Convivial’s current focus is producing our own documentaries with rich social media connections. We are also producing short movies for online distribution related to non-profits, artists, community, economic development, sustainability, local agriculture and filmic locations in the Northern New Mexico promoting tourism. As per their New Mexico | New Visions service contract Convivial is mentoring film and digital media students, previsualization and storyboard classes, creating and producing oral history, media production and social media workshops for local Northern New Mexicans.

In their collaborative partnership over the past 15 years Antelles & Hess are experienced in all stages of documentary filmmaking, encompassing pre/pro/post production. Together they have excelled in diving into the breath and scope of documentary content, discovering core stories and building a narrative structure foundation while both supporting and extending story threads. Whether short or long form, fiction or non-fiction, animated or documentary, or a mashup, Convivial knows how to tell stories. Convivial's 2010 New Visions documentary affords Antelles and Hess many opportunities to bring together the knowledge and skills in storytelling and production.

Biography of Patricia (Gian) Antelles

 

For the last twenty years, Ms. Antelles collaborations include prototype teams, non-profits, artist groups, film studios, museums; educational institutions, advanced technology and convergence media research labs, creating innovative digital media products. The premiere passion of Ms. Antelles is interactive and social media design with an associated narrative foundations. 

Selected for an innovative graduate program at Mills College (1987-89) Ms. Antelles participated in an emerging interdisciplinary media studies program. As a graduate fellow, Ms Antelles worked with a team of instructional designers receiving an NSF Grant, for “Interactive Square One TV,” a program from Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in Boston. With the Mills team, she repurposed a massive series of videotapes into thematically accessed content and developed new interactive games. Milton Chen, then at Harvard now at educational nonprofit The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF), was her advisor. Based on her work with CTW Ms. Antelles was selected as Co-Director for a unique collaboration between LucasFilm and Apple Computer (LUAU). For the next few years, LUAU developed a number of seminal interactive media prototypes between the worlds of designers in the digital world and the converging world of film and video production milieu such as: “Paul Park Ranger & The Mystery of the Disappearing Ducks,” “Life Story: The Story of the Discovery of DNA,” with Adrian Malone Productions for the A&E network. During LUAU Ms. Antelles divided her time between at The San Francisco Apple Multimedia Lab and LucasFilm in Marin. After these efforts, Lucas Arts spun off as a separate division and she continued to produce story-driven multimedia products there. After early work at LucasFilm, LucasArts Learning and Lucas Attractions, Ms. Antelles participated in the development of the educational nonprofit The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF). Moving to independent productions Ms. Antelles co-produced CD-ROMs “Journey to the New World: Ellis Island,” and “Creation Stories From Around the World,” for Warner New Media.

In the 1992 Ms. Antelles founded Convivial Studios in San Francisco relocating to New Mexico in 2000. Leading collaborative teams Antelles produced interactive convergence media prototypes focusing on narrative storytelling, personalization, narrative game experiences, time-based pre-visualization workflows, collaborative digital media asset management and online social networks. Ms. Antelles has also worked with technology research tanks such as Microsoft Labs,Continuum Research (now Corbis), Interval Research, NTT, NEH, NSF, Kodak and Apple Media Developer Group.

In New Mexico Convivial has produced community-based video social media campaigns for artist collectives, cultural/geographic commons, sustainable agricultural entities and digital videos for non-profits such as The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). For the past five years Convivial sets up a mini multi-camera TV station for the social science summer Teachers Institute for two weeks. Mostly recently Antelles created “Cinema Activismo” a social media platform providing filmmakers and a community of viewers feedback to culturally relevant films, environmental, social, pov, artistic...documentaries, and share these on an integrated social network (MySpace, FB, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, Vimeo). Convivial also participates in the B-Side film festival mobile technology officially launched at Sundance 2010. We are sorry to see B-Side to close shop as they provided an important service to the film festival communities.

Ms. Antelles continues to write and produce narrative storylines for digital storytelling venues on multiple media platforms. Creating location-aware “narrative navigation” scenarios for games, online and mobile platforms is a current passion. Summer 2009 Ms. Antelles and Melinda Hess were selected for the NALIP Producer’s Academy. Fall 2009 Antelles and Hess won the New Mexico | New Visions Award for their upcoming personal historic New Mexico documentary.

