowing film, television and gaming professionals to become more creative, collaborative and cost-effective. Previsualization and Virtual Production: BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER takes place February 24 – 25, 2011 and includes panels, presentations and technology demos delivered by industry experts. For a complete list of speakers and full conference agenda visit: http://www.sirtcentre.com/conferencesched.html   (Check below for amazing industry discounts that you are eligible for!)

Industry discount:

SIRT is offering a $200 discount off the $350 registration fee to people in the industry.

To register and redeem your code, go to:  http://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=926463

Click on the drop down menu and select “Registration Type”. Select option “SIRT Partner Discount”.  In the field “Partner Identification Number (If Provided)” enter the code 19091820 the click “Continue”.

The Centre for Creative Communications, Centennial College, is seeking innovative and forward-thinking proposals from Canadian media, interactive, creative, technology, business and social entrepreneurs for the next wave of children’s media and multi-platform projects to qualify for $50K federal development grants. The new kidsmediacentre, an industry and creative content think tank at Centennial College, will hold an Information Session to interested developers, on Thursday, Feb 24 at 5:30 p.m., at The Centre for Creative Communications, located at 951 Carlaw Avenue, Toronto.

Centennial College’s Applied Research and Innovation Centre (ARIC) has received ten $50K Federal Development grants, some of which are available to help small and medium enterprises in the kids’ technology industry launch the next big idea in children’s media. The grants are part of a coordinated strategy between the federal government and colleges to accelerate innovation and productivity in southern Ontario asking business partners to collaborate on projects and work “hands-on” with College faculty and students in developing new and innovative technologies and services. Businesses are asked to contribute at least $25K towards a project in cash and/or in-kind.

Come and see Laura Paolini and Rob Cruickshank talk shop at InterAccess!

This discussion-based class introduces participants to key trends in media art history, using several historical case studies and recent artworks as examples. Covering a wide array of genres such as: sound art, installation, video and kinetics, the participant will develop their own tool box of terms and insights into navigating media art, as well as exploring the tools required to create both software and hardware-based works. Participants are given hand-outs for keeping notes, and a select reading list to help them pursue their own interests after the workshop ends. Co-taught by Laura Paolini and Rob Cruickshank, the intention is to explore the how and why, and the most important question: ‘How’d they do that?’

This non-technical workshop is suitable for those with no background in electronics or art theory, (or for those with one but not the other!), and is recommended as an introduction to other workshops such as Introduction to Electronics, Sensors, Make Awesome Interactive Audiovisual Art (with Pure Data), and more.

ASSOCIATE CREATIVE DIRECTOR FOR A DIGITAL AGENCY

Salary Range: 90 – 100K

Job Description:

• A deep understanding of Brand importance
• Appreciates that storyboards are gospel
• Values being courageous and cutting edge in design and communication
• Thrives in an atmosphere that is built on collaborative team-work
• Knowledge of the Adobe Suite of products
• Experience with Flash an asset
• Motion Design specialized in After Effects
• Solid experience in branding and identity
• Must have experience in the interactive space (ex: Online & Mobile)
• Leadership a must as you will be the Lead for a small team (3-5 designers)

SR. RUBY ON RAILS ROLE

Salary Range: 70-90K

Job Description:

• 3 years experience with Ruby on Rails, Merb, or other Ruby based web frameworks
• Experience in OO programming language (Java, .Net) and web application frameworks (Struts, Spring, .Net)
• Have embraced test driven development and are experienced in rSpec, Test::Unit, Cucumber
• Knowledge of Web 2.0 technologies AJAX, CSS, Javascript, Prototype, Scriptaculous, jQuery
• Ability to hand-code, analyze, debug, and deliver clean, maintainable code for all major browsers
• Experience with an RDBMS such as MySQL, Oracle or Postgres and the ability to hand-code SQL statements
• Working knowledge of Unix/Linux environments as a user and administrator
• Ability to contribute to architectural and software design decisions using standard tools and practices, i.e. OO patterns, UML
• Ability to work in a tightly integrated team environment with an agile development processes
• Assess and summarize the root case of issues and provide a clear and concise corrective action

Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF) was just named one of MovieMaker Magazine’s “20 Coolest Film Festivals” in the Fall 2010 edition. TUFF is the only Canadian festival that made the cut this year!

Published in NYC, MovieMaker is the the USA’s leading resource on the art and business of making movies and the world’s most widely read independent movie magazine.

Check out who else is up to snuff: http://www.moviemaker.com/festivals/article/20_coolest_film_festivals_2010_20101201

For more on TUFF: www.torontourbanfilmfestival.com

All I have to say is… ICE COLD! Way to go!

SR. DESIGNER / ART DIRECTOR

Salary Range: 70-90K

Job Description:

Openings for seriously talented and experienced designers who love doing what they do. The ideal candidates are able to turn strategic goals into coherent design direction and oversee projects from kick-off to launch. Here’s what we’re looking for in a bit more detail.

Qualifications: A Bitchin’ digital portfolio.

We want to see:

• Strong concept development and graphic design ability
• Ridiculous attention to detail
• Excellent understanding of composition, color, imagery, typography
• Ability to explain and defend your design decisions

You should have:

• Experience presenting your work to others, including clients
• 5+ years experience in the digital channel
• Strong working experience with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator
• Experience creating and working with copywriters, designers, architects and developers
• Excellent understanding of user experience issues
• Experience providing art direction to others
• Ability to self-manage multiple projects and work within deadlines
• Team oriented, self-motivated

Bonus if you have:

• Familiarity with CSS and HTML – no need to execute, but knowing how to implement design in real code is a bonus
• Experience designing outside of the browser

3D WEB DESIGNER
(Toronto)

Salary Range: 55 – 65K

Our client, an award winning Toronto Agency is seeking a highly talented and creative mind to join their already successful team.

The Ideal Candidate would posses:

• A deep understanding of Brand importance
• Appreciates that storyboards are gospel
• Values being courageous and cutting edge in design and communication
• Thrives in an atmosphere that is built on collaborative team-work
• Experience with 3D Modeling/Design
• Motion Design specialized in After Effects
• Solid experience in branding and identity
• Must have experience in the interactive space (ex: Online & Mobile)

…Bon chance!

Don’t miss this exclusive holiday offer!

Purchase some holiday “Cheer” from WagJag.com for only 99¢!
All proceeds go to Make-A-Wish Foundation and CFC Media Lab Scholarship Fund.

Thank you for your support and happy holidays!

Snare Books and Coach House Books present the launch of Update by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler (CFC Media Lab Faculty member) with special guest Jon Paul Fiorentino (Indexical Elegies) and hosted by Christian Bök.

For writers Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy, status updates are also poetry. Or,
rather, it becomes poetry after the RRS feeds of thousands of Facebook users have
been harvested, shorn of the user names and attached to the names of dead poets or
writers.

- Globe and Mail, Books section

You haven’t forgotten about this, have you?

All Proposals are due after the weekend! December 6th!

Jacqueline Nuwame, Sr. Training Programs Manager at the CFC Media Lab, had the honour of speaking at last week’s HTMlles Festival of Media Art and Networked Practices 2010 in Montreal.

Founded in 1997 and produced by Studio XX, the HTMlles Festival of Media Art and Networked Practices explores various facets of digital technology and the web as a medium for the creation and exhibition of women’s digital artworks. The festival occupies the singular position of being one of the only Quebecois and Canadian events entirely dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of independent media art, its particularity also being emphasized by its feminist approach, concerns and engagements.

Also featured at the festival was First Person Digital, produced in partnership with the NFB, which featured some amazing female-only work.

Take a peek at these other great projects:

www.itschinesetome.net
www.otandayanaan.net
www.perfectplum.com

A big shout-out to Studio XX for organizing this great event!

We had the incredible opportunity of taking our TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Residents to a Master Class by Tim Burton (Director/Producer/Writer/Artist) today at TIFF Bell Lightbox! Tim Burton is in Toronto to launch his major career retrospective at TIFF Bell Lightbox.

“Tim Burton’s visual style is unquestionably unique, loved by millions of fans and has been highly influential in multiple creative spheres. When we first heard of the show, we were convinced it was the perfect marriage of film and the visual arts and the perfect way to bring new audiences into our major exhibitions space.”

- Noah Cowan,
Artistic Director, TIFF Bell Lightbox

Tim Burton will open on November 26, 2010 and run until April 17, 2011. Exhibition and film programmes tickets on sale now! Visit tiff.net or call 416-599-TIFF (8433) or 1-888-599-8433 for more information. 

WANTED: Canada’s next award-winning digital documentary!

Do you have a digital documentary idea? One that can attract a large community, win critical success on the world stage, or innovate with a successful business or creative approach? The docSHIFT Institute will support up to four experienced creators with innovative digital documentary project ideas. selected participants will receive mentorship, professional consultation and some financial support to complete their project or create a prototype.

docSHIFT is presented in partnership with Ryerson University, Hot Docs, CFC Media Lab and the National Film Board.

www.doctoronto.ca/docshift-institute

HB Studios is seeking an experienced Head of Production to join their team! If you are creative, hard-working, have a passion for video games, and thrive in a dynamic working environment, HB Studios is the place for you.

HB Studios is the largest video game developer in Atlantic Canada with over 100 staff across two locations (the Lunenburg HQ and a Halifax satellite studio). Founded in July 2000, HB have shipped 29 titles with over 200 SKUs across PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, PSP, PC, PlayStation 2 and Xbox selling more than 15.5 million units. Behind HB Studios is a passionate team of game designers, producers, programmers, artists, animators, graphic artists, audio engineers and support staff known in the industry for their high quality sports games, and with publishers for their professional and reliable delivery.

HB Studios would like to thank all applicants for their interests. Only those candidates selected for the interview process will be contacted. To learn more about HB Studios, please visit www.hb-studios.com.

Good luck to all applicants!

2020 Media Futures (2020mediafutures.ca) is an ambitious, multi-industry strategic foresight project designed to understand and envision what media may look like in the year 2020.

By participating in 2020 Media Futures, you’ll be contributing your vision to an innovative research project which will help build capacity and drive innovation in Ontario’s Creative Cluster by helping companies and organizations to ‘future-proof’ themselves, preparing for opportunities and challenges brought on by the rapid evolution of media.

Through the practice of “strategic foresight,” the project will enable stakeholders to better manage uncertainty through deeper understanding and anticipation of change.

If you know of others who you think might be interested in participating in the Delphi, please pass them the link: 2020mediafutures.ca/delphisurvey

Happy Hallowe’en weekend, everyone!
Enjoy your sugar comas…

POSITION SUMMARY:

• The designer will be part of the team responsible for BlackBerry Messenger Development at RIM’s Mississauga location (4701 Tahoe Blvd. Mississauga, ON)
• The designer will be responsible to create interactive user interfaces in both web and mobile applications

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Degree in design or related discipline
• 3 or more years of experience in developing web applications in HTML, CSS, AJAX, JavaScript, Flash, AIR, XML
• Knowledge in developing dynamic data-driven web applications
• Portfolio of work containing samples of web development and other graphical/media designs
• Experience in prototyping/storyboarding and graphics design

ADDITIONAL ASSETS:

• Background in software development life cycle and Java programming
• Knowledge of server-side web technologies such as PHP, JSP, and Linux platform

Attention Alumni! Corus Interactive is seeking stellar Supervising Producer!

Corus™ Interactive (Toronto) is looking for a Supervising Producer with excellent production and managerial skills to oversee the daily operations and delivery of the Kids & Family websites and web content for YTV, Treehouse, CMT, and Nickelodeon Canada. This position reports into the Director of Interactive.

The ideal candidate will have proven experience running a team that delivers high-quality online experiences, excellent traffic metrics, innovative integrated sponsored campaigns and large-scale production budgets.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Ensure the Network websites perform optimally, function as required, and continue to deliver innovative features and functionality.
• Maintain and grow Kids & Family websites as category traffic leaders.
• Manage large-scale production and operations budgets, including work with Director of Interactive on forecasting and managing costs, efficiently produce or acquire excellent web content, and consistently ensure costs are on or under budget.
• Lead production for Kids & Family Network websites and get the best performance and products out of internal and external teams.  Ensure that all websites operate with minimal downtime, bugs addressed quickly and appropriately, new features needed are identified and produced in a timely manner.
• Understand the OIDMC tax credit system, ensure maximum number of projects qualify for tax credits, and assist in the preparation of application documentation.
• Lead the community activities for these brands, including strategic implementation for message boards, loyalty programs, UGC and social media activities; understand all applicable regulations (e.g. PIPEDA) and legal best-practices, membership system design and flow, and organization of the moderator pool.
• Secure and track rights for digital assets used on the sites, including contract negotiation, rights management and documentation. Oversee the implementation of all legal guidelines and processes by both internal team and external partners.
• Lead a high-performing team of Producers, Project Managers, and coordinators.

REQUIRED SKILLS AND QUALIFICATIONS:

• Proactive, positive, and thrives in a fast-paced highly-collaborative production environment
• Comprehensive understanding of interactivity and the Web, website technology and production practices.
• Passionate advocate for and consumer of interactive media for kids and parents.
• Minimum 5 yrs professional experience in a senior production or managerial position
• Excellent communicator and problem solver. Ability to shepherd a wide range of stakeholders with complicated brands.
• Knowledge of information architecture, usability best practices, and demographic use patterns.

