Boston’s WGBH is adding to the digital elements in WGBH Lab, expecting some resulting reactions to flourish on-air and online. The recently relaunched online content workshop at lab.wgbh.org will offer lots more rights-cleared clips for use by video artists and new possibilities to broadcast their very best works, thanks to a freshly minted partnership with the long-running doc series P.O.V.
“This creates a broadcast venue for innovative Lab content,” says Denise Dilanni, Lab founder and director, “if the things people come up with are as good as we hope they are going to be.”
Five years ago, WGBH launched the Lab as a means of telling independent filmmakers about opportunities such as the station’s filmmakers-in-residence program and open calls, hearing their pitches and giving mutual feedback. The portal still does those things, but has evolved into a broader “incubator for user-generated content,” says Dilanni. The site’s Sandbox section, unveiled last fall, gives video bloggers and producers free access to dozens of clips from WGBH’s library.
WGBH reps think the site may work well enough to serve as a model—or perhaps provide the infrastructure—for other stations that hope to encourage and make use of user-generated content and make online and broadcast efforts complement each other.
“I’m trying to be optimistic without overstating things — it’s too soon to claim anything until we see how this rolls out,” Dilanni says. But “if this architecture can work for us it can work for others, and we hope it will be a resource and an asset. Stations always seem to spend limited resources doing the same thing.”
The Lab’s redesign, with more embedded video and a simplified upload process, among other upgrades, is intended to make the portal more user-friendly.
The Lab has featured periodic, competitive open calls primarily targeting Boston-area producers since it launched. Its current open call, for example, seeks war-themed shorts to run locally in September in conjunction with Ken Burns’ The War.
Part of the appeal of hooking up with P.O.V. is its audience of independent filmmakers, Dilanni says. P.O.V., in turn, hopes to add more web services in addition to its acclaimed online series, P.O.V.’s Borders.
“They’re looking for more independent artists, we’re looking for more online offerings,” says Simon Kilburry, executive director of the series. “We consider about 1,000 submissions per year for the series; if we can hitch WGBH Lab to that wagon, it can reach out to a much broader” pool of content creators, he says.
Winners of the P.O.V. competitions will air within the national strand — the series plans to issue a call later this summer for Election 2008 shorts. “It’s always hard to find short-form content that fits what P.O.V. is looking for,” Kilburry says. He thinks the series producers might have better luck by pairing P.O.V. editorial guidance with access to “WGBH technology and tools” such as Sandbox, soon to undergo revamping.
Sandbox is designed to fuel mash-ups and other user productions by making arts, culture, historical and scientific footage, among other station video clips, freely available under a Creative Commons license.
The sparse video collection—it began last fall with 24 video clips, and there are now roughly 60—got some tepid appreciation from indies (Current, Oct. 11).
“So far it’s been a shallow sandbox; it will not really be useful until it’s deeper,” Dilanni says. WGBH will soon offer “a couple of hundred” clips for downloading from the site, Dilanni says, and eventually include up to 10 percent of the archival material available on the station’s stock footage sale site.
Though video bloggers have in the past criticized WGBH’s decision to insert a station logo in its Creative Commons videos, that policy will not change in the new iteration of the site.
WGBH has spoken with members of the minority consortia and other pubcasting organizations interested in possibly using the Sandbox model for their own video libraries, Dilanni says.
“I think we have to learn as a system to collaborate more and not always reinvent everything,” she says. “If we have a chance to make public media more open for creative expression, that’s only a good thing.”
Web page posted July 10, 2007
Copyright 2007 by Current Publishing Committee
