By Arun Kumar, IANS,
Washington : An Indian-American filmmaker and journalist is leading a project to create a “crowd-sourced interactive documentary” to tell the story of the Egyptian revolution with the same tools that brought it to the world in real time.
A three-person team led by Jigar Mehta, a Knight Fellow at Stanford and former New York Times video journalist, is asking people to tell what they know of the events in Egypt from Jan 25 to Feb 11 for their “18DaysInEgypt” documentary.
Others on the team are Yasmin Elayat, a New York based interaction designer and software developer, who studied Computer Science at the American University in Cairo and Alaa Dajani, a documentary filmmaker born and raised in Egypt.
The team is asking people to tag their media on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter with the tag ’18DaysinEgypt’ and the day it happened plus any additional information they can provided about the media.
The team will find the clips via search, they said. “Once we have a collection of the media, we are going to use the community around #18DaysinEgypt to help curate the material for the final documentary.”
The just launched first part of the project involves collection: getting the population who took video/photos/tweeted to tag or upload their media. The second part involves distribution of the interactive component to tell the story using footage shot by thousands.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])