Corus is committed to providing a fair and equitable work environment and encourages applications from qualified women, men, visible minorities, aboriginal peoples, and persons with disabilities.

For more information on Corus™ Entertainment Inc., please visit us at www.corusent.com



Seminar Series to Assess the Financial Landscape of Digital Media in Canada:
With the recent launch of the Canada Media Fund, the financing landscape for Canadian film and television has changed dramatically. New media extensions are part of the new reality and there are a LOT of questions that are probably on your mind:

• When should I start planning?
• What are the implications for my production?
• Who should I work with?
• How will this help my bottom line?
• Where can I find out more?

To answer these and many other questions, the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, the CMPA and Zeros 2 Heroes Media are continuing the seminar series that has been held in cities across the country. Speakers in Toronto will include:

• Andra Scheffer, Executive Director, Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund
• Shawn Bailey, Director, Chocolate Liberation Front
• Jessica Clark-Bojin, Head of Entertainment Business, VFS
• Johnny Kalangis, Creative Director, Marble Media, and CFC Media Lab Alumnus
• Matt Toner, President, Zeros 2 Heroes Media

These speakers will share years of experience working with convergent media and provide the inside track on how best to advance your production. With the next Bell New Media Fund and CMF windows fast approaching, it is time to finally figure out the best way to go digital.

Last week we had the absolute pleasure of introducing International Guest Director, Dawid Marcinkowski (Director/Screenwriter/Editor/Designer), to our current Residents of the TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program*.

What began with screenings of his online interactive music videos Smolik Attitude (www.nobudget.art.pl) and Someday on the Misty Island (www.dawidmarcinkowski.com/mistyisland) as well as his interactive film Sufferosa (sufferrosa.com) at TIFF Bell Lightbox, ended with a reveal of his process as an interactive filmmaker during the post-screening Q&A with our Residents and CFC Media Lab Guest Faculty member, Todd Denis, Founder/Editor of jawbone.tv.

Sufferrosa is one of the biggest interactive web-based movies ever made (110 scenes, 3 alternative endings, and 20 different locations!) The film is a satire of cult, beauty and youth in the present-day world.

Do you remember the film ‘Logan’s Run’ (1976), where everybody who is older than 30 gets exterminated? Probably our generation is not endangered by such experiments. But there is a chance that, in 40 years time we will all have transformed into frustrated woopies (Well-Off Older People) who spend their life savings on plastic surgery. And when it happens that the scalpel is not enough, we will probably head directly to the clinic of Carlos von Braun. As Mae West once said “You are never too old to become younger”…

TELUS IAEP

*Interested in being part of the next TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program at the CFC Media Lab? We’re now accepting RSVP’s for our TELUS IAEP Spring 2011 Info Session on November 17th at 6:30pm in Downtown Toronto. Please RSVP to medialab@cfccreates.com to be forwarded the location details.

The deadline for TELUS IAEP Spring 2011 applications is DECEMBER 15, 2010. For more information, check out www.cfccreates.com/what_we_do/cfc_media_lab/telus_interactive_art_and_entertainment_program

SURROUND YOURSELF WITH NEW WAYS OF THINKING

Think your ideas are farfetched? Think again. There’s no limit to what you can create at the CFC Media Lab. In just five months, you will learn from some of the best in the interactive business and develop engage in a collaborative process that will allow you to develop an original prototype.

ACCELERATE YOUR FUTURE

The CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program (IAEP) is Canada’s first post-graduate training and production program based on a philosophy that compelling content is created though a collaborative process harnessing a wide range of creative skills.

Residents learn from a variety of perspectives including academic, industrial, artistic, technological, and practical. Team-based and project-driven, the TELUS IAEP merges the fundamentals of new media with creative collaboration.

More than 92% of CFC alumni are currently working in the Film, TV and New Media industries. Award winning Alumni companies include Stitch Media (stitchmedia.ca), Smiley Guy Studio (smileyguy.com) and Trapeze Media (trapeze.com) to name a few.

Hey digital superstars!

Get the recognition and respect you deserve by entering your digital masterpiece into the CNMA’s. The Canadian New Media Awards (www.nextmediaevents.com/toronto) are taking place December 1st, at the Design Exchange (Toronto), and looks to honour the country’s best individuals, companies and projects.

You know your work is good, and we know it too!
Submit today! www.nextmediaevents.com/cnma

Calling All Digital Creators!

Culture Days is a massive arts and culture party taking place in every province and territory across Canada this September 24 – 26, 2010 (in Alberta, September 17 – 19). The party takes shape in the form of thousands of free interactive activities for the public to enjoy and appreciate the inner world of artists and creators. Everyone connected to the creative process (including you!) is encouraged to join the movement by registering an activity at www.culturedays.ca

Activities can be as simple opening the doors to your studio and sharing your creative process as a designer, architect, artist or writer. Host a demo in person or online via UStream. The only requirements are that registered activities must be free, open to the public and interactive. The interactive component can be sophisticated or quite simple. For example, if you have an exhibit going on, you can add a simple interaction by offering a chance to meet the artists or to talk to the curators about the show, or finding a way to encourage dialogue among the public themselves.

If you can’t organize an activity this year, we hope you will help spread the word about cool Culture Days activities in your area. Every activity has its own page on the website with social media buttons to make it easy for you to share it with friends. Or make your own Top 10 list on Facebook. Show your support for culture!

For more information on Culture Days, please contact helenyung@culturedays.ca or visit www.culturedays.ca where you can search by postal code or keywords or browse by category or using the Google Maps Mashup.

Be a part of making culture free for all!

PSST! Hey Alumni…

OCAD is looking for an instructor for their Time-Based/Transmedia Narrative course to start this Fall, so you will have to act fast!

Time-Based/Transmedia Narrative course (ADVR 3B03):
This course continues the study of trans-media narrative and introduces the subject of storytelling and the construction of a narrative structure as students gain an understanding of time-based media across a number of traditional and emerging platforms. Instruction includes the creation of scripts, their refinement and pre-production requirements. As well, students are introduced to professional techniques that will support the execution of their advertising concepts. Projects will include television commercials, time-based web media and other media currently used in conjunction with modern global advertising.

Check out all the deets here: http://www.ocad.ca/about_ocad/human_resources/employment_opportunities/faculty_instructors/sessional_design_2010_2

...and good luck!

The CFC Media Lab and the docSHIFT Initiative have joined forces to present TWEAK: an Idea-Refinement Boot Camp for Digital Documentaries. We are looking for up to 30 experienced producers, creators, directors, writers, strategists and architects with an interesting interactive documentary idea and the desire to have their idea analyzed, work-shopped and honed from both a creative and business perspective. This 2-day weekend workshop will be facilitated by a series of high level industry mentors along with UK’s Frank Boyd, former BBC Director of Creative Development and the visionary behind Crossover Labs as well as CFC Media Lab Faculty member. Selected participants will retain ownership of their project idea but must be open to working collaboratively in a group setting—sharing their idea, receiving input, and also giving valuable input on other projects.

TWEAK will run from September 25-26

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS:
3 pages maximum (PDF). Please tell us briefly about:

1. You & your career
2. Your interactive documentary idea
3. What you want to get out of TWEAK

ELIGIBILITY:
• you have a strong interactive doc idea (mobile, web, game, multiple platforms)
• you must live and work in Ontario
• you must be an experienced and established documentary content creator (ie. producer, director, editor, writer, media artist, other) OR an experienced interactive digital media professional (ie. game developer, mobile developer, web designer, interactive producer)
• you are available weekend of September 25/26th both days, all day
• you are willing to pay registration fee of $100 (DOC Members) or $150 (nonmembers)

Please note: those of you who applied for or participated in the docSHIFT Crossover Weekend in May are eligible to apply for TWEAK. TWEAK (focused on idea refinement) has been designed to compliment and extend from the Crossover Weekend which focused on idea generation. TWEAK is both a stand alone event and a good preparatory phase for those interested in the docSHIFT Institute (see below).

For more, check out: www.doctoronto.ca/docshift

ABOUT THE docSHIFT INSTITUTE:
Four experienced creators with winning and innovative interactive documentary project ideas (games, mobile apps, websites) will receive mentorship, professional consultation and some financial support to complete their project or create a proto-type. docSHIFT Institute is part time (nights & weekend days) beginning mid November 2010 and running for approximately 5 months. Details & Call For Applications will be posted shortly.

docSHIFT is made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation on behalf of the Ministry of Culture. It is presented in partnership with Ryerson University, Hot Docs, CFC Media Lab and the National Film Board.

Calling all talented femmes!

The HTMlles Festival of Media Art + Digital Culture 2010 (htmlles.net) is currently seeking proposals for its 9^th edition, to be held in Montreal, under the theme of <home></land>.

Initiated by Studio XX (www.studioxx.org) in 1997, and evolving as quickly as technology itself, the HTMlles Festival is an international platform dedicated to the presentation of women’s independent media artworks from all facets of contemporary technological creation, including but not limited to:

• digital storytelling
• cyber art
• short film and video art
• audio and electronic art
• installation
• locative media
• 3D animation
• game art
• virtual reality
• electronic publishing
• design
• performance
• interdisciplinary practices

As a meeting place at the crossroads of creativity, technology and a wide spectrum of feminist perspectives, the HTMlles Festival focuses on the public presentation of innovative media artworks, panel discussions and workshops, creating dynamic connections between audiences, artists, cultural practitioners, curators, producers, educators, scholars, students and technophiles.

CFC Media Lab Guest Faculty member, Kate Raynes-Goldie, will be speaking at the 32nd Annual Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners – Privacy: Generations on the Plenary panel: “Where are we now? The inter-generational shift in privacy perceptions”
For hundreds of generations privacy has been recognized as a fundamental human right in Israel.
Today, privacy stands at a crossroads. The existing legal and regulatory frameworks, in the EU, US, and OECD, as well as in Israel, date back to the 1980s and 1990s. They predate a new generation of technologies including mobile devices, biometrics, RFID, cloud computing, indeed, the Internet itself – which has swept through the marketplace with such force so as to destabilize laws and regulations. They have seen shifts in the perception of privacy among a new generation of users, who post personal information and communicate with friends and colleagues on social networks. Policymakers all over the world realize that this sea change calls for a new generation of governance.

Join us in Israel, a land melding old with new – from the religious, cultural and historical heritage of Jerusalem, to the high tech start ups of what has become known as “Silicon Wadi”.

- Yoram Hacohen, Head of ILITA

Privacy: Generations runs from October 27-29 (October 29: closed session for regulators)

PROGRAM: www.privacyconference2010.org/program.asp
SPEAKERS: www.privacyconference2010.org/invited.asp

Canadian New Media Awards (CNMAs), the country’s only nationwide competition recognizing the accomplishments of Canada’s most successful digital media companies, is now open for nominations! The awards are part of nextMEDIA Toronto, Canada’s leading digital media production and development marketplace.

Canada is a hotbed of digital innovation. Last year’s nominees and award recipients truly represented the best in digital media and we look forward to discovering fresh talent from leading-edge companies.

- Mark Greenspan, Executive Producer of nextMEDIA and former Senior Training Programs Manager at the CFC Media Lab

Celebrating its 10th year, the CNMAs offers up two exciting new categories:

• Community Campaign of the Year
• Digital Media Technology of the Year

Think you’ve got the chops to enter?

To be considered for this year’s CNMAs, choose the category which best applies to the achievements that you would like to highlight for this year’s awards. To view all the categories and to check your eligibility, click here: www.nextmediaevents.com/cnma/competition-categories.php
Regular Rate is $175.00 CDN. Enter today! Contest is closing September 17th, 2010.

For more information, please contact:
Tiffany Rushton | Program Producer – Awards
Email: trushton@achillesmedia.com

Calling all aspiring actors: STITCH MEDIA (www.stitchmedia.ca) and SHOWCASE (showcase.ca) are hosting an online, Canada-wide talent search for their new comedy web series, Moderation Town. Quirky, crude, and awkwardly self-aware, Moderation Town satirizes the worst of Internet culture by revealing how online attitudes affect average, normal people in the real world.

We want to hear the most creative, hilarious stories people have experienced online. It could be an awkward Facebook encounter, an odd Chatroulette conversation, or the most atrocious message board flamewar. It doesn’t even have to be true. We just want to see what stories people have and search out new and aspiring actors through this open casting call.

- Mark Mullane
Co-writer & Director of Moderation Town

…why do I get the feeling the most embarrassing submission will be about a (first-and-last) Chatroulette experience?

Are you a filmmaker with a passion for comedy? Want to work with the best comedic talent in the business to make your comedy feature a reality?

Telefilm Canada Features Comedy Lab (www.cfccreates.com/comedy) is a CFC Film Program in Collaboration with Just For Laughs (www.hahaha.com).

There’s some very heavy weight people at the Lab. Just to get their ear is difficult enough in this business. These filmmakers are in a very privileged position.

