Horizons is a member of the founding council for the Chicago New Media Summit, which officially launched at the Chicago Cultural Center on June 5th. I attended with our Project Development Manager, Kelly Molchan. Rick was due to fly back in from New York that night but got held up, so we carried the water for him. He missed a great event, which I hope marks just beginning of a boom for Chicago creatives, producers and developers.
At the CNMS08 launch I had the pleasure of being interviewed for Chicago’s local station, Cable 25. They are planning to broadcast at the start of July, and will feature some clips of Horizons’ work alongside my warblings on how we fit with new media – something that is really not always apparent to those meeting Rick or myself for the first time, or just taking a look at our website, and that is something that we have been striving to address. Hence this blog….
When John Patterson of our good friends Pixel Bros first notified us about starting a movement to position Chicago as a hub for new media, I jumped at the chance to get us on board. The movement is not only good for Chicago as city, and for production companies, but fits ideally with the direction we are going to be taking in the rest of 2008 and beyond. However, I worried that we were well behind the times…
Previously, we produced a documentary or a PSA, sent it to the big networks or PBS, maybe sent a press release to Stella Foster or Bill Zwecker, had some DVDs made, and then were done. About as “old media” as you can get. We produced some great work on some vitally important social issues, but nowhere near as many people as needed to see this work actually ever did. And it wasn’t their fault – it was ours.
Well, that won’t happen anymore. From now on, when a nonprofit client works with Horizons, their message will be spread across the vast canvas of web 2.0 before they can say “Tim Berners-Lee”. It’ll be on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, WordPress, and wherever and whatever else people up with next.
This won’t be slipshod marketing. We’re going to use our vast experience of the non-profit field and combine it with the brilliant opportunities that are now out there, so that our clients get an unrivalled service.
Our documentaries will also increasingly reflect this embracing of social networks. For Hunger Heroes II in particular, we have already begun work on a ning site (inspired by CNMS08), which I will write about more as it develops. This could be a truly revolutionary step for documentary filmmaking aimed at effecting real change on social issues.. well, that’s we hope for, anyway.
In the meantime, we will continue to work on making the Chicago New Media Summit a viable and sustainable forum for other Chicago companies to collaborate and share in this new media revolution. We are learning a great deal from the others on the Council… but I humbly hope that we can also teach them a few things, and in the process, use the new tools available on the web to provoke lasting socioeconomic change through new media.
Web: http://chicagonewmediasummit.ning.com/
Twitter: https://m.twitter.com/cnms08
Oh, and I am well aware that this post is well after the event and therefore does not reflect the immediacy of web 2.0. We’re still learning… and we still have real world deadlines to meet!
Tags: Bill Zwecker, Cable 25, Chicago, CNMS08, documentary, horizons, Horizons Communications Group, John Patterson, Kelly Molchan, New Media, Nonprofit Video, PBS, Pixel Bros, PSA, Rick Roberts, social change, Stella Foster
July 6, 2009 at 10:36 am |
[...] Town Chicago’ covering the Chicago New Media Summit launch event in June 08. I posted a blog about the event, but now you have the [...]