Working language for Crossover is English

CROSSOVER LAB IS COMPLETE AND READY TO START


(Update 2 September 2010: Crossover Mentors, see below)

What's Crossover

Crossover is an international programme designed to explore the creative and the commercial challenges of developing content and services for digital media.
The lab process brings together creative professionals from diverse disciplines – including film and TV production, animation, games, theatre, web design and new media – to share understanding of a rapidly changing mediascape, to form new interdisciplinary collaborations and generate ideas for projects.
Crossover differs from other models of lab, which work with existing teams on pre-conceived proposals. We mix people with a range of creative skills, at different stages in their careers and from diverse cultural backgrounds. Participants are selected as individuals to create new partnerships and explore new collaborative interdisciplinary approaches to cross-platform development.

The Lab is tightly structured for the first three days; the final two are more open, with participants working together in teams, on ideas that they have chosen, with support from mentors.

The Lab is in four phases:

Introductory
Participants discover who the mentors and other participants are, and what they know; build a common understanding of the territory the lab will explore; share knowledge of and debate about media futures, and establish the best possible environment for creative collaboration. The main outcome of this phase is knowledge transfer: developing an understanding of the values, culture, language and approach of producers working in different sectors.

Cross-platform idea generation
In the second phase of Crossover participants are challenged to create original ideas for cross-platform products and services. Using a range of techniques from classic brainstorming, lateral-thinking techniques, user-focused design processes, Stanford Research International’s Innovation methodology and other tools, people work in constantly changing interdisciplinary teams.

Selection, evaluation, development
From the third day onwards, Crossover adopts a more convergent approach. The mentoring team provides a framework within which the participants select ideas to develop further, working in a team with diverse knowledge and skillsets.

Presentation
In the last 24 hours of the Lab, teams focus on developing a value proposition and a pitch for the single project that they will present on the final day of Crossover. Presentations are made to an invited audience.



THE CROSSOVER TEAM

Frank Boyd is the creative director of Crossover. He has been one UK's new media pioneers since founding the Arts Technology Centre in 1989. He has worked as producer, funder and trainer on a series of innovative creative and economic development programmes in the arts, broadcast, and in education in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia. He established the European Multimedia Labs, the Digital Media Alliance and BAFTA’s Interactive Entertainment Awards before joining the BBC as Director of Creative Development, where he directed a series of development labs for interactive television, broadband and cross-platform production. He established Unexpected Media in 2002 to support innovation and creative research in future media, designing events, seminars and labs for clients in the public and private sectors and running Innovation Labs for the BBC and Crossover labs. Following demand domestically and internationally he established Crossover as a company with Heather Croall and Mark Atkin in January 2009.

Mark Atkin is a director of Crossover Labs, the Head of the Documentary Campus Masterschool, and an executive producer, currently working with Brook Lapping Productions (UK), Renegade Films (UK) and Context TV (Germany). For six years, until October 2008, he was Commissioning Editor for SBS TV and on-line commissioning, coproducing and acquiring for TV and on-line, across all genres, for SBS Australia, the world’s most diverse public broadcaster.
Industry posts
• Board Member, Sheffield Doc/Fest
• Advisory Panel: Hot Docs
Activities
• International Marketplace Consultant for Australian International Documentary Conference.
• Project selection for Sheffield DocFest MeetMarket and IDFA, Hot Docs and Nordisk Forum documentary pitching forums; panellist for international fund of ITVS.
• Advisor to Wellcome Institute on science documentaries for funding.
• Producer of The Truth Is Out There Alternate Reality Game at Sheffield DocFest.
• Joint commissioner on the Why Democracy? project, as well as helping co-ordinate the
on-line activities.


CROSSOVER MENTORS in Turin

Arnaud Dressen
Arnaud Dressen co-founded the independent production company Honkytonk Films in Paris  in 2007; since 2008 Honkytonk has realized – with Le Monde, France 5, Canal+, Orange – innovative co-productions of webdocumentaries that have become case studies in Europe. Honkytonk developed the software for interactive editing Klynt. Before starting his company, he worked in the media industry for France Televisions Group, Arte France, ITVS/USA, Vodeo.tv, Article Z, and he collaborated with producer Patrice Barrat on an array of international co-productions (with such broadcasters as NYT Television, CBC Canada, ITVS).