- Eugene Levy, Chair of the Telefilm Canada Features Comedy Lab

For more information and criteria visit www.cfccreates.com/comedy or email Kristine Kazias, kkazias@cfccreates.com

Green Screens partners films from the NFB with experts and panelists selected by the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy (www.cielap.org)

REMIXING OUR WORLD: Create your own short animated film and bring your vision to life! Participants will arrange cut-out images from magazines to critically address environmental issues and superimpose them on an untouched landscape – remixing the portrayal of our environment and challenging how we think about it. A fun hands-on experience with stop-motion animation, whether it’s your first or fiftieth time!

Follow the NFB Mediatheque on Facebook: www.facebook.com/?ref=home#%21/pages/Toronto-ON/NFBONF-Mediatheque/17608843063?ajaxpipe=1&__a=17
and Twitter: twitter.com/NFBMediatheque
and Foursquare! foursquare.com/venue/1062629
Sign up for the new NFB Mediatheque newsletter by email to nfbmediathequeonf@nfb.ca

Follow CIELAP on Twitter: twitter.com/cielap

Calling all mediaLEADERS!

Media Intelligence (www.mediaintelligence.ca) is searching for a Senior Editor / Project Manager to join Toronto’s Canadian Coalition for Tomorrow’s ICT Skills (CCICT) on a full time contract position (August 2010 – March 2011) with a possible extension of two years or more.

The CCICT is an industry-led national initiative whose mission is to reverse an alarming decline in IT-related post-secondary enrollments, historically low female participation, and significant shifts in demand – against the backdrop of growing demand from every sector for expertise in digital tools and technologies…

Our message is that today’s IT-related careers are different. They are about leadership and innovation, rather than being stuck in a cubicle doing routine programming. Examples of these exciting careers include tech entrepreneur, social media guru, business change leader, digital media artist, life scientist, and clean energy engineer.

To check out the full job description, click here: http://mediaintelligence.ca/files/posts/000105.pdf

Whether you’re a strategic collector of railroads or would rather invest in hotels on Mediterranean and Baltic, here is your official invitation and reminder to come out and play award-winning Gentrification: The Game! developed by Atmosphere Industries (www.atmosphereindustries.com) comprised of CFC Media Lab Alumnus and Guest Faculty Member, Kate Raynes-Goldie, with Luke Walker, David Fono and Alex Raynes-Goldie.

Gentrification: The Game! is a game*! But not your usual kind of game.
It’s a game that happens on the street, with sidewalk chalk, parades, and even a mobile web app if you feel like it. It’s called a Big Game by festivals like Come Out and Play in NYC, who awarded us Best in Fest and Best Use of Technology this summer, out of 40 other games from organizations like Disney Imagineering and NYU. Ditto for the Hide & Seek Festival in London, who are flying team across the pond this month for an ultra-exclusive edition of Gentrification: The Game: The British Expansion Pack.

But never fear! The party’s coming back to Toronto as part of Kensington Pedestrian Sunday (as promised: stabletalk.cfccreates.com/2010/05/28/gentrification-the-game-created-by-cfc-media-lab-alumnus/)

Find out more and register to play at www.atmosphereindustries.com/gentrification

*Gentrification in a nutshell: 30 people, divided into teams of developers and locals, fight to collect real-life properties, build chain coffee shops, form BIAs, and bend the neighbourhood to their will. They’ll craft slick advertising campaigns, deliver impassioned speeches, and probably run around a bit. It’s part Monopoly, part public space hacking, and part something else entirely.

nextMEDIA+Banff2010 will be chock-full of inspiring conversations and exciting keynotes!
Still trying to decide when to be where and where to be when? Check out the CFC Media Lab’s top picks!

To register for Banff2010, visit: https://registration.achillesmedia.com/delegate_registration/list_products?event_id=19

To check out the full schedule, visit: http://www.banff2010.com/schedule.dynamic.php?

On.Fire (onfire2010.ca) is the national media arts conference and festival of the Independent Media Arts Alliance (IMAA), a non-profit organization representing over 80 artist-run media arts centres serving more than 12,000 artists and cultural workers across Canada.

On.Fire 2010 will run June 15-19, 2010. Highlights include Opening Keynote with Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller on June 15th at 6:30pm, and Closing Keynote with Rafael Lozano Hemmer on June 19th at 6:30pm.

Check out the full schedule here: onfire2010.ca/?page_id=236

To register for On.Fire 2010, visit: onfire2010.ca/?page_id=3

Privacy for everyone!

PrivacyCampTO will convene 60 participants from all walks of life, including educators, techies, policymakers, students, academics, librarians, and casual users to talk about privacy issues and solutions in the age of social media ubiquity. We will look at privacy issues relating to everyday users and everyday situations both practically and theoretically. In other words, privacy for everyone. So, come to discuss privacy policy, learn how to protect yourself on Facebook or share your online privacy experiences (positive or negative).

WHEN: June 19, 2010 at 9PM

WHERE: Ryerson University
80 Gould Street, 3rd Floor
Toronto, ON

We’re aiming to have a friendly, informal and accessible event. Everyone is invited to participate or present and we encourage those presenting to do a more informal led-conversation or speed geek in lieu of a PowerPoint. Bonus: All attendees get free breakfast, lunch and beer (at the hacklab.to after party!)

REGISTER: privacycampto.eventbrite.org
CONTACT Kate Raynes-Goldie (CFC Media Lab Guest Faculty): kate@atmosphereindustries.com
Interested in presenting/leading a conversation? Add your topic here: barcamp.org/PrivacyCampTOTopics
MORE INFO: privacycampto.org / @privacycampto

REGISTER: www.netchangeweek.ca/registration

MOBILE TAKEOVER: www.netchangeweek.ca/conference/events/mobile-tech-triple-threat/
THE FUTURE PANEL: http://www.netchangeweek.ca/conference/events/the-future-panel/
CYBER SECURITY FOREIGN POLICY: http://www.netchangeweek.ca/conference/events/cyber-security-foreign-policy-implications-for-canada/

Saturday is the perfect day to catch a symposium or two!

Non Linear Storytelling: Designing Interactive Narratives
Victoria University: 140 Charles Street West, Room 215, Toronto

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
As the shift toward interactive screens continues, designing narratives for the digital landscape is a skill that’s increasingly in demand. This master class session will bust creative thinking out of old models and introduce you to multi-plot structures, current forms of transmedia and interactive digital narratives.

Moderator:
Siobhan O’Flynn – Transmedia Storytelling Consultant; CFC Media Lab Faculty

Shifting Landscapes: Successful Transmedia & Multiplatform Projects
Victoria University: 140 Charles Street West, Room 215, Toronto

1:30 PM – 3:00 PM
Through examining a variety of case studies, this panel will explore how approaches to content delivery and use of technology relate to audience consumption habits, and fan participation. Discussion will highlight the realities of how these trends are causing shifts in the way audiences, creators and funders are approaching media.

Moderator:
Anthea Foyer – Co-Founder & Director, The Labs; former CFC Media Lab Staff

Panelists:
Alex Mayhew – Trans-media Creative Consultant; CFC Media Lab Guest Faculty
Howard Rosen – Business Affairs Manager, Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund
Victoria Ha – Partner, Stitch Media; CFC Media Lab Alumnus

This will be an exciting year for TIFF, a vibrant not-for-profit arts organization, that will be marked by the opening of Bell Lightbox, our new home and the world’s premiere centre for film. We are seeking a highly motivated individuals who want to be part of a new era in Toronto’s cultural history.

TIFF is currently accepting applications for the contract position(s) of:

WEB DESIGNER / DEVELOPER

Contract Dates: July 5, 2010 – October 22, 2010

We are looking for a web designer / developer to help design, implement and test our digital collateral and web applications as part of our dynamic Interactive Services Team. Our work environment demands a commitment to quality, ability to meet tight deadlines, and a willingness to work in an open-concept, team-oriented atmosphere. This position reports to the Senior Manager of Interactive Services.

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to the design and execution of web-based marketing collateral
• Update content on TIFF’s web properties using HTML / XHTML / CSS
• Content conversion into various text based delivery formats
• Adhere to quality code and conduct unit testing
• Meet deadlines and manage workload expectations

For more:  download the full job summary
or visit http://stabletalk.cfccreates.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/web-developer-seasonal-contract.pdf

SUBMISSION DUE: JUNE 11 at 5PM
(Please see submission details below)

SENIOR PRODUCTION COORDINATOR, INTERACTIVE SERVICES

Start Date: JUNE 2010

We are looking for a Senior Production Coordinator to administer the production and execution of our digital collateral and be an integral part of our dynamic Interactive Services team. Our work environment demands a commitment to quality, ability to meet tight deadlines, and a willingness to work in an open-concept, team-oriented atmosphere. This position reports to the Senior Manager of Interactive Services. Successful candidates must possess excellent communication skills, have the ability to manage projects, ensure project deliverables are met, manage resources, document and monitor project execution.

Responsibilities:

The main responsibility for the Senior Coordinator is to manage deadlines established from production requests. This requires managing resources to ensure deliverables are completed and approved on time. This individual also provides detailed written documentation, monitoring and reporting of all project timelines and deliverables. This requires extensive communication with internal staff, including our Marketing and Programming teams as main stakeholders. Specific responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Developing timelines based on production requests assigned by stakeholders
• Ensure delivery of collateral material determined by various projects
• Coordinate delivery schedule with internal stakeholders (i.e. Marketing)
• Provide accurate scope for project deliverables
• Troubleshoot execution process, focusing on communication with internal partners (i.e. Creative Services)
• Work closely with Content Coordinator to ensure website content is provided on-time and is of high quality; representative of our master brand and its position in the marketplace.
• Facilitate change management for all web properties.
• Communicate timeline status and resource use for all projects to Senior Manager
• Facilitate department sign-off of collateral as required.
• Submit proofs for external departmental approval

SUBMISSIONS DUE: JUNE 16 at 5PM
For more: download the full job summary
or visit http://stabletalk.cfccreates.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/senior-production-coordinator-interactive.pdf

Atmosphere Industries (atmosphereindustries.com), comprised of CFC Media Lab Alumnus and recent addition to our Guest Faculty roster, Kate Raynes-Goldie, Luke Walker, David Fono and Alex Raynes-Goldie, has created Gentrification: The Game!

In Gentrification: The Game!, small teams of players compete to collect properties and transform the neighbourhood. As developers, they’ll develop swanky lofts, erect coffee shops, and raise property values. As locals, they’ll form BIAs, build community centres, and try to thwart the developers.

With Gentrification: The Game!, anybody can enjoy the thrills and spills of urban renewal, without being directly exposed to hipsters, Starbucks, or a feeling of security mixed with vague unease… Along the way there will be art, vicious debates, and possibly an Apple Store.

Gentrification: The Game! has been selected for the “Come Out and Play Festival” in New York (the sole Canadian selection featured!), June 4-6, 2010. Kate and David will present their game to Toronto’s Kensington crowd as part of the Pedestrian Sundays program starting July 25, 2010.

comeoutandplay.org/2010_gentrification

Also, be sure to catch Kate Raynes-Goldie on the NXNEi panel “Can Social Games Do Social Good?” http://www.nxne.com/interactive/nxnei-presentations/#sgames

Regent Park Film Festival

The 8th Annual Regent Park Film Festival (RPFF) happening November 4-7, offers films from around the world to a neighborhood of people rarely exposed to independent, foreign, animation, shorts, experimental, documentary, or even Canadian films.

RPFF seeks works made by filmmakers from multi-cultural background and/or celebrate differences and solidarity, immigrant experiences, urbanization, inner city issues, cultural identity and multicultural relationships.

Submissions deadline: May 3, 2010 June 4, 2010
NO ENTRY FEE

For more details dowload guidelines and entry form here: www.regentparkfilmfestival.com/submissions.html

401 Richmond Street West, #354
Toronto, Ontario  M5V 3A8
416.599.RPFF (7733)
director@regentparkfilmfestival.com

www.regentparkfilmfestival.com
www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=26624117559
twitter.com/rpff

The application deadline is quickly approaching!
APPLICATION DEADLINE: Friday, May 21, 2010

Do you fit the profile?

• Passion for web and software development
• Accountable for creating and managing the technology associated with MaRS’ online web presence
• Reporting to the Manager, Online Communications
• Plans and develops/maintains web and other applications
• Broad range of technical skills
• Must enjoy learning, solving complex problems and interacting with key stakeholders

Interested candidates may send a copy of their resume and cover letter to careers@marsdd.com

You can find the full job description here: www.marsdd.com/careers/careers-detail.html?uuid=cd71f783-db90-4296-851f-8b072d06853d
Check out MaRS Discovery District’s main site here: www.marsdd.com

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.

CFC Media Lab Director, Ana Serrano, has been invited to speak at TEDxCanadianRockies. Check out the other industry leading creatives who have been invited to speak: www.tedxcanadianrockies.com/speakers

WHEN: May 21, 2010
WHERE: The Banff Centre, 107 Tunnel Mountain Drive, Banff, Alberta

TEDxCanadianRockies is a full day event featuring live presenters, recorded TED Talks and opportunities for discussion between delegates. Meals will be provided throughout the day through Vistas Restaurant at The Banff Centre. While the live event is open to only one hundred delegates, it will also be streamed live via our website during the day.

