Over the past eight years, Sundance Institute’s New Frontier program has been building a community of brilliant creative minds from a broad range of artistic, scientific, and technology backgrounds, who are “geeked” about playing together in the story innovation sandbox.
Last month, the New Frontier Story Lab brought a fraction of that community to the ancient mountains of Utah to share what they’ve learned from their experiments and to help develop the visionary projects of our 2013 Fellows.
Before the Lab, my Sundance colleagues and I felt like we were constructing some kind of convergence experiment, asking ourselves questions like
“What if the Academy Award-nominated writer who conceived the ingenious twist to Cape Fear that iconic talents Scorsese, Nolte and DeNiro used to rivet audiences; was in the room with a former Disney Imagineer, whose transmedia campaigns brought millions of fanboy/fangirl fantasies to life? And, we added the digital artist who (from a lighthouse in Iceland) studied the inner workings of Bjork’s mind to created fluid iPad interfaces that allowed millions of her adherents to explore and interact with her imagination?”
What would happen?
“What if the Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker who used rare footage to depict the power of rhetoric, from its darkest manifestations (i.