2011 - Freerange Future

2011

FEATURED WORK

Big Stories, Small Towns

Starting in 2008, Freerange was the digital partner of Big Stories, Small Towns — a landmark digital storytelling project that, across almost a decade, perfected a model of creative residencies in regional communities across Australia and into Asia.

The filmmaking team of Anna Grieve, Martin Potter, Jeni Lee, Sieh Mchawala and others would live for weeks or months in a community and collaborate with local people of all ages, supporting them to create films, animations, photo essays and more. Nick was lucky enough to participate in some of these residencies and workshops.

The Big Stories Site

We originally built a site for Big Stories in 2008, then rebuilt it in 2011 using our Gluttonberg CMS, a custom video pipeline and a dynamic JavaScript-based interface. The site is still running fifteen years later, which is quite remarkable.

It was an incredible privilege to be part of Big Stories, Small Towns — a project that gave a voice to regional communities and received numerous awards all over the world. Including a big one.

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SxSW

2012 Interactive Awards

In March 2012, Nick and Sieh travelled to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, to represent Big Stories at the SxSW Interactive Awards.

If you’ve never been, SxSW Interactive in its heyday was something else. Tens of thousands of people from every corner of the tech and creative world, descending on a mid-sized Texas city for a week of talks, demos, parties, taco trucks and very little sleep. The convention centre humming, every bar on 6th Street taken over by some startup or platform, and the whole city running on breakfast tacos and free coffee. It was chaotic, overstimulating, and genuinely electric — the kind of event where you’d bump into someone at a food cart and end up in a two-hour conversation about the future of the internet.

But the best part of that trip wasn’t the conference. It was getting away from the hustle and seeing the Austin that locals actually live in — slower, weirder, and genuinely warm — with some good friends over there.

And yes… Big Stories did win the award for Best Community Interactive Project.

Digital in 2011

Snapchat appeared and confused everyone over 25. Google launched Google+ and began the long process of pretending it hadn’t.

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