For more information and to register, check out their website: www.tedxcanadianrockies.com

CFC Media Lab Alumnus, Rose Bianchini, will be speaking at INplay 2010 tomorrow, May 18 at 4 pm at Liberty Grand, in the Centennial Room, located on the Exhibition Grounds in Toronto.

INplay is a unique, international event that connects kids creative industries with insights and opportunities in the interactive space. From the video game business to the broadcast industry, from toys to toons, the INplay conference brings together leaders in the kids space to learn, network and be inspired by interactive.

The conference will feature 3 major streams each covering a different dimension of working with properties for kids aged 2-12:

Inspiration - creativity and content stream
Investment – business stream
Insights – research stream

Rose Bianchini has been selected to speak on an “Insights” panel for Cutting Edge Research: Input Devices. This topic will be addressed through a series of short presentations followed by a moderated Q&A.

The keyboard, mouse and headset are old school. What is coming next to improve kids’ interaction with the digital world?

Moderator: Steve Szigeti (Ph.D Candidate – Knowledge Media Design Graduate)

Other Presenters: Chris Muscarella (Cofounder at Do Crew) and Vincent John Vincent (President of Gesturetek Inc.)

Rose Bianchini prototyped Neighbourhoodie with David McCallum and Kathleen Climie during the Telus IAEP Fall Residency of 2009 at the CFC Media Lab.

Neighbourhoodie is a hoodie that combines the fun and dynamic of street games like ‘zombie tag’ with the technological experience space young people grow up with today, online or with computer games. The ‘Neighbourhoodie’ has the potential to motivate us to leaving not only the couch but the house by playing hybrid games that partly happen in the real world and partly in our all important virtual world.

Neighbourhoodie has been featured on top wearable electronics and gadget blogs, talk2myshirt.com and gizmodiva.com.

INplay is taking place May 18 & May 19. Tickets are still available!
For a full line up or speakers and sessions, click HERE.

The CFC Media Lab will have a booth presence at OCE (Ontario Centres of Excellence) Discovery 2010, a conference that brings together business leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers and students in shared exploration of the dynamic synergy that is the innovation-commercialization process. Stop by booth #912 to slap some high fives with The CFC Media Lab!

WHEN: May 17 & 18, 2010
WHERE: Metro Toronto Convention Centre, (South Building) 222 Bremner Boulevard, Toronto, ON

Ontario’s world-class research and innovation strength has turned remarkable ideas into equally remarkable products and services. Conferences such as this OCE are crucial to building on the momentum Ontario has achieved and to further sharpening our competitive edge on the world stage.

The CFC Media Lab will also be present at the Premier’s Innovation Awards, an event that honours outstanding Ontarians whose innovative spirit, vision and creativity are making Ontario one of the leading knowledge-based economies of the 21st century.

For the full list of OCE Discovery 2010 exhibitors, click HERE.

This year’s 14th Annual Webby Awards celebrating outstanding online content will be held on June 14 in New York City. Dubbed the “Oscars of the Online World”, the Webby Awards honour exceptional producers and creators of blogs, websites, web tv shows, interactive advertising, online films, online video and mobile websites.

Canadian content producers have always been strong contenders at the Webby Awards.
This year was no different.

Love Letters to the Future, designed by CFC Media Lab Alumni, Patrick Crowe and Thomas Wallner’s Xenophile Media Inc., walked away with both the Webby and the People’s Voice awards in the “Green” Website category. The site allows users to send a video, image or message to be seen by future generations. In December, the Top 100 entries, as voted by the site’s visitors, were placed in a time capsule and delivered to the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

Toronto’s Swarm Entertainment won the Webby Netart award for Nawls, an interactive multimedia web comic.

AmoebaCorp of Toronto won the Webby for best use of animation or motion graphics for a promotional site for The Pop Shoppe.

Academy of Vancouver won the Webby for “best visual design – aesthetic” for History of Flight, a web exhibit of NBA great Michael Jordan’s iconic Air Jordan shoes.

1000 Awesome Things by Toronto’s Neil Pasricha won the People’s Voice award in the “blog – cultural” category.

Manifest Communications of Toronto won the People’s Voice award in the activism category for a site for the Canadian Stem Cell Foundation.

RAPP of Toronto won the People’s Voice award in the pharmaceuticals category for a promotional site for a GlaxoSmithKline product, Alli.

An interactive Web video based on the renowned documentary WaterLife and an iPhone application showcasing Canadian films earned Canada’s National Film Board (NFB) five Webby noms, a record number for the NFB.

Nominated for Online Film & Video, Best Sound Design, was The Curse of Degrassi, from Epitome Pictures Inc.

TAXI Canada‘s Let’s Change Insurance – Aviva Banners received a Banner Campaign nomination for the Interactive Advertising category.

TAXI Canada also received a nod for Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics in the Website category for Smart Set’s Fashion At Play.

For the Email Marketing category, DDB Canada / Tribal Vancouver received a nomination for The Big Wild Email.

DDB Canada / Tribal Vancouver also received a nod for Russian Dolls for the Online Commercial category.

WAY TO BRING IT, CANADA!

*banner image from Xenophile’s Love Letters to the Future.

Two of Canada’s foremost television and interactive production companies, Kensington Communications and White Pine Pictures, have joined forces to create City Sonic, a location-based documentary film series about places where music happens in Toronto. The unique selection of short films, directed by some of Canada’s most inventive award-winning filmmakers, is about extraordinary artists and the places where their musical lives were transformed.

Just launched is the City Sonic FREE iPhone App in the iTunes App Store (along with new content exclusive to mobile at m.citysonic.tv). This app merges short films with GPS to create a street-level cinema experience of Toronto’s music scene and music history.

Fans of Toronto’s music scene can watch films immersed in the location where the stories took place using the City Sonic map interface, guided by GPS, or simply watch their favorite City Sonic films wherever and whenever they want. They can also unlock exclusive bonus content connected to each City Sonic location – from rare archival video to intimate live performances and previously unreleased songs – through game-based challenges that put them in the middle of Toronto’s music stories: testing their wits in a series of quiz questions about places where music happened, finding codes at City Sonic locations, and even unlocking bonus content by GPS, tripped when they walk past select Toronto music spots.

We set out to create an entertainment experience for fans of music and film that is geared to the very particular environment of mobile phones. With the City Sonic iPhone app, I think we’ve done that by merging high quality documentary films with ideas behind locative cinema, where place is really a key element in engaging your audience.

The series of short films features artists such as:

Geddy Lee (Rush) at Massey Hall
Brendan Canning (Broken Social Scene) at the Drake Hotel
Serena Ryder at the Dakota Tavern
The Great Lake Swimmers, 2009 Polaris Prize nominees, at Spadina Subway Station
Damian Abraham (Fucked Up), 2009 Polaris Prize winner, at Rotate This

These short films were created in collaboration with:

Anita Doron (CFC Media Lab Alumnus)
Peter Lynch
Bruce McDonald
Rob Pilichowski
Charles Officer
George Vale
Robert Lang
David Oppenheim (CFC Media Lab Alumnus and Head of Development/Interactive Producer at Kensington Communications)

City Sonic premiered 5 of its films at NXNE and screened 11 films at TIFF last September as part of the Yonge & Dundas Square outdoor screenings, followed by a broadcast on AUX TV (Rogers Cable 107).

Watch a trailer for City Sonic HERE.

City Sonic has been made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation on behalf of the Ministry of Culture. City Sonic is produced with the participation of the Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund and the TELUS Innovation Fund, in association with AUX and with the participation of Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, the Toronto History Project and CIMA.

Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC) Director and CFC Media Lab guest faculty member, Michele Perras, has just announced MEIC‘s next quarterly event discussing the future of mobile experiences and design. It will consist of presentations from Canadian industry leaders, researchers and designers, followed by a short reception.

WHEN: Friday, May 28, 2010 from 4-8pm.
WHERE: OCAD, 100 McCaul St. (in the Auditorium)

This is an open event – let your colleagues and friends know!

RSVP is required, and can be done HERE.
If you would like to present at MEIC7, please send an email to mperras@ocad.ca

WHEN: Thurs. May 6, 7pm ‘til late

WHERE: Cadillac Lounge (1296 Queen St W)

ADMISSION: Free!

Presented by Pop Sandbox, TCAF, Hot Docs, The CFC Media Lab, TCHAD Magazine, NOW Magazine & Steam Whistle. KENK includes a robust interactive on-line component produced with the support of the CFC Media Lab and an animated film treatment in development.
Visit: www.kenk.ca.

LISTEN TO AN INTERVIEW ABOUT THE RELEASE OF KENK ON “Q”, CBC RADIO

Make connections this year at Hot Docs!

We have a slew of past and present CFC Media Lab Fellows floating around Hot Docs this year!
Why not take this opportunity to chat them up if you see them?

Anthony Saad
Dorothy Engelman
Michael Schaus
David Oppenheim
Mark Jones
Joan Prowse
Amit Breuer
Lisa Santonato
Andreas Ua’Siaghail
Katie Macguire
David Hartman

The festival runs until May 9, 2010. For a full schedule of screenings and events, click HERE.

Happy Doc-ing!

Be sure to check out Hot Doc’s Industry Event: Poetics of Online Documentary moderated by CFC Media Lab Director, Ana Serrano.

Maybe you’ve heard of the Internet and how everybody is going to be watching documentaries online in, well, soon. But will they look like documentaries as we know them? Panelists will present samples of online works and discuss the emergence of new doc forms.

PANELISTS:

Annette Bradford, Interactive Producer, CBC (Canada)
Kat Cizek, Director/Coordinator, HIGHRISE (Canada)
David Oppenheim, CFC Media Lab Alumnus, and Head of Development/Interactive Producer, Kensington Communications Inc. (Canada)

New interactive activities made possible with special support from the Ontario Media Development Corporation, Telefilm, Canada Media Fund, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, Next Media and the Canadian Film Center.

WHEN: Thursday, May 6 from 11:00 am – 12:15 pm.

WHERE: Rogers Industry Centre (Victoria College), 93 Charles Street West, 2nd Floor, Toronto

See the rest of the Hot Docs Industry Events Schedule HERE.

WHEN: Thurs. May 6, 7pm ‘til late

WHERE: Cadillac Lounge (1296 Queen St W)

ADMISSION: Free!

Presented by Pop Sandbox, TCAF, Hot Docs, The CFC Media Lab, TCHAD Magazine, NOW Magazine & Steam Whistle. KENK includes a robust interactive on-line component produced with the support of the CFC Media Lab and an animated film treatment in development.
Visit: www.kenk.ca.

nextMEDIA is proud to announce a new competition to find the hottest new ideas using iPad/tablet devices!

Submission: FREE

The Process:
Applicants must fill out the application form which will outline the following:

* goal of the application, and specifics of functionality
* audience target
* intentions for development
* information architecture or up to five screen shots

An expert jury will select five finalists to showcase their concept live at nextMEDIA and the
Banff World Television Festival on June 16, 2010.

The winning entry will receive a development deal worth $25,000 to make their concept a reality via leading interactive development agency Trapeze* and the Toronto-based Mobile Experience Innovation Centre**.

The winners will be announced at nextMEDIA.

Deadline for submissions is May 14th, 2010. Click HERE to apply now!

* CFC Media Lab Alumnus, Mike Kasprow, is Founder of Trapeze.
** CFC Media Lab Guest Faculty Member, Michele Perras, is Executive Director at MEIC.

Opportunity awaits with the Canadian Media Fund!

The CFC Media Lab has joined forces with The Documentary Organization of Canada – Toronto, National Film Board, Hot Docs, and Ryerson, to present docSHIFT: a cutting edge initiative aimed at fostering collaborations and business opportunities between interactive media producers and documentary filmmakers.

docSHIFT is currently seeking applicants interested in participating in a 2-day weekend workshop (May 8-9th 2010) facilitated by the UK’s Frank Boyd. Frank is the past BBC Director of Creative Development and the visionary behind world-renowned Crossover Labs as well as part of the CFC Media Lab’s guest faculty roster for the TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program.

If you are an experienced interactive digital media professional (games, mobile, web, AR) looking for opportunities in the burgeoning interactive documentary genre, this weekend should not be missed! Through participatory creative group exercises, the workshop is designed to break down walls between professional silos, develop common languages and perspectives and establish best practices for working together and ensuring success.

The docSHIFT Crossover Weekend is a pre-cursor to a five-day residential lab this Fall where select projects will move into development with the CFC Media Lab’s incubation support with Ryerson University.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: APRIL 21ST, 2010

For full details and application information, please click HERE.
Any further questions regarding docSHIFT can be directed to Coordinator Kyree Vibrant: kyree@doctoronto.ca

To download the official docSHIFT flyer, please click HERE.

WANT TEN GRAND IN YOUR HAND?

The submission deadline for The Reel Challenge is fast approaching! Submit your film online by April 26, 2010 at thereelchallenge.ca.

The Reel Challenge contest, an initiative of the CFC, challenges filmmakers to create a short film that will persuade audiences to respect creator’s rights and copyright protection for their work.

1st place winner: $10,000

2nd & 3rd place winners: $2,500

Please note the contest is open to residents of Canada (excluding Quebec as well as all CFC employees and their families)

For more information click HERE.