 

Biography of Melinda Hess

 

Melinda Hess’s career has spanned over 25 years in the film, video and interactive multimedia industries. She began her career as a news cinematographer for an ABC television affiliate. After attending NYU Film School, Ms. Hess became a film editor, winning several awards for short and long form documentaries for both independents and television networks.

For many years, she edited a series of PBS documentaries made in collaboration with major museums; all of these films included original film footage, archival footage, numerous narrative techniques and original music. These credits include: “In Our Own Time” for Art of the Western World PBS series, “Merchants and Masterpieces” for Metropolitan Museum of Art & PBS, “The Vever Affair” for Smithsonian World & PBS, “Light of the Gods” for National Gallery of Art &PBS. With Director Meryl Joseph she edited “Into the Mainstream” (1988) and “City Farmers,” (1996) CINE Golden Eagle Award, which aired on Nickelodeon and Learning Channel. Collaborating with a team of film and video artists, Melinda co-produced, directed and edited several segments of a 16mm / interactive laser videodisc art project entitled “The Erlking,” exhibited at MOCA, the Whitney Museum Biennial, the Jewish Museum in New York, and the Beauborg in Paris in the late 80’s.

Moving west to San Francisco in the early 90’s,Ms.Hess began her collaboration with Patricia Gian Antelles of Convivial Design Studio. As Director of Time-Based Media, Hess guided all nonlinear media post-production. She directed a team of editors and animators creating digital storyboards, animatics and movies for a media series of titles targeted for girls 7-12years old and later purchased by Mattel.

Since 1999 in New Mexico, Ms. Hess has incorporated her cinematographer roots into video productions. Convivial has produced, directed, filmed and edited several documentaries for New Mexico communities, non-profits and educational organizations. Hess & Antelles filmed, edited and produced a multicamera production of an instructional dance DVD. Collaborating with a research institute, Convivial designed a Media Preservation Master Plan for preserving and digitizing over 8,000 hours of a multitude of analog and digital video formats spanning over thirty years. Convivial's video restoration, color correction and editing services have resulted in finished products for DVD, broadcast cable-TV and online.

Convivial is named after Tools for Conviviality (1973). I first read Ivan Illich during my undergraduate studies. Upon graduation I assisted in the establishment of a community school and took Ivan's ideas with me. I discovered Illich's argument for the creation of convivial, rather than manipulative institutions. Building of societies in which modern technologies serve " interrelated individuals." Sound like the web? I wonder what Illich would say about the proliferation of online learning and interactive media environments as connected informal mass communication.

≥≥ Tools for Conviviality: The entire text of another of Illich's most important works, the most general statement of his view about technology. 1970s.

>> Fan Ivan Illich on Facebook!

ILLICH LINKS

• >> Scary School Nightmare - great short video exploring Illich's ideas around schooling on YouTube.

• >> Thinking after Illich

• >> ivan illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning. Illich's "learning webs" mentioned and much more by Mark K. Smith.

• >> Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich

• >> A Voice for Conviviality Remembering Ivan Illich 1926–2002 By Jerry Brown in Utne magazine March/April 2003.

• >> Ivan Illich on We The People, By Jerry Brown.

• ≥≥ Remembering Ivan Illich by Peter L. Berger.

• >> Ivan Illich: Very useful page with links into key obituaries and to his writings. Includes e-texts of Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality. Useful timeline of Illich publications.

• >> Ivan Illich: writings on the web: Useful listing of links from PreserveNet.

• ≥≥ Ivan Illich: Observations on the Tools of Industrial Institutions and the Changes Needed to Achieve Sustainability and Independence. Don Ferris covers Tools for Conviviality and Energy and Equity in relation to modern times such as our with globalization and sustainability as daily concerns. Fifteen years before globalization became a buzzword, Illich wrote about it.

Ivan Illich Biography (1926 - 2002)

Ivan Illich was born in Vienna in 1926. He studied theology and philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome and obtained a PhD in history at the University of Salzburg. He came to the United States in 1951, where he served as assistant pastor in an Irish-Puerto Rican parish in New York City. From 1956 to 1960 he was assigned as vice-rector to the Catholic university of Puerto Rico, where he organized an intensive training center for American priests in Latin American culture. Illich was co-founder of the widely known and controversial Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and since 1964 he has directed research seminars on `Institutional Alternatives in a Technological Society', with special focus on Latin America.

[from: Ivan Illich: Energy and Equity. London: Calder & Boyars, 1974.]