After a decadent three course meal overlooking Hollywood Boulevard at the Highlands. The LATV festival resumed their "Digital Day"of in-depth panels conducted by experts in all things new media.

Lisa Osborne, Ross Cox, Sharon Lawrence and Midori Willoughby

The seats filled quickly for the AFI (American Film Institute)'s "Digital Content Showcase" Many filmmakers and web artists who would find the Digital Content Lab branch of the institute mind-blowing, and are not even aware of it's existence. The Digital Content Lab located in Hollywood, CA has been putting together teams of working professionals from the entertainment, design and technology worlds to incubate digital prototypes over the course of the past nine years. The supervising producer of the lab, Lisa Osborne, led the panel of case studies from the lab's recent past. The first example of the lab's success was from the production company Kontentreal. The environmentally centered company wanted a way for viewers of their eco-educational TV series to be able to integrate their own ideas into the viewing experience of the entire audience. This is a tall order if you are familiar with the disparate elements of the technologies that they chose to integrate. The way that the lab is able to help these prototypes become a reality is with the help of mentors who will work on developing and executing these concepts over an 18 month period. Their impressive mentor list appears to be in the hundreds, consisting of higher ups from companies such as Comcast, Brightcove, Schematic, Sun Microsystems, Inc., and Yahoo! just to name a few. The result in the case of Kontentreal's prototype was a breath-taking design which could be accessed from broadband, a Tivo interface, a blue-ray DVD or a mobile device allowing viewers of the TV series to have a seamless interactive experience. For example: If the lab featured an episode on eco-friendly housing, a viewer could take a picture on their mobile phone after the show of an eco-friendly house in their area and email it to the Kontentreal website (which would automatically be geo-tagged on a world map accessible on all the media platforms listed above). This input would be coming from all over the world so you could find examples after the show of eco-friendly houses and resources in your area or other areas of the world. You can get a sense of the magnitude of this project and the possibilities that it has. This was one of four presentations including presentations from Cynergy Films, the Cartoon Network and Stage 9 Digital Media. Watching these presentations was a true goimpse into te future of new media technology. The AFI Digital Content Lab welcomes applications for mentors and protoypes from all over the world.

If are interested, check out the Digital Content Lab site: http://www.afi.com/education/dcl/default.aspx .

If you want to see more of what Kontentreal is all about check out their site: http://www.krfilms.com/

To see what else the LATV festival had to offer check them out at: http://www.latvfest.net/

The folks at NATPE who organized the LATV festival will be organizing their annual conference in January so keep an eye out for more info we will post as that approaches.