Angella Mackey (CFC Media Lab alumnus) and Kate Hartman will be hosting this month’s Wearables Meet-up tomorrow, April 13th from 7-9 pm at OCAD on Richmond: 205 Richmond St, Room 7315 (3rd floor) Toronto.

The Toronto Wearables Meet-up is a gathering of people interested in wearable technology, fashion, wearable electronics, soft circuits, electronic textiles, emerging materials, and other creative and innovative approaches to things that live on the body. This Meet-up is a gathering artists, fashion designers, industrial designers, textile enthusiasts, engineers, researchers, students, and anyone interested in these emerging and intersecting fields.

For more information and to register for this event, click here. ]]> http://stabletalk.cfccreates.com/2010/04/12/wearables-meet-up-to-be-hosted-by-cfc-media-lab-alumnus/feed/ 0 http://stabletalk.cfccreates.com/2010/04/09/openfile-seeking-full-time-junior-developer/ http://stabletalk.cfccreates.com/2010/04/09/openfile-seeking-full-time-junior-developer/#comments Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:20:12 +0000 Kimberly Dean http://stabletalk.cfccreates.com/?p=1567

Openfile is a web/experience design start-up based in Liberty Village specializing in the intersection of content and design and the impact the experience provides to the end-user. We are currently seeking a junior developer with a passion for design to join our team on a full-time contract basis.

• Strong understanding and experience with CSS and HTML
• Strong understanding and experience working in PHP
• Experience using MySQL databases
• Experience with Javascript preferred (specifically JQuery)
• Experience with AJAX would be considered an asset

Content Management Framework:

• A knowledge of Drupal would be considered an asset

Software Knowledge Requirements:

• Adobe Dreamweaver: We manage our sites through Dreamweaver so a strong understanding and experience is critical. Although the selected candidate must be able to edit in code view and may not rely soley on using the GUI.

Social Media & Feeds:

• An understanding of feed and social media integration into a site would be considered an asset

Making a great one-minute film, that’s TUFF!

The Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF) founded by CFC Media Lab Alumnus, Sharon Switzer, is a 10-day (September 10-19, 2010) public film festival that reaches over 1.3 million subway commuters daily. TUFF is looking for the best one-minute silent films from across Canada and around the world. Over $10,000 in cash and prizes will be awarded to the winning films (Check out the incredible prizes!) Artist fees of $100 will be payed to every film that’s selected by our jury to screen on the TTC and on the TUFF website.

Films are selected by a guest jury, with the top films chosen by a special Guest Judge. The TUFF 2010 Jury includes Min Sook Lee, Jorge Lozano, Kathleen Mullen, Sarah Robayo Sheridan, Haema Sivanesan, and Michael Zryd.

Filmmakers, animators and video artists are invited to consider our urban-themed categories:

• Urban Encounters and Other Stories

• Our Environment and Urban Growth

• The Medium is the Message

• Urban Ideas and Politics

• Urban Journeys

• The City is a Poem

• After Night Falls

TUFF SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 15, 2010
Submit your film before June 1st and avoid the $10 entry fee. Fees rise to $15 on July 1st.

www.torontourbanfilmfestival.com

…Need support to make your TUFF film? Click HERE to find out about the Trinity Square Video (TSV) Pitch Award.

Design with Dialogue (DwD) explores leadership in the co-creation of positive organizational change facilitated by conversations for meaningful action.They are a group of practitioners that gathers monthly (second Wednesday of each month) to convene dialogue as a practice in social design to engage the organizations, projects, and civic communities to which they’re committed.

The next DwD workshop explores the structured approach of viewing a problem from multiple defined perspectives to expand the possible solution space.

Are you a social entrepreneur?
Are you an entrepreneur creating a business that helps society or the environment?
Are you supporting the work of entrepreneurs at your foundation or ministry?
Do you create technology that can be used to affect social change?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, are curious to learn more, or just want to hang out at MaRS for a morning, please join us for our annual SiG@MaRS Information Session – version 2010 on Wednesday, March 24, 8am – 12:30pm.

Take a look at our schedule for the morning and feel free to drop in when you can:

8:00-8:30am: Refreshments and networking

8:30-9:20am: Overview. Hear updates on what’s going on in the area of social entrepreneurship and social innovation at MaRS.

9:30-10:20am: Going deep. SiG@MaRS provides advisory services to social entrepreneurs – convenes interested stakeholders – and accelerates for impact.

10:30-11:20am: Conversation. This is your chance to chat with MaRS staff, volunteers and other members of the social innovation community, take this time to get to know someone new and explore your area of interest in more detail

11:30-12:30pm: School for Social Entrepreneurs Feasibility Report Back. The team from MASS LBP will join us to provide a report back to the community on the feasibility of a School for Social Entrepreneurs in Ontario.

We do hope you can join us!

Register now!

CFC Media Lab Alumnus, David Clark, has an installation piece entitled Waterfall on display at Whistler Canada Olympic House for the duration of the 2010 Olympics and Para-Olympics.

Waterfall is an interactive video sculpture commissioned by Canadian Wildlife Federation to address the issue of water use. David with Kim Morgan, Rachelle Viader Knowles and David Ogborn created Waterfall by gutting a vending machine and replacing the snacks with videos showing different uses of water. Pressing the machine’s buttons make the images fall away revealing a waterfall. The vending machine is a cool way to connect the commercial consumption of water with a powerful image of its source.

Check out The Coast’s article on Waterfall here.
Check out The Canadian Wildlife Federation for video footage of Waterfall and the artist bios here.

Don’t miss your opportunity to discuss the answers to the following questions:

As increasingly sophisticated technologies give rise to visions of the posthuman and experiences of the virtual, what is the place of the human and the non-human? As environmental and human pressures converge, can renewed attention to ‘place’ foster an ethics of care within human practices?

Attend “Placing the Human” a roundtable discussion organized by CFC Media Lab faculty member, Siobhan O’Flynn. This event will take place on March 26 at 1 pm (with reception to follow) at University College, Rm 140, Toronto.

Seated at the roundtable: PHILIP BEESLEY (University of Waterloo), CHAR DAVIES, CAROL GIGLIOTTI (Emily Carr University), and JEFF MALPAS (University of Tasmania).

Seating is limited; Please register!

For more information, click here.

CFC Media Lab alumnus, Angella Mackey and Kate Hartman are initiating a Wearables Meet-up on March 16th at 7:00 pm at OCAD DFI/DMRII Suite: 205 Richmond St, 7th floor – Room 7701, Toronto.

The Toronto Wearables Meet-up is a gathering of people interested in wearable technology, fashion, wearable electronics, soft circuits, electronic textiles, emerging materials, and other creative and innovative approaches to things that live on the body. This Meet-up is a gathering artists, fashion designers, industrial designers, textile enthusiasts, engineers, researchers, students, and anyone interested in these emerging and intersecting fields.

For more information and to register for this event, click here.

Do you have the skill and imagination to design sustainable archive-based services which can make a valuable contribution to democracy, to learning, history and culture within the communities they serve?

Screen West Midlands is delighted to invite archivists, archive rights holders and producers with experience in film or television, social media, web design, games, mobile and location based services to participate in an intensive 3 day ‘creative lab’, organized in collaboration with the Crossover Lab with a specific focus on developing innovative digital archive projects.

“Our archives hold the stories of our past and therefore play a unique role in building understanding and learning for our future. It is important that public archives are easily accessible, whether that is in physical buildings or online, so that the benefit is spread to as wide a range of people as possible.”

This event will be held between March 3-5, 2010 in the West Midlands.

Crossover is an international programme designed to explore the creative and the commercial challenges of developing content and services for digital media. The lab process brings together creative professionals from diverse disciplines – including film and TV production, animation, games, theatre, web design and new media – to share understanding of a rapidly changing mediascape, to form new interdisciplinary collaborations and generate ideas for projects.

To find out more and to apply for a place, please click here.

Submission Deadline: March 15th, 2010

Do you know someone who’s going green and doing good? Tell the story of an every day environmental hero in the first annual Every Day Heroes Film Competition.

Filmmakers can submit silent 90 second videos online, or by mail.

Jury Includes: Judy Gladstone (Executive Director of CTV’s Bravo!FACT); Jennifer Baichwal (Award winning Director, Manufactured Landscapes); Sharon Switzer (Festival Director, Toronto Urban Film Festival); Keith Treffrey (Earth Day Canada).

Exposure: Filmmakers selected as finalists by our jury will have their films viewed by over 2 million viewers a day during Earth Week (April 16-25), on the ONESTOP screens in Toronto’s TTC, and on screens in Ivanhoe Cambridge shopping centers across Canada.

Prizes: Selected films will have a chance to win great prizes in four categories:

• Best of Competition—North American Getaway

• ‘Best of Under 18 years of Age’, and ‘Best of 18 and Over’ – MacBook Pro laptops (one per age group)

• People’s Choice Award —Bose SoundDock Portable Digital Music System

Online Voting: Get your friends and family to vote for your film as winner of the People’s Choice Award and they can enter to win a $250 Ivanhoe Cambridge shopping center gift card.

Every Day Heroes is co-produced by Earth Day Canada, Art for Commuters and ONESTOP Media Group (the folks who produce TUFF).

MEIC6
Wednesday, February 24, 3 to 7 p.m.
OCAD’s Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC) presents an afternoon conference discussing the future of mobile content, services and experiences. Speakers will include Gerald Karam, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, AT&T Labs – Research, and he will be speaking about: iLoveIt: Riding the accelerating adoption of Smartphones. MORE.

Augmented Reality Developers Camp
Saturday, February 27, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
OCAD’s Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC) hosts Toronto’s first Augmented Reality Developers Camp (ARDevCamp). This day-long, free event is for developers, designers, researchers, entrepreneurs and others enthusiastic to learn more about the rapidly changing technologies supporting Augmented Reality. MORE.

On Campus
EXHIBITIONS:

Superviscous: Works in Glass
February 19 to May 28
Curators’ Tour with Charles Reeve and York Lethbridge: Wednesday, March 3, 6:30 p.m.
Haunted by fragility and an uncertain identity (ultra-thick liquid? amorphous solid?), glass rests uneasily at the intersection between art, design and craft. Including works drawn largely from Toronto collections, Superviscous brings together artists exploring this temperamental medium’s unstable nature. Jon Kuhn’s dazzling cubes are compacted universes full of colour and light. Tim Whiten’s subtle cast broom stands quietly in the corner, contrasting with Sandra Rechico’s satisfyingly crunchy shards on the floor. Through these and other works, the show explores the contradictory associations we bring to glass. Its eye-catching beauty is both strength and weakness. Is this inevitable attractiveness just a cheap — or costly — trick? MORE.

OCAD Student Gallery:
Fabricating Frontiers
Until March 13
The artists within this show, Ivette Aghajani, Eugenie Davis, Shlomi Greenspan, Nathaniel Hurtubise, Megan A. Skyvington, and Jarrod Wilson produce work which explores architectural forms and space as points of personal reference, whether referring to a personal memory or to a geographical location. The idea of space as a referent indicates an interest in the search for individual identities and a sense of place within a system which perceives space as property and wealth. MORE.

Transit Space:
Corners of Evening
Until March 4
Adrienne Chalaturnyk, Kali Fisher, Jillian MacLachlan, and Ariel Kellett explore the unconscious mind and create alternative realities as they examine the influence of night time. Working with painting and mixed media, these artists contrast the soft, imaginative quality of dreams with the harsh, unsettling reality of nightmares. MORE.

Level 4 Photography Display Cases:
Introductory Photography: Black and White, Photo Essay Assignment
Until February 22
Students in Ron Wood’s Introductory Photography: Black and White course at OCAD produced wonderful visual narratives on interesting themes. MORE.

Student Centre GalleryWall:
Hot Work: Working Towards Summer
Until February 28
Members of OCAD Student Entrepreneurs (OSE) have put together this diverse selection of work, with the celebration of the coming summer in mind. MORE.

The Alumni Window Gallery (Rm 249):
Works by Paula Krochak
Until April 30
The OCAD Alumni Association is presents an installation of a works by alumna Paula Krochak. MORE.

EVENTS:

Alumni Life Drawing Sessions
Wednesday, February 24, 7 to 10 p.m.
Saturday, February 27, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Interested in drawing a professional model each week? These sessions are perfect for people looking for a life drawing drop-in without instruction. You don’t have to be a student or alumni to attend – these sessions are open to everyone. MORE.

Everything You wanted to know about Indians* (but were afraid to ask)
Every Thursday, 2 to 3 p.m.

Aboriginal Visual Culture Program Mentor Advisor Duke Redbird hosts discussion, questions and answers in Rm 1512d, 113 McCaul Street. All are welcome. *First Nations, Inuit, Mètis, Aboriginal and Native Peoples of the Americas.

Community Hours with Jane Ngobia, Director, Diversity & Equity Initiatives
Thursdays from 3 to 5 p.m. (Level 3, 115 McCaul St.)
Jane Ngobia, Director, Diversity & Equity Initiatives, welcomes students, faculty and staff to meet with her informally during her community hours to confidentially discuss their ideas, comments or concerns about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at OCAD.

OCAD Student Entrepreneurs
Friday, February 26, 2 p.m.
The OCAD Student Entrepreneurs work together, support each other, brainstorm and follow through on ways to market their crafts through discussion, exhibition, self-development events, speakers and supportive feedback. MORE.

