Week One - Web 2.0

Introduction to blogging (hence this blog!), Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, MaxMSP and Web 2.0

I will do weekly posts to summarize ideas, concepts and development strategies I'm being introduced to and the new media practices I'm trying out during the months of May and June. This will include outreach and integration into online social communities and especially blogs on various technologies that might be applied to my documentary projects.

My background in media includes thirty years of independent filmmaking. I am first and foremost a conceptual practitioner working as a writer, director and editor on more than a dozen documentaries and as a story consultant and writer of drama. http://www.spectrumfilms.ca

I am currently researching my thesis project for the MFA in Documentary Media program at Ryerson University in Toronto. http://www.ryerson.ca/graduate/documentarymedia

My thesis project at Ryerson will be completed in the spring of 2009 and is titled "Visibility and Invisibility in the Margins of Disappearance". I started my research for this project five years ago when I began to look into writing a film on the disappearance of sixty-five women in the downtown eastside of Vancouver. I have been involved in various development stages of projects along the way, but each project collapsed. During my first year at Ryerson I have broadened my research to include missing women across Canada and homelessness. From this ongoing research several projects will emerge over the next two years with the immediate focus being on my thesis project. I am at an early development stage with this project and interested in discovering how various forms of new media concepts, technologies and delivery modes might factor in.