Roger Graef
Roger Graef is a writer, filmmaker, broadcaster and criminologist and CEO of Films of Record. In January 2006 Roger was given an OBE. In 2004 he was awarded the prestigious Fellowship to the British Academy of Film and Television, again for his outstanding contribution and achievements. Roger also won a BAFTA in 2003, as the Producer of the Flaherty Best Documentary, Feltham Sings! Originally a theatre and tv drama director, he’s worked in documentaries, arts, current affairs and science. Among his more than a hundred films in various capacities, he is best known for gaining access to hitherto closed institutions ranging from ministries and corporation boardrooms to police, courts, prisons, probation and social work. These influential films include the Bafta winning BBC series Police, which helped change the way the police deal with rape victims. In Search of Law and Order, took a unique look at some groundbreaking ways of changing juvenile rehabilitation and influenced the setting up of the Youth Justice Board. And he’s done nine films with John Cleese, including The Secret Policeman’s Ball – a film that helped establish Amnesty as a household name. He also co-producer the first Comic Relief, which along with the Amnesty films, influenced a generation of comedians and musicians to try and change the World. His series WEB LIVES – 76 three minute mindocs for itv.com – was the first online doc series. As a consultant and communications expert, he has served on numerous boards and government committees. He was a founding board member of Channel Four and a governor of the British Film Institute. He created and chaired the ICA Architectural Forum, and taught at the AA. He also co-designed the London bus map.

Markus Nikel
Author, producer and editorial supervisor of educational and factual television programmes and
multimedia productions, in Germany. For RAI Educational, he has worked on a variety of programmes and web services for school as well as for adult education. The EBU, the European Broadcasting Union in Geneva, appointed him twice as Executive Producer for co-productions of TV series. Since 1998, he has been working as a workshop tutor and staff member of the Basel Karlsruhe Forum on educational and societal TV and Media (www.bakaforum.net). Since 2004 he is the Forum’s Programme Manager.

Jo Roach
Jo Roach is a producer of quality editorial, design and ideas for radio and television, new media & emerging platforms. She has completed successful projects for Channel 4, BBC television and Radio, Chrysalis Radio, Kerrang!, Curved House, Eurovision, Hit 40 UK,, Spotlight Africa and Unique Broadcast.
She was a Commissioning Editor at Channel 4, responsible for some groundbreaking innovative projects. Since stepping down as a Commissioner, she has returned to production and has recently overseen the collaboration between Somethin' Else and Preloaded of a major CHannel 4 interactive project, Super Me.
Jo has a rare combination of skills. She is able to translate complex web and wireless technology and explain it to creative, editorial marketing and new media people in world class companies like BskyB, Chrysalis and the BBC. She has both empathy with and understanding of classic, linear media and compiementary new media channels.



TESTIMONIALS


"The most effective and productive way of identifying and developing new ideas from cross-platform teams."

Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor, Channel 4


"Without doubt, the most useful media course I have attended in a 20-year career in broadcast television."

Sonya Pemberton, Head of Specialist Factual, ABC


"For me, the lesson of Crossover was… the challenge for people developing media projects today is that of creating experiences which have an existence and a reality beyond the limitations, technologies and timeframes of any single platform… It’s a bit like the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: once you’ve tasted the apple you can’t ‘untaste’ it.  I’d find it hard now to imagine developing any future project with the sole objective of putting it on a TV screen."

Simon Wells, CrazyBoy TV, documentary film maker


More testimonials and detailed info about Crossover Labs



CROSSOVER LAB in Turin
a 2RIN CONTENT awareness event

produced by
Virtual Reality & Multi Media Park - Pole of Digital Creativity
in co-production with
Torino Wireless - ICT Pole

supported by
Fondazione CRT
organised in collaboration with
Crossoverlabs.org
FERT - Filming with a European Regard in Turin
Documentary in Europe

media partners
Trancemedia.eu
European Cinema & Audiovisual Days

special thanks to
Camera di Commercio Industria Artigianato di Torino
Film Commission Torino-Piemonte