Faculty of Art annual Drawing Marathon
Sunday, February 28, 12 noon to midnight
The Faculty of Art hosts its annual Drawing Marathon. Professional models will be available in rooms 484 and 487 (Level 4, 100 McCaul St.) for gestures or a sustained pose. Challenge yourself, bring a lunch, get sponsors; this all day event is only $25 for students and $30 for everyone else. All money collected will be used for a catalogue to support the Drawing and Painting Figure Show. MORE.

DEADLINES:

OCADSU Call for Submissions: OCAD Flea Market
Deadline: Thursday February 25, 2010
Sell old clothes, household items, books, cds, arts, crafts, designed clothes, fundraise for your department, barter and swap for affordable items. Flea Market Date: March 4, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. MORE.

Call for Submissions: I See You See Me
Deadline: Monday, March 1
The Internationaleyes OCAD Student Group invites all OCAD students to submit works. MORE.

Call for Submissions: Michael Sweet Memorial
FIRST PRIZE: $5000
Information session: Wednesday, March 3, 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Deadline to register: Thursday, March 12
Deadline for Submissions: Monday, March 15
52 Division Toronto Police Service, First Urban Development and OCAD invite all OCAD students to submit proposals to create an outdoor art or design installation in memory of Police Constable Michael Sweet, an officer who lost his life in the line of duty 30 years ago this March. Complete competition details will be available online and in MyCourses after February 18. MORE.

Call for Submissions: Transit Space
Deadline: Thursday, March 4
Faculty and students are invited to submit proposals for Fall 2010 programing. MORE.

OCADSU Call for Submissions: 2010 RETRO SHOW
Deadline: Friday, March 12
The Student Union is planning our annual retrospective, or the 2010 RETRO SHOW for short. It is an end of the year show hosted and put together by the OCADSU. It consists of a variety of artworks from all disciplines of the school. MORE.

Call for Awards Program Applications
Deadline: Friday, March 26, 4 p.m.
OCAD’s Awards Program recognizes excellence in each program at the second-, third- and fourth-year level on the basis of studio work as well as for specific Liberal Studies achievement, on the basis of coursework completed. OCAD Medals will be given for each program at the fourth-year level as part of the Awards Program. Awards are differentiated from Bursaries, which are distributed on the basis of financial need. MORE.

Call for Submissions: OCAD Student Gallery
Deadline: Thursday, May 20
The OCAD Student Gallery/Transit Space office is accepting student submissions to program Fall 2010 – Spring 2011 in the OCAD Student Gallery. MORE.

In the Community

EXHIBITIONS:

give us our dreams: part II
Until March 20
Leo Kamen Gallery in Toronto presents new work by alumna Crystal Liu. MORE.

EVENTS:

Architecture Theraputics Aesthetics
February 26 to 28
John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto hosts a conference focused on “Technologically Enhanced Environments and the Human Sensorium.” OCAD is a collaborative partner, and presents two speakers: Industrial Design program chair Julian Goss and Faculty of Liberal Studies Associate Professor Jim Drobnick. MORE.

SCREENINGS:

New Snow
Tuesday, February 23, 7 p.m.
The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery presents the Toronto premiere of Reverberlin (2006, 67 min.). This film will be preceded by Puccini Conservato (2009, 10 min.). OCAD alumnus Michael Snow will be present for a post-screening Q&A. MORE.

Queer Café
Wednesday, March 3, 12 to 1 p.m.
A “PROUD at OCAD” drop-in for LGBQTI2Q students, staff, faculty and alumni. MORE.

Graduate Student Gallery:
Past Now: Works by Meryl McMaster and Luke Parnell
March 4 to 13
Opening Reception: March 4, 7 to 9 p.m.
Curated by Suzanne Morrissette and Lisa Myers; first-year MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice students at OCAD. Past Now is an exhibition concerned with the life of images. Artists Meryl McMaster and Luke Parnell enter into a dialogue with meaning in visual representations of Aboriginal identity. Their works rupture stereotypes embedded in historical iconography to challenge and problematize the legacy of these images. MORE.

ASA Buffalo Stew Lunch
Thursday, March 4, 12 to 2 p.m.
The Aboriginal Student Association (ASA) exists to bring together Aboriginal, Native, Indigenous, Métis and Inuit students at OCAD to network and support an Aboriginal community of emerging artists and designers. The ASA Buffalo Stew Lunch is held every second week on Thursday. All are welcome. MORE.

Art Creates Change: Action
Vodou and Haitian Art
Friday, March 5, 1 p.m.
OCAD’s Faculty of Art presents a lecture, exhibition and silent auction in support of Haiti. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, professor of Africology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and an Oungon Asogwe (a high practitioner of Vodou religion and spirituality) will lecture on Vodou and Haitian Art. Professor Bellegarde-Smith will address misperceptions surrounding Vodou, and in the process reveal the strength found in its cultural practices and historic vision. An exhibition of art representing the past four generations of Haitian artists, from the 1940’s to the present (courtesy of Arte Del Pueblo). The event includes a silent auction of art with proceeds going to SOPUDEP, located in Petion-ville, Haiti, a comprehensive community school serving the poorest residents of the city. MORE.

SUMO Robot Challenge 2010
Saturday, March 6, 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
One of the most anticipated annual events at OCAD, the SUMO Robot Challenge features homemade robots in competitions ranging from tug of war, dancer/painter, autonomous, and full out, head to head combat! MORE.

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WeroGame is offering a paid, 3 month internship project to develop mobile research, UX and some UI for WeroGame (with Toronto-based company WeroCreative) for an undergraduate or graduate student with the following skills:

• Good technical and design research and writing skills
• Knowledgeable and skilled in PHP and preferably has some CakePHP experience
• Familiar with LAMP setup
• Familiar with Ubuntu servers

Project Description:

Currently WeroGame has been designed to deliver content into the classroom to facilitate collaborative learning.  It allows teachers to manage their students as groups of users, and deliver them educational content based on their collective progress through a variety of learning challenges. For teachers, it allows a level of control and engagement with students, where previously sitting kids behind the computer was a recipe for chaos. WeroGame’s current content package is called Rock Mars, and uses flash games, video content related to Discovery Channel’s Race To Mars television series, and a graphic novel component to teach science, math, social sciences, and digital media literacy. For this stage of the project we expect to develop a fully functioning, mobile-enabled locative content delivery system.

______________________________________________

Xtreme Mobility is offering a paid, 3 month internship project to develop mobile interfaces and integration for Xtreme Mobility (a Toronto-based company focusing on the development of an m-commerce application) for one undergraduate or graduate student with the following skills:

• CS3, CS4 (PhotoShop primarily)
• CSS
• HTML, HTML5
• Javascript
• Some experience with mobile clients (Objective C, Android, etc)

Project Description:

XM has developed a number of mobile commerce applications, including XMOne and XMPay.  There are currently some prototypes that have been developed, which are complementary to the existing suite of applications.  For these new prototypes, an improved UI is required to complete the product.

______________________________________________

ARDevCamp (Toronto’s first unconference devoted to Augmented Reality Applications and Technology) is seeking volunteers to help out with an all-day event happening at OCAD on Saturday February 27, 2010. Students are needed to help out with registration, photo documentation and organization, as well as participation in the event.

This is a great opportunity to get involved and learn about an emerging technology, meeting researchers,  entrepreneurs, designers, geeks and others interested in AR.

For more info, check out the website.

If interested, please contact:

Michele Perras, Director, MEIC
mperras@ocad.ca

The Banff New Media Institute is offering the following exciting programs:

• Video 2.0: Do-it-yourself videos and social media marketing

Program dates: March 4 – 7, 2010

• Interactive Screen 1.0: Beautiful Lives

Program dates: August 14 – 21, 2010

• Self-directed Co-production Residencies
  

If interested, contact: 1-403-762-6180 or email arts_info@banffcentre.ca

For more BNMI program information click here or visit the BNMI website.

The Banff New Media Institute’s multimedia web magazine HorizonZero is an interactive web production that released 18 issues between 2002 and 2004. A new issue of HorizonZero launched yesterday with the generous support of CODE: the Cultural Olympiad’s digital edition. CODE stakes out a space in the digital realm where audiences and artists can connect, create, and collaborate.

Featuring work by Stephen Kovats, Louise Poissant, Zainub Verjee, and Caroline Langill,
Issue 19: BRIDGE is a space for you to explore and interact with the idea of bridging.

For more information click here.

CODE website.

By Adriana Kuiper

After a mysterious storm a tornado shelter sits in a tree, landing in an unknown forest far from the plains.

Biography

Adriana Kuiper is an installation artist who lives and works in Sackville, New Brunswick. Her recent work explores versions of modified, hidden architectural structures meant to suggest safety from extreme forces, natural and otherwise.  Her work investigates provisionally built structures found in the local landscape, and she often adapts and manipulates existing instructions for “Do-It-Yourself” shelters and small buildings.  Outdoor public installations of her work have been show recently at Nuit Blanche in Toronto, and at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Kuiper’s work has been shown across Canada in cities such as Kitchener, Oakville, Vancouver and Calgary, and has been exhibited internationally in Oslo, Norway.

Visit PaCuBox for more information.
Visit CODE Live for more festival information.

By Susy Oliveira

My work intends to examine our preoccupation with replacing nature with fabricated versions of it as well as delving into ideas of digital and technological reproduction. By definition, the garden; complete with its natural components; is a construction made for our own pleasure and consumption. This piece endeavors to present some trust and hope in nature despite our constant interventions.

Biography

Susy Oliveira is an artist living in Toronto.  She received an MFA from the University of Waterloo in 2006 and is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design.  Her work is represented by Peak Gallery in Toronto.

Visit PaCuBox for more information.
Visit CODE Live for more festival information.

Our alumni constantly tell us that The Banff Centre has transformed them in some way. How have you been inspired – months or even years after a program here? We’re looking for stories about how the Centre has affected your career or your life — whether you have come through our doors as an artist, a business leader, or a mountain enthusiast.

We’ll include submissions in a new alumni section on our website. And, we may feature one of them in our upcoming online version of Inspired magazine to be launched next month.

Enter your story to win music, books, or Banff Centre events tickets.
Draw will be held on March 1, 2010.

Click here for more information.

The ThreePointOh (3PO) New Media Showcase is calling for entries that take creativity to the cusp by fusing and integrating as many media and elements together.

3PO emerges in its second year at the TELUS World Ski & Snowboard Festival as the festival’s freshest, most compelling addition to the ten day and night showcase of sports, music, and arts.

As a celebration of innovation, technology and culture, the 3P0 New Media Showcase will present 3-5 minute digital shorts that best morph film, photo, graphics and animation, visual art, sport and media into a production that transcends the sum of its technical parts to create a moment of emotional resonance.

A panel of judges will review the submissions and select 6-10 finalists to be shown to the public in Whistler, BC during a Gala evening on Monday, April 19th as part of the TELUS World Ski & Snowboard Festival.

One winner, Best of Show, will be chosen by an esteemed panel of judges, to reap the rewards this exposure will result in.

Best of Show will win $2,500 cash!
People’s Choice Award will win a prize value of $1000!

Deadline for Entries is March 26, 2010.

TO SUBMIT CLICK HERE.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE FESTIVAL CLICK HERE.

By Tazeen Qayyum

I work in the style of miniature painting of the South Asian tradition to explore compelling contemporary issues. My work comments on aggressive global politics and the subsequent suppression of difference. A dead cockroach motif is repeated in my work to simultaneously attract and repulse; commenting on human rights violations and fatalities as a result of globalization and war. The work borrows the language of entomology to explore how categories and classifications used in archiving practices, parallel the agendas of political propaganda. Preserved and presented in a steel, Armour-like, display box, the insect images are spread open for inspection/ investigation. The title of the work, ironically, is derived from universal pesticide warnings, to evoke dehumanizing ideas. When people are killed like insects around the world, we question our own insensitivity and the diminishing value of human life.

Biography

Tazeen Qayyum (Canada/Pakistan) is a contemporary miniature painter who graduated from the National College of Arts Lahore, Pakistan in 1996. She has had three solo exhibitions and  has participated in numerous International group exhibitions some of which include ‘Urban Myths & Modern Fables’, University of Sydney, Australia and University of Toronto, Canada, ‘A Thousand and One Days: The Art of Pakistani Women Miniaturists’ at the Academy of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii, ‘JAALA Exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Japan, ‘Negotiating Borders’ Miniature Paintings at Katmandu, Nepal and ‘Homecoming’, at the National Gallery of Pakistan. Her work was included in the 10th Asian Biennale, Dhaka, Bangladesh and 2nd Painting Biennale, Tehran, Iran. Her works are part of many public and private collections and has received several critical reviews including a review in The New York Times in 2009.

Visit PaCuBox for more information.
Visit CODE Live for more festival information.

By Jason Van Horne

The year is 2210. It has been several hundred years since humans have inhabited the City of Vancouver. This is a glimpse at one of the city’s landmark structures, the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library. Although it has become overgrown with vegetation and much of it has crumbled, it still stands. While this may seem unnerving to some it is also very likely comforting to those who may, despite being human, secretly wish mother nature to prevail in the end.

