Walking Cinema

01/05/2025

Next Sunday, the 12th of January, I will be speaking at the
FIRST UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST SOCIETY OF SAN FRANCISCO about two Walking Cinema projects in the Fillmore neighborhood that look to make its history more evocative using immersive theater, AR, and soundwalks. Please join us at 9am for a breakfast and 9:30am for the talk and discussion!

https://www.uusf.org/forum

If you can't make it in person the link below has the Zoom link!

forum

04/06/2023

Our immersive tour of Southwest, D.C., Before the Bulldozers, has earned the distinction of Honoree in the Public Service & Activism category of the Metaverse, Immersive & Virtual section. As recognized by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Science, this is a huge achievement for us and ! Honoree is granted to only the top 20% of the nearly 14,000 projects submitted in this year’s competition.

We need your help, though! The Webby People’s Voice Award is voted on by the online public.

VOTE at the link! https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting #/2023/metaverse-immersive-virtual/general-virtual-experiences/public-service-activism

You have until Thursday, April 20th to vote, so get your votes in now!

03/15/2023

Reminder that applications for the online course "History Around Us" are due by 11:59 PST March 15th

In "History Around Us," we'll be targeting museum professionals, historic site personnel, and all kinds of storytellers interested in creating site-specific narratives. Our goal is to expand the community creating such work and learn from new approaches. The course will use off-the-shelf Adobe software (Audition, Photoshop and Aero) and each student will end up with a prototype project that can be expanded on or used as the basis for a grant application.

It's a month-long course that starts May 1. We hope to bring together a diverse group of folks who work with cultural institutions either in a formal or project-based way. Preference will be given to applicants currently employed by a museum, historical site, or other cultural institution. Applicants are not required to have any technical expertise, but should have a specific area or community in mind for their site-based audio/AR project.

Link to apply: https://forms.gle/qByAPyzDj4C9dNNc7

This should take less than 5 minutes, but please fill out by March 15th.

The course costs $800, but no one will be refused for lack of funds. Our goal is to limit attendance for this course to 10 students with diverse story concepts and geographies.

Hi there and thanks for responding to our call for participants for Walking Cinema's first course in site-specific storytelling. This course will focus on museum and cultural site professionals who want to create smartphone-based audio and augmented reality walks in communities that connect to their...

02/28/2023

The production team at Walking Cinema, in partnership with Adobe, is putting together a month long course called “History Around Us” that will bring together 10 hand-picked partners from diverse museum and cultural organizations together to learn how to develop smartphone-based audio and augmented reality stories. This immersive approach to cultural exploration is becoming a popular way to involve diverse communities and use cutting edge technology to tell site-specific stories.

This course titled “History Around Us” is built on Walking Cinema's award-winning process of creating immersive audio and augmented reality walks for museum, civic, and nonprofit organizations.

Who's it for?

Do you work in migrant communities? Environmental science? Urban design? No technical expertise, but have already researched and maybe developed a story that is site-specific?

Do your students, visitors, or community members want to explore local history in a new and engaging way? Do you want to develop immersive media that extends your exhibits to the surrounding neighborhood?
This course is for you.

What will you learn?

In addition to gathering skills in place-based story development, course participants will work with like-minded colleagues from around the world to develop compelling stories with unique neighborhoods, historic sites, and communities at their center.

When's it happening?

The course will be starting in the Spring of 2023 we're accepting applications now. Fees will be along a sliding scale. The course will meet weekly for four weeks, with 90 minutes of Zoom class per week, and assigned learning and producing. Participants will be expected to dedicate an average of 5 hours per week to the course.

How do I sign up?

Fill out the survey by March 15th if you're interested in the course, to tell us who you are and what kind of project you’re interested in developing!

https://forms.gle/6DsuTgWymNNA1FZ46

Feel free to email [email protected] with any questions you have.

02/25/2023

In our immersive audio walking tours, we incorporate physical touchstones, working with local businesses. In our new tour of the Mission district of San Francisco, we have three instillations set up and ready for you to experience! If you want to check out the tours yourself, head to calmigration.org

5 Likes, 1 Comments - Walking Cinema ◆ Storytelling () on Instagram: "In our immersive audio walking tours, we incorporate physical touchstones, working with local businesses. In our new tour of the Mission district of San Francisco, we have three instillations set up and ready for y...

02/22/2023

Are you in SF?

Head to the Mission to experience our immersive audio tour, released just last week! Explore what SF's coffee industry has to do with a long history of Salvadoran migration, the birth of Sanctuary Cities, and the struggle to keep the neighborhood Latinx.

This tour, and two others, are available to download for free on the California Migration Museum app, available on the App Store and Google Play.

https://www.calmigration.org/migrantfootsteps

02/17/2023

Very excited to announce the launch of our latest project, Migrant Footsteps, a series of three immersive audio tours in San Francisco neighborhoods.

https://www.calmigration.org/migrantfootsteps

Use this link to download the FREE app and take the tour yourself.

