The festival featured panels, presentations and film screenings focused on transmedia and "the future of storytelling across platforms," held at various local venues, including Tupelo Music Hall and the Main Street Museum. The 48 Hour Film Slam, which gave participants an opportunity to craft their entries from scratch, drew active participation from Dartmouth students. Selected films from various age groups won cash prizes, and the competition awarded extra cash to films featuring the Upper Valley.
The slam competition began on Thursday night, when this year's theme of "Main Street" was unveiled. Each team was required to include a suitcase and a moustache into projects completely shot and edited within the 48-hour time period, Annie Munger '13 said.
Munger's team created a short documentary about the Polka Dot Restaurant, a charming diner in the center of White River Junction. The team shot six hours' worth of footage over the weekend, Munger said.
"We wanted to get a feel for Main Street itself," she said. "Quintessential Main Street is a dying concept, so we wanted to explore the diner as a relic of those times."
Munger said competing in the film slam as well as attending a festival-sponsored master class on transmedia, hosted by the College on Friday, had practical applications.
"The master class was really useful for me because I'm doing a transmedia post-grad project," Munger explained. "I only worked in traditional film forms before."
Transmedia storytelling is a technique of uncovering a single narrative across multiple platforms, using a variety of digital technologies. The method has recently seen a growth in popularity in the film festival circuit. "It becomes very interactive with the audience, and they fill a part of the story," Allie Young '13 said of the medium.
Young started working with White River Indie Films last year, when she interned with a member of the company's board and volunteered at last year's festival. While Young has become closely familiar with WRIF's festival, her film experience also extends beyond the Upper Valley.
"At home, on the Navajo reservation, I was part of designing the first film festival in my area," she said.
For Young, this year's festival theme has proved particularly relevant to her interests.
"I'm working on a transmedia documentary for my culminating project about the Navajo youth on the reservation," Young said. "It's something I'm very passionate about. WRIF has helped a lot by having workshops during the festival."
Young helped organize the transmedia master class, which brought the festival home to the College. Filmmaker Helen De Michiel and scholar Patricia Zimmermann were able to introduce the digital medium to students by showcasing their own documentary and transmedia work, Young said.
The class attempted to define the idea of an "open space documentary" as a new approach to documentary filmmaking, attendee Alex Stockton '15 said.
"The old way is like a triangle in which the three points are the subject, the maker and the audience," Stockton said of traditional filmmaking. "The new way is a circle, in which there aren't these clearly defined points. There is interaction."
