By Jessica Fenney

As part of the Digital Capital Week Festival 2012, last week Pride Collaborative, a DC-based strategic communications firm, and The Create Daily, a resource that connects storytellers with career opportunities, had the chance to host an event entitled Story Innovation: Transmedia, Web Cinema, & Participatory Storytelling.  The hour-long session was held at the Affinity Lab on U St. in DC and facilitated by Pride Collaborative’s chief content officer, Felicia Pride.

According to DC Week co-producer Peter Corbett, the goal of the annual weeklong festival is to catalyze as much creation as possible by bringing together various designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and social innovators in order to share ideas.  The Story Innovation event did just that.  It featured five guest speakers from diverse industry backgrounds exhibiting their current projects, sharing their development processes, and spearheading dialogue about common concerns that arise among creators working within the digital media landscape. 

Attendees kept Twitter a flutter as the event progressed—a testament to the useful information provided.  The knowledge gained surely left folks excited about the possibilities and ready to incorporate the new concepts into their own initiatives.

Lance Hill of Meridian Hill Pictures presented on The Green Corps-Living Docs web-based cinema project. The project is an experiment that merges documentary footage, Google Maps, and Google Street View, creating both an engaging and interactive transmedia platform.

The second speaker was founder and creative director of Muse Collective, Metasebia Yoseph.  She spoke about the transmedia project, A Culture of Coffee, which uses social media and the art of book-making to explore the history and influence of Ethiopian coffee across time and cultures.  

Next came creative director of Arcade Sunshine, Patrick White.  He presented on the Lakou Mizik project, a multimedia celebration of Haitian music and culture utilizing app production, web design, and transmedia strategy to promote the cultural strength and beauty of Haiti.