Biography
Jason has worked within a range of mediums that include drawing and painting, sculpture installation, community arts and art production for independent films and theatre. Post-apocalyptic scenarios in film and fiction have been of great influence on his work as he is primarily focused on the depiction of cities, real or fictionalized, in some state of ruin and decay. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design in 2002 from the Sculpture/Installation Department.

Visit PaCuBox for more information.
Visit CODE Live for more festival information.

CFC Media Lab Alumni, Tom Kuo and Rachel Vulliens, exhibit “PaCuBox” at VANOC’s CODE Live (Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition), a festival celebrating Canadian culture and talent into the digital sphere running February 4-21, 2010.

PaCuBox is a participatory installation with four miniature galleries placed in unexpected outdoor locations throughout Metro Vancouver (See map). The galleries will feature artwork from artists around Canada. Visitors can give their thoughts about the art through a 1-800 telephone number or a website.

Whether immediate – like a tornado, to the long-term eradication of our species and the probable takeover of the cockroach, to the small hope of a more positive future, we are quickly becoming a world where natural disasters are quickly becoming a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. This exhibit serves to highlight this phenomenon by creating tiny moments of awareness about the environment around us.

The artist collective PaCu, which stands for ‘Participatory Culture’, is the inspiration behind PaCu Boxes, where unassuming urban locations are brought to life through small, public art installations. Four miniature galleries are placed throughout Vancouver for the public to discover. Online, one can comment, offer new ideas and carry on a discussion around these small creations. PaCu sees the boxes as a physical version of blogs; a way to create an equal access network for anyone to both see and create works of art in an everyday situation.

Artist Biographies:

TOM KUO is an award winning designer, producer, sound engineer, technical director and installation artist. Tom Kuo is a versatile professional with extensive experience in creating multimedia installations in custom-designed spaces. His company, Foundation Creative Studio, specializes in conceptualizing and producing projects for clients who seek meaningful and engaging experiences for their audiences. Tom is well-recognized for his capacity to deliver imaginative and exciting events that effectively communicate the core message of the project.

RACHEL VULLIENS studied film and art at the ECAL/University of art and design in Lausanne where she graduated in 2002 with an award from the Manganel foundation. After a year and a half studying computer science at the University of Genevashe, she left to record an album with her band Kunst and direct an interactive live cinema project for the festival LesUrbaines. In February 2006 she studied at the Canadian Film Centre New Media Lab in Toronto where she met Tom Kuo with whom she coproduced PaCuBox. Since Fall 2008 she is assistant in the film department at the HEAD/university of art and design in Geneva.

Curated by Anthea Foyer

Anthea Foyer is an organizer, artist, curator, writer, schemer and an enthusiast of all strange and whimsical. Her work centres around ideas of collaborative narrative which manifests in various forms including performance, sculpture, digital narratives, video and a variety of other mediums. She holds an MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice from Goldsmiths College, London, UK and holds a BA in Sculpture from the University of Calgary.

**WE WILL BE REVEALING A NEW ARTIST AND THEIR PACUBOX LOCATION ON <STABLETALK> EVERY DAY THIS WEEK! STAY TUNED!**

Visit PaCuBox.
Visit CODE Live for full event details.

Brendan Wypich exhibits “Greenhouse” at VANOC’s CODE Live (Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition), a festival celebrating Canadian culture and talent into the digital sphere running February 4-21, 2010. Greenhouse will be exhibited at Great Northern Way Campus (577 Great Northern Way, Vancouver) as part of the Eco-Art series, co-presented with the Canadian Film Centre.

Greenhouse is a telematic artwork that creates a symbiotic relationship between a fully-automated greenhouse and single orchid flower housed within it. Using the Internet, real-time data is collected from a weather station in the orchid’s native habitat. This weather information is then used by a control system to create a simulation of these natural environmental conditions within the greenhouse. Within this system, the roles traditionally associated to nature and machines are reversed. The plant is reduced to an industrial element defined by its production and consumption of various resources, while the machine is trusted with the role of caregiver to the life form housed within it. The calm and meditative state present within the greenhouse juxtaposes with the complex and dynamic interactions captured by the sensors and interpreted by the control system.

Artist Biography:

Brendan Wypich is an artist and interaction designer who currently lives in San Francisco. His art practice explores interpersonal and human/machine relationships through the use of telematics, control systems, and multimedia. He is from Toronto, Canada, and holds an MFA in Product Design from Stanford University, a BFA from Ryerson University’s New Media program, and a BComm from Queen’s University. Since graduating from Stanford, he has continued on as a Researcher at Stanford’s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center developing strategies that introduce energy efficient behaviors into the home.

Visit Greenhouse.
Visit CODE Live for full event details.

OMDC Intellectual Property (IP) Development Fund assists Ontario corporations by providing a refund of 30% of prior costs incurred in direct support of eligible early stage development activities to bring screen-based content properties closer to production or market ready stage.

Qualifying Ontario corporations may apply for expenditures incurred over the course of a taxation year that relate to a slate of early stage development activities undertaken by the corporation.

Eligible expenditures are those incurred after March 31, 2009 up to and including March 31, 2010.

Applicants may apply up to twice during the span of the pilot program. Applicants must submit their application to OMDC at the end of a taxation year in which the applicant has incurred expenditures for eligible early stage development activities (Year End Application). If the applicant chooses, they may also file an Interim Application prior to their taxation year end. To be eligible to file an Interim Application a qualifying corporation must still meet all of the eligibility requirements set out in the guidelines, including the requirement to have incurred a minimum $30,000 in early stage development costs.

Click here for Guidelines and applications forms.

Grégory Lasserre & Anaïs met den Ancxt exhibits “Akousmaflore” at VANOC’s CODE Live (Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition), a festival celebrating Canadian culture and talent into the digital sphere running February 4-21, 2010. Akousmaflore will be exhibited at Great Northern Way Campus (577 Great Northern Way, Vancouver) as part of the Eco-Art series, co-presented with the Canadian Film Centre.

Akousmaflore is an interactive garden composed of living musical plants or flowers, which react to human gestures and light contact.

Indoor plants can have an ambiguous definition that swings between decorative object and living being. Plants are natural sensors and are sensitive to various energy flows. Digital technologies permit us to have a relationship with plants and sound. We display the effects of random data flow and plant interaction. The data is modified as the spectator meanders around and touches the installation, resulting in a random musical universe. Audience gestures and movements generate sound effects and changes in the texture of the sound. A flower concert is created.

Mixing reality with imagination, we propose a sensory experience that encourages us to think about our relationship with other living things and energy.

Artist Biographies:

Anais met den Ancxt was born in Lyon in 1981. She is graduated from the University of Lyon in anthropology, from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Lyon, and from the Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design of St Etienne.

Grégory Lasserre was born in Annecy in 1976, he has studied Computer Science and Electronics, he has a Masters degree in Multimedia and has been creating interactive artwork since 2002 as a digital artist.

The duo have exhibited their artwork at ZKM – Centre for Art and Media (Germany), BIACS3 – International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (Spain), ISEA2009 – International Symposium Electronic Arts (Ireland / UK) and many digital art festivals in France (EXIT, VIA, Scopitone, Arborescence, Mal au Pixel, 38e Rugissant… ) and others countries (Futuresonic (UK), WRO (Poland), Streamfest, SHARE (Italy), ACM SIGRRAPH (Germany)  in art and cultural center (Kibla multimedia center (Slovenia), Carré des Jalles(fr).

Visit Akousmaflore.
Visit CODE Live for full event details.

Don’t miss your chance to see two of our esteemed CFC Media Lab faculty members, Darren Wershler and Matt Gorbet, speak and co-host, respectively, at the TEDxWaterloo event on February 25th 2010.

Time: 1pm – 8pm (followed by an after-party)

Venue: Gig Music Hall: 137 Ontario Street North, Kitchener, Ontario (map)

Click here to attend. Application Deadline is Monday, February 1, 2010 at midnight.

Click here for additional information on TEDx events..

CFC Media Lab Alumni, Tahir Mahmood, Kalli Paakspuu, and Suzette Araujo exhibit “World Without Water” at VANOC’s CODE Live (Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition), a festival celebrating Canadian culture and talent into the digital sphere running February 4-21, 2010. World Without Water will be exhibited at Great Northern Way Campus (577 Great Northern Way, Vancouver) as part of the Eco-Art series, co-presented with the Canadian Film Centre.

Through a physical interaction in a bathroom vanity, World Without Water offers a new media interactive documentary experience that witnesses the world’s diminishing fresh water supply.

The banal act of walking into a private bathroom and turning on the faucet while looking into a mirror, is the framework for a meditation on the future of this precious resource – water.

By turning on the tap we see photos streamed from the website flickr.com in the mirror.  Tagged flickr images reflect a global public’s view on the absence and abundance of fresh water. If both taps are turned the user is invited into an associational play with the “hot” (absence) and “cold” (abundance) images that have been uploaded from all across the world by professional and amateur photographers and made available through a live internet connection.

The user, while washing, makes narratives from views of our water use from Eurasia to Africa and from Australia to the Badlands of North America in a fun, clean and exploratory experience.

Artist Biographies:

Tahir Mahmood is a multi-talented creative personality with a Bachelors degree in Graphic Design. His career has spanned the last decade working as an Art Director and Set Designer for numerous music videos, documentary productions and TV commercials, including Art Direction for the Mountain Dew Survivor Reality Show for Castaway Production USA. Tahir co-founded World Without Water during his time at the Canadian Film Center’s Interactive Art and Entertainment Program in 2007.

Kalli Paakspuu is a founder of the nonprofits Womenfilm/Womenart and Collective for Living Theatre as well as a Genie-winning filmmaker. She expects to defend her doctoral dissertation, “Rhetoric’s of Colonialism in Visual Documentation” at the University of Toronto this summer.  The thesis examines early colonial cross-cultural photographic practices and the dialogical storytelling on both sides of the camera as international mediations.  Part-time faculty at York University, she currently teaches cultural studies and has taught film production and screenwriting in the Fine Arts programmes.

Suzette Araujo‘s acting, comedic and musical talents have been showcased in a diverse range of performances, including a two-year North American tour with Cirque du Soleil, shows in China with Theatre Beyond Words, A Ross Petty production of Snow White at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto, and a guest role as Mrs. Chintro in CBC television production of Twitch City. Her original one-woman show, Chandeleirva, won Patron’s Pick Award at the Toronto fringe and was first runner up for the Quincy Award in the Montreal fringe festival.  She performed this show at the Fringe Theatre Festival in New York in August, 2008.

Visit World Without Water.
Visit CODE Live for full event details.

CFC Media Lab Alumnus, Faisal Anwar, exhibits “Odd Spaces” at VANOC’s CODE Live (Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition), a festival celebrating Canadian culture and talent into the digital sphere running
February 4-21, 2010. Odd Spaces will be exhibited at Emily Carr University (1399 Johnston St., Vancouver).

Odd Spaces is a real-time multi-disciplinary installation, with Karachi, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

This project seeks to connect people separated by geography, social and cultural status by using new technologies to help facilitate their exchange. Using multiple projectors, screens, and locations, the task of linking an assortment of people and places becomes an almost seamless act. Yet despite the use of large-scale audio-visual networks, the people connected by it are far from familiar to the idioms, social gestures and practices of those they are interacting with. Odd Spaces attempts to show the unease that can arise through technologically mediated interactions. …The viewer is both the participant and observer of the exchange, and as a result s/he is made aware of their own role, culture and attitudes.
- NADIA KURD | PhD Candidate McGill University (Montréal)

Odd Spaces has been awarded a self-directed residency @ Banff NewMedia 2008, and Ontario Arts Council’s project grant 2007.

Artist Biography:

Faisal Anwar‘s diverse background includes design, puppeteering and theatre which support his interests in fictional narrative, social interaction, “edutainment” and interactive design. His immersive environments currently focus on accessibility issues for all children including those with limited mobility.

Faisal Anwar’s Biography

Partners and Collaborators:
CFC Media Lab – Toronto, Canada
VASL Artists’ Collective – Pakistan
Britto Artists’ Collective – Bangladesh
Techniques collaborators: Hassan Mustafa, Karachi, Pakistan and Salman Bari, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Visit Odd Spaces.
Visit CODE Live for full event details.

CFC Media Lab Alumni, Gabe Sawhney and Napo Brousseau, along with former CFC Research and Technology Manager, Galen Scorer, exhibit “Seed” at VANOC’s CODE Live (Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition), a festival celebrating Canadian culture and talent into the digital sphere running February 4-21, 2010. Seed will be exhibited at Great Northern Way Campus (577 Great Northern Way, Vancouver) as part of the Eco-Art series, co-presented with the Canadian Film Centre.

Through the use of sound and imagery, users create and populate a forest together, by dialing a particular number on the screen, each participant receives a  “seed” on the public screen.

Seed explores the convergence of rich media and wireless technology in the creation of a collaborative and evolving work of art. Through sound and imagery, users create and populate a forest together. By dialing a particular number on the screen, each participant receives a  “seed” on the public screen. By using the keypad on the cell phone audiences have the ability to grow their seeds, choose the type of trees they want to plant, and change their texture and color.

