Creatives join in at BIFF's Digital Media Convergence Symposium

The flicks will share some of the spotlight with game developers and other creatives when the Boulder International Film Festival starts up later this week.

Festival organizers teamed up with the state's film and media office and Boulder's tourism office to launch the Digital Media Convergence Symposium -- a "multi-tiered" event designed to further develop the emerging local digital media industry.

The first-ever "DiMe" is slated to take place starting at 3 p.m. Friday and will include a panel discussion involving seven industry members, a reception and a screening of "Waking Sleeping Beauty," a documentary from a Disney producer who also is a panelist.

"You have a growing amount of game development companies, animators, the arts in general here," said Heather Clisby, project coordinator for DiMe. "... But everybody's sort of working in a vacuum, and the hope is to create a forum during the festival so we can talk about how we can grow jobs, how we can keep jobs and talk about how these benefit each other."

The panel discussion will be moderated by Robert Reich, founder of Boulder-based real-time search company OneRiot and creator of the Boulder-Denver New Tech Meetup.

The panelists include: Don Hahn, a producer from Disney; Michael Brown, founder of Serac Adventure Films & Film School; David Rolfe, vice president of integrated media for Crispin Porter + Bogusky; Brian Robbins, founder of Riptide Games; Jason Mendelson, managing director for the Foundry Group; Aidan Chopra, product evangelist for Google SketchUp; and Krista Marks, general manager of Kerpoof.

On a state level, Colorado is trying to help its film and digital industries flourish through legislative and other initiatives, and events such as DiMe could be an asset as those actions move forwards, said Marcia Morgan, spokeswoman for the Colorado Film, Television and Media Office.

"What we want to do is embrace a broader group of the creative industries," Morgan said. "We see the convergence of film, TV and digital media as the future."

Hosting the event in conjunction with the Boulder International Film Festival made sense on many levels, said festival co-founder Kathy Beeck. The "cutting-edge" aspect of hosting a symposium with the creative sector brings to mind other interactive festivals, namely Austin, Texas-based South By Southwest, which integrates, music, film and technology, Beeck said.

"I don't know we'd ever do something quite that big," she said, pausing to give a chuckle, "but who knows."