Made with the California Migration Museum, these immersive, multi sensory walk bring history to life with music, story, augmented reality, and installations. Thank you to Alex Wong, La Doña, IDHAZ, and all of our other collaborators and partners on these tours.

02/02/2023

A few weeks ago, a few members of the Walking Cinema team had the chance to see perform live at along with . Alex has been working with us on our upcoming walking tour of San Francisco's Chinatown—scripting, narrating, and writing and recording original music for the story.

It was such an honor to hear Alex talk about our project and his personal connection to it! Listen to the clip to learn more, and you can learn more about Alex's music at alexwongsounds.com

01/27/2023

We're getting so close to having our installations complete for our California Migration Museum walking tours! Here is the director of the museum, Katy Long, in front of a record player that we installed at Cliff's Hardware in the Castro as part of our walking tour of the neighborhood. You can check out the record player in the back of Cliff's now for a sneak peak of the tour.

We'll make an announcement here when the full tours are available to be walked! Stay tuned.

01/25/2023

Our collaborator Andrea Jones, Associate Director of Education from the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum, spoke at this year's 2022 Smithsonian National Education Summit about "Museums of the Streets: Learn how to activate everyday places as sites of learning, joy, reflection, and healing." Our newest walking tour, Before the Bulldozers, got a shout out!

To listen to the full panel, click on the link here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-RioRQm0k8&list=PLFGZwzyPnxTv2mAisSfJd674mGBp3T2p2&index=25

01/16/2023

We are finishing up the final touches for our upcoming tours with the museum. A few weeks ago we had California Migration Museum founder Katy Long in the recording studio at @ to record her host narration. The tours are free, virtual walking tours of San Francisco: “Chinatown: The Spaces In-Between,” “The Castro: Finding Home,” and “The Mission: Coffee Country” will be available to download via the App Store in February.

01/14/2023

After over a year of research and production, it's so exciting to see students experiencing our Before the Bulldozers tour out in Southwest, D.C. These photos are from November when a school group from Middle school took the tour.

The 's Anacostia Community Museum runs field trips for students to take the tour and provides the devices to take them on! If you're interested in learning more about how to sign up, follow this link:

https://anacostia.si.edu/visit/tours

And of course, if you're an individual who would like to take the tour, you can download the app at beforethebulldozers.com/download

01/12/2023

We're a bit late to the party sharing this, but we are the proud and grateful recipients of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Programs Grant for our upcoming immersive theater project, Bop City Immersive.

If you don't know about Bop City Immersive yet, it's going to be a live theater experience of Jimbo’s Bop City, an iconic mid-20th century diner and jazz venue where some of the most innovative jazz musicians played in San Francisco and where the movement for racial justice, music and urban planning collided in a dramatic and instructive way. During this immersive theater experience, audiences will explore a recreation of Bop City at a venue in San Francisco’s Fillmore District and learn about the roots of today’s housing crisis.

Learn more about other recipients of the Rainin Foundation's grant at the link below and stay tuned for more Bop City information as we progress in the research!

https://krfoundation.org/arts/grants/new-experimental-works-new-program/recipients-2022//

01/09/2023

Another exciting announcement from last year! We're grateful to have received a grant from the Creative Work Fund to support our upcoming immersive theater project which will be titled Bop City Immersive.

The project, which we're making with playwright Cleavon Smith, is a live theater experience of Jimbo’s Bop City, the iconic mid-20th century San Francisco diner and jazz venue where some of the most innovative jazz musicians played into the wee hours of the night and where San Francisco’s racial justice, music scene, and urban planning collided, in a dramatic and instructive way.

Here's a quick statement from Creative Work Fund program lead Natalia Vigil:

“This year’s Creative Work Fund awarding process centered collaborations with community in the form of our readers and panels. The final 15 CWF awardees were selected by a community panel comprised of working artists that represent the artistic, geographic, ethnic, and varied identities represented in the final group of applicants. This year’s grantees are strong examples of organization-artist partnership, of new work, and artistic innovation.”

Read more about all of the award winners here: https://creativeworkfund.org/news/creative-work-fund-2022-announcement

01/07/2023

"What does it mean when we erase history and the collective story of those who came before us?" — We thank Ms. Thelma Jones for sharing these words at our launch event for Before the Bulldozers back in November. Ms. Jones is a long time award winning community activist in the D.C. area, and served as an advisor for our project.

To take the tour and see how we addressed some of those important questions, click on the link in our bio, or visit https://www.beforethebulldozers.com/download

01/05/2023

Happy New Year everyone! It's about time we update you on what we've been up to these past few months.

First thing to celebrate from 2022: the launch of our immersive audio tour of the Southwest neighborhood in D.C., Before the Bulldozers.

We had a great launch event in DC back in November where we were able to celebrate many of the artists, activists, historians, and other neighborhood experts who made the tour happen. Here are just some of the folks who made it all possible.