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Workshop

Workshop with Spectres: Making Yourself a Ghost

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PT

  • Headshot of an adult male with light skin tone, medium length blonde hair, beard wearing black wool cardigan over blue shirt, smiling slightly.
    Alexander Porter, Speaker
  • black and white headshot of a woman
    Ana Herruzo, Speaker
  • Headshot of a mixed race middle-aged male in a mask and sunglasses, on top of a snowy hiking trail with smoke in the background.
    Martin Shelton, Speaker
  • Headshot of middle-aged male, slavic with long hair, white background
    Nicholas Pilarski, Moderator
  • A person sits in a director's chair at a festival, holding a microphone.
    Abby Sun, Moderator
  • Headshot of a woman with light skin tone, blonde chin-length hair, wearing a black and white floral shirt.
    Sally Volkmann, Moderator

As our everyday lives become progressively computational, the majority of our actions are increasingly trackable. This presents new challenges, ethical concerns, and emerging production realities that documentary practitioners must navigate. IDA’s SPECTRES is a two-part forum with documentary producers, directors, academics, and security experts that attempts to demystify digital security and its need within documentary production. This series will culminate in a best practices field guide for documentarians and a burner OS that allows makers to ingest, edit, and communicate securely. 

As the second and final installment of the series, SPECTRES: Becoming a Ghost we will investigate what it actually takes to make your digital footprint as discrete as possible. The SPECTRES team will provide a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a digital audit of your pre production, production, and post production workflows - removing the anxiety over vulnerability so you can prioritize creativity. Time will be dedicated to discuss how emerging documentary forms such as augmented, virtual, and mixed reality open up additional vulnerabilities and give an overview of our burner OS that is in development to shield your presence in the field. 

The event will be moderated by Abby Sun and Nicholas Pilarski, a documentary director and Associate Professor of Emerging Media who runs a laboratory at ASU that investigates resilient computational media and ethical narrative practices. 

The event will require registration and will be recorded for internal purposes only. If you have any serious security concerns, we recommend you to please log in on a dummy Zoom account. Identity defining data will not be collected by the IDA. Filmmakers with projects at any stage are encouraged to attend.

Event Participants

    Headshot of an adult male with light skin tone, medium length blonde hair, beard wearing black wool cardigan over blue shirt, smiling slightly.

    Alexander Porter

    Alexander Porter is a director, inventor, and educator. He uses digital capture techniques to tell affective stories in immersive formats. Out of this creative practice he has defined a concept of 'volumetric filmmaking' through founding a leading immersive studio, and creating the first and most widely used software and community for volumetric video production. He strives to apply these often obtuse techniques to important or personal topics ranging from environmental justice, to mental health and fine art. Awards include an Emmy award, an Emmy nomination, multiple Webby awards, and other festival awards for immersive work. He was an inaugural member at New Inc and is a current resident at ONX. He teaches his approach to filmmaking at Johns Hopkins and NYU.

    black and white headshot of a woman

    Ana Herruzo

    Ana Herruzo, is an Associate Professor and the director of the MediatedX Research Lab at the Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) center, at Arizona State University, ASU. Specializing in emerging computational media, she synthesizes disciplines to create diverse spatial experiences in public art, live music, film, and architecture. With over 10 years in the industry, she has led large-scale productions and immersive experiences, collaborating with clients like Warner Bros, NASA, Google, and Nike. 

    Her work and research have been awarded, published, and exhibited globally on numerous renowned platforms and venues, such as the J. Paul Getty Museum. Due to her pioneering approach to emerging media technologies, Ana Herruzo has been invited to be the keynote speaker at distinguished events, including The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) Media Technology Summit, USITT’s Digital Media Symposium, and the European Broadcasting Union’s flagship conference.

    Headshot of a mixed race middle-aged male in a mask and sunglasses, on top of a snowy hiking trail with smoke in the background.

    Martin Shelton

    Dr. Martin Shelton is the Principal Researcher at Freedom of the Press Foundation, conducting research on harassment of journalists and digital security education in J-schools. He also leads security editorial and the U.S. J-school digital security curriculum. As a UX researcher he previously worked with Google Chrome, and the Coral Project at the New York Times, where he learned from journalists and at-risk groups about their security concerns. In a former life, he was a disaffected academic and earned his Ph.D. at the University of California at Irvine.

    Headshot of middle-aged male, slavic with long hair, white background

    Nicholas Pilarski

    Nicholas Pilarski is an Associate Professor at ASU and a Senior Global Futures Scientist, focusing on XR and spatial computing within the realm of media. With a deep passion for co-creating content that sheds light on historicized poverty and class dynamics, he believes in making media that genuinely represents communities rather than just portraying them. Notably, he has been recognized as one of the "25 New Faces of Cinema" by Filmmaker Magazine. Pilarski's methodology has been featured at the MIT Co-Creation Studio and is a Co-Director of ASU's RV-CoLab, emphasizing community visioning and security. He has advised the Mayor's Office of the City of New York on media policy for societal betterment and economic mobility and his work has been showcased on platforms such as The New York Times, museums like the MoMA, and various global film festivals for his documentary work.

    A person sits in a director's chair at a festival, holding a microphone.

    Abby Sun

    Abby Sun (she/her) is IDA's Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary magazine. Before joining IDA, Abby was the Curator of the DocYard and co-curated My Sight is Lined with Visions: 1990s Asian American Film & Video with Keisha Knight. As a graduate student researcher in the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Abby edited Immerse. She has bylines in Film Comment, Filmmaker Magazine, Film Quarterly, MUBI Notebook, Sight & Sound, and other publications. Abby has served on festival juries for festivals like Hot Docs, Dokufest, Palm Springs, and CAAMfest, as well as nominating committees for the Gotham Awards and Cinema Eye. Abby has reviewed projects for grants and markets such as IDFA Forum, BGDM, NEA, SFFILM, LEF Foundation, Sundance Catalyst, and spoken on and facilitated panels at Locarno, IFFR, TIFF, NYFF, and other film festivals. Along with Keisha, Abby received a fall 2022 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship. She produced Shared Resources and, with Jordan Lord, received a 2022 American Stories Documentary Fellowship for the upcoming The Voice of Democracy. Her hometown is Columbia, Missouri, US.

    Headshot of a woman with light skin tone, blonde chin-length hair, wearing a black and white floral shirt.

    Sally Volkmann

    Sally Volkmann (she/her) is an artist and documentary filmmaker. She is drawn to intimate, character-driven narratives, non-linear storytelling and the rich texture of archival. Her work reflects her interests in climate solutions, social justice, and the creative process.

    Sally has contributed to the documentary community as a Jury Member for the IDA Awards; Contributing Editor at the Sundance Documentary Edit & Story Lab; Emerging Editor Fellow in the Karen Schmeer Diversity in the Edit Room Program; and served on the Steering Committee of the Alliance of Documentary Editors (ADE). 

    Called to Create: Black Artists of the American South – a collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC – is her latest project in the arts. This five-screen immersive video installation was the first of its kind for the gallery. The projections placed the exhibit pieces in their original contexts and allowed the artists to tell their own stories.

    For more information on current projects visit sallyvolkmann.com