Seed was presented in 2005 at the Scope Art Fair in NYC and has been shown in Australia, China, Canada and the USA.

Artist Biographies:

Napo Brousseau (Founder, Project Director) makes art as a constantly evolving social tool for exploring, stimulating and creating cultural transformation. Brousseau’s mediums include installations; new media; conceptual art, Digital Portraits; miniature water colours created in India; androgynous oil paintings; charcoal drawings; the landmark ants on the Cameron House in Toronto 1984; prop designs for the Pee Wee Herman TV show, New York.
After graduating from the Canadian Film Centre’s New Media Program in 2001, Brousseau Art Directed the “Swamp”, which holds the distinction of being the first cell phone driven interactive narrative. In 2004, he Directed “Emmersive Gallery”, a new media gallery. And in 2005 he was Artistic Director of “The Josh Lederman Art House” a monthly new media, art performance, which was presented online on PerformanceArtTV.com.

Gabe Sawhney (Wireless Director) is a hacker working at the edges of code and culture. At the CFC Media Lab in 2002, Gabe co-created [murmur], an audio storytelling and archival project, using mobile phones and first-person narratives to share location-specific stories, which would otherwise be lost. [murmur] launched in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal over 2003 and has been featured at numerous festivals and conferences around the world.
Gabe’s recent projects focus on locative media, as well as video and kinetic interactive installation projects. With an academic background in architecture, film and semiotics, Gabe balances an understanding of technology with a passionate interest in visual design, usability and information architecture.

Galen Scorer (Integration Director) was a former Research and Technology Manager as well as advisor on all prototypes and projects developed at the CFC Media Lab. He has worked independently for five years on a broad range of commercial projects including web design, programming, interactive museum exhibits and as an advisor and collaborator to several media artists.
He has taught in many capacities at Ryerson University and Ontario College of Art and Design. He has worked with numerous professors to teach students creative and practical uses of technology in art, design, and programming.  By situating the body in reference to our environment through Net-worked and digital technologies, he investigates the blurring lines of virtual and physical landscapes and the ways in which our bodies inhabit those spaces. In order to explore these ideas he helped form a Research group at Ryerson University called Synth /ops, which investigates artistic uses of broadband networks

Visit Seed.
Visit CODE Live for full event details.

The exhibition I am here; what can we do? is part of “Urban Screens Toronto 2010”, an international urban screens conference and exhibition taking place between
September 24th-30th; produced in collaboration with the International Urban Screens Association (IUSA).

Through an integrated program of keynote lectures, panel sessions, workshops, curated screenings and multimedia projects, (Urban Screens Toronto) will bring together leading Canadian and international artists and curators, architects and urban planners, designers, ad agencies and brand managers, screen operators and content providers, academics, activists, policymakers, technology manufacturers, software developers and public intellectuals.

Public Call For Submissions:

• New or existing experimental, interactive artwork suitable for urban screens.

• Short-format videos that are relevant for presentation on urban screens.

• Interactive Design & advertising created for urban screens (past commercial interactive work from ad agencies and designers accepted).

• Student work interactive and video work by students at any institution worldwide is welcome.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MARCH 1, 2010

Visit here for full details, suggested themes, and submission format/requirements.

Attention all filmmakers! Inspire Canada this Earth Day by creating a 90-second silent videos telling the story of your every day environmental hero and their dedication to support of a healthier environment.

Enthusiastic. Remarkable. Inspiring. These are just a few words that describe the individuals and groups across Canada that are doing amazing things to reduce their impact on the environment in large and small ways. They’ve taken the three R’s and made it a way of life. They’re every day heroes whose stories need to be told.

Prizes will be awarded in the following categories:

Best of ‘Under 18′ years of age (win a 13 inch MacBook Pro)
Best of ’18 and Over’ (win a 13 inch MacBook Pro)
Best of Competition (win two economy airline tickets to any destination in North America with two nights Hotel accommodation AND two tickets to the Earth Day Canada Gala, including travel to Toronto and hotel accommodation for the nights of June 8th and 9th, 2010)
The People’s Choice Award (win a Bose SoundDock Portable Digital Music System)

Finalists will have their videos screened in Ivanhoe Cambridge Shopping Malls across Canada, on the Onestop Network of 270 monitors on the subway platforms of the Toronto Transit Commission, as well as hosted on Earth Day Canada’s website and YouTube channel.

Judges include:

Judy Gladstone (Executive Director of CTV’s Bravo!FACT)
Jennifer Baichwal (Award winning Documentary filmmaker and director of Manufactured Landscapes)
Sharon Switzer (Media artist, curator, and founder of Art for Commuters)
Keith Treffry (Director of Communications for Earth Day Canada and unabashed movie enthusiast)

SUBMISSIONS DEADLINE: MARCH 15, 2010

Submissions received prior to February 15, 2010 will be entered into the raffle to win a Panasonic 60GB HDD/SD Camcorder.

Click here for more details and a submission form.

Interactive Production
A Corus Entertainment Company
SUPERVISING PRODUCER
Toronto, ON

JOB SUMMARY:

The Supervising Producer, Interactive Production, oversees the production of interactive projects for the TV division from development through to delivery, ensuring financial planning, stability and appropriate execution.

At development, the Supervising Producer would be involved in budgeting and scheduling as well as ensuring the creative direction is in line with both the brand’s needs and production process, working with the Interactive Producers, Director of Interactive, Creative Director, or others as required.

Throughout production, the Supervising Producer would oversee systems in place, designing and implementing improvements as needed to keep projects on schedule, on budget and on brand.

The ideal candidate will have proven experience leading and inspiring a team of designers and developers, as well as excellent client relationships which require an understanding of all legal definitions, delivery procedures/requirements, standards and practice.

The Supervising Producer will oversee the operations of the production team, track tax credits and budgets, and ensure that productions proceed in a manner that produces high quality results as well as meeting the financial and legal requirements of Corus.

Interested applicants are invited to apply no later than February 15th, 2010.

For a full job description and contact information, click HERE.

ATTENTION ALL DIGITAL DAREDEVILS!

The most anticipated cross-media pitching challenge of the new decade has begun accepting entries for new ideas and techniques to engage audiences across digital platforms.

Finalists including independent producers, interactive agencies and digital designers will be invited to Cannes, France (April 12-16) to pitch ideas LIVE to major international networks, including the BBC, TF1, KCC, NFB, and the European Commission.

This rapid-fire competition sets the creative pulse for the Content 360 Festival, part of MIPTV’s all-new MIPDigital event programme.

Since its launch 4 years ago, the Content 360 Challenge has attracted over 1400 new ideas from 42 countries and awarded €400,000 in development funding.

Category: CONTENT 360 “Next Generation Audience Engagement”. A creative challenge for new talent, companies or freelancers, with truly new and unique application or content ideas with mass potential to attract and engage audiences.

Category: KOREA COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION (KCC) “Engaging with children through the use of Connected TV”. Best educational content or service idea to engage with children through Wed TV, DMB and IPTV including any kind of connected TV.

Category: NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA (NFB) – “Next Generation Online Video Experience”. The National Film Board of Canada is on the lookout for the best and brightest to push the online video experience to a whole new level and imagine the next “killer feature” for the NFB.ca website.

Category: TF1 PUBLICITÉ – “New Advertising formats”. TF1 Publicité is looking for new advertising formats and/or cross media techniques to complement TV campaigns (TV commercials, billboards or short form programs) in order to maximize the efficiency of traditional TV advertising methods.

DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES: February 15, 2010.

European Commission Challenge details.

For more information on “Content 360 – MIPTV Cross Media Challenge” visit here or contact content360@reedmidem.com.

CFC Media Lab Alumnus, Maggie Greyson, will be exhibiting art at “Come Up To My Room – Room 202: Undertaking Acquisition” at the Gladstone Hotel on Friday, January 22 at 12pm, until Saturday, January 24 at 5pm.

If your senses are tingling the “most exciting design show in Toronto” seven years running is just around the corner. Humbly, myself and two of the most talented collaborators have reached into Mary Poppins’ carpet bag to bring you something special!
We have brought the “Archival Library of Found Treasures” to the Gladstone Hotel and invite you to participate in the lost and found of priceless objects.

For more details and to RSVP click here.

THE CHALLENGE: The European Commission is inviting audiovisual professionals as well as individuals to compete in the production of a video clip presenting an original vision of Europe based on EU archive material mixed with new or remixed images produced by the participant.
CLIP CONTENT: The clip should express a personal vision of Europe and be able to captivate a young and wide audience via internet and/or mobile devices through its original, creative or aesthetical approach.
CLIP LENGTH: Maximum of 3 minutes
THE PRIZE: €10,000
THE DEADLINE: March 15, 2010

FULL BRIEF

UPLOAD YOUR CLIP

The Banff Centre is calling for applications for their Writing With Style and Self-Directed Writing Residencies.

Writing With Style: Amidst a diverse community of writers, you will encounter new ideas and gain confidence in your own style and voice, while shaping and editing your work-in-progress under the guidance of an experienced writer and editor. The program offers a variety of activities designed to maximize the artistic growth of each writer.

For more Writing With Style program information visit here.

Self-Directed Writing Residency: Self-directed writing residencies provide time, space, and facilities for individual research, editing, and manuscript development. Writers structure their own time, and are free to maintain privacy or to engage with other artists and activities at The Banff Centre.

For more Self-Directed Writing Residency information visit here.

For additional information, please email: arts_info@banffcentre.ca or call 1-403-762-6100.

The National Film Board is offering a temporary 12-month position (with the possibility of extension) for an Assistant, Studio Administration, English Program, Ontario Centre.

JOB SUMMARY: Under the supervision of the Centre Administrator, supports the Centre Administrator in conducting, co-ordinating and following up all non-filmic activities of the Ontario Centre. Contributes to the production coordination activities and liaises with Business Affairs and Legal Services to administer production related files.  Acts as the Centre’s contact or resource person for activities related to tenant and building services and software familiarization. Provides administrative support in various areas for the Centre.

QUALIFICATIONS: Diploma of Collegial Studies in the office administration or secretarial field and two (2) years of related experience, or an equivalent combination of education and experience; good understanding of budgetary procedures; good mathematical abilities; good knowledge of Oracle; understanding of contracts and related issues. Knowledge of Word, Excel and Filemaker; speed and precision in data processing; ability to work in a team; ability to administer simultaneously several dossiers in an active environment and to maintain good interpersonal relationships; other personal qualities such as judgment, autonomy, speed, accuracy, good control of stress, tact and sense of organization. Knowledge of English is essential.

SALARY: Between $40,186 and $48,875

If these requirements match your profile and this challenge excites you, we invite you to send your résumé, BY JANUARY 19, 2010, quoting competition no. TT-10004687-V, by e-mail to rh-hr@nfb.ca, by fax to 514-283-5850 or by mail: Human Resources Branch, P.O. Box 6100, Station Centre-ville, Montréal, QC H3C 3H5.

View the job posting here.

Visit the NFB website here.

CFC Media Lab Alumnus, Andrew Mallis, has been invited to be a speaker at TEDxSoMa on January 22nd, 2010.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx, a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxSoMa, where x=independently organized TED event. At our TEDxSoMa events, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group.

Register for this TEDxSoMa event here.

Learn more about TEDx events here.

CFC Media Lab Alumnus, Shawn Micallef, authors “Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto” (Coach House/May), one of the books recognized by the National Post’s list of Most Anticipated Books of 2010.

Micallef has been writing the “Stroll” column for Toronto’s Eye Weekly for years. This book collects and expands some of his favourite pieces.

View National Post’s Most Anticipated books of 2010 here.

Visit a collection of Shawn Micallef’s Eye Weekly articles here.

The Banff Centre is calling for interested applicants for the Visual Arts Thematic and Self-Directed Residency programs.

Set in the spectacular environ of Banff National Park, The Banff Centre offers artists a creative oasis to inspire creativity and support artistic productivity. By providing the time and space for focused work, these residencies provide an ideal opportunity to realize a self-directed project. With access to accommodation and meals on campus, participants will have the freedom to focus completely on their project.

For program information and how to apply, visit: http://www.banffcentre.ca/va/programs/

Sarah Samesh, CFC Media Lab Alumnus (2007), has launched an art project as part of an artist residency in Salvador, Brazil. She will be presenting the work in Sao Paulo this year and carrying out another version of (dis)location in Sao Paulo as part of an artist residency.

(dis)location – Salvador explores geographies of various communities in Salvador, Brazil through the oral narrative of  local inhabitants. 5 narrators take you on a tour of their respective neighbourhoods as part of a personal trajectory into the practice of their daily life.

The central concept in this work is that perception is dynamic, depending on our condition and position in time and space. The exploration of physical, psycho and social geographies, expresses a desire to deepen perception as part of an engagement to make social realities visible.

Visit (dis)location at: www.dislocation.br.com

Baylea Mahoney – Marketing Communications Co-ordinator
Achilles Media Ltd. | Tel: 416-921-3171 x 239 | bmahoney@achillesmedia.com
nextMEDIA Toronto | November 30 – December 1,  2009. |www.nextmediaevents.com/toronto
The Canadian Innovation Exchange | December 2,  2009. |