It’s free but reservations are required.  This is an important detail, and one that could have you miss out of enjoying some of the most exciting elements of the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival and that would be a shame, since it’s free.   

Let’s start with free Fridays (April 17 and 24th). During the 2015 with reservations and a few other "details," to be reviewed at the website - you can see festival films for free and that's made possible to #TFF AT&T sponsorship. 

Please check it out now -  https://filmforallnyc.att.com before the tickets fly away!

In other festival news, check out Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes, created in collaboration with BOMBAY SAPPHIRE® Gin.

Hey, culturally adventurous public  - join the story and the storytellers with  Storyscapes, a juried section at the Festival showcasing groundbreaking exhibits in technology and immersive storytelling.  

Storyscapes is located in the Festival’s new downtown creative hub, Tribeca Film Festival at Spring Studios (50 Varick Street), and is open to the public from Thursday, April 16 – Sunday, April 19, 2015.

Curated by the TFF Programming Team and Ingrid Kopp, Director of Interactive for the Tribeca Film Institute, Storyscapes will present five selections as public, interactive installations at the BOMBAY SAPPHIRE Storyscapes Exhibit and Custom Tonic Bar.  

This year’s projects celebrate a wide range of creative approaches to storytelling, empathy and immersion:

Enter the 6,000-square-foot labyrinth of 'Door Into the Dark’ and discover what it feels like when your senses are lost. Explore powerful virtual reality experiences with 'The Enemy' and ‘The Machine To Be Another'. Uncover how you are tracked online through the personalized storytelling in 'Do Not Track' or establish a digital friendship with ‘Karen', the life coach that wants to get to know you... a little too well. 

Storyscapes, which is free with an RSVP, now open for reservations at tribecafilm.com. 

One project will be awarded The BOMBAY SAPPHIRE®Storyscapes Award, which recognizes groundbreaking approaches in storytelling and technology. Descriptions for each project can be found beneath.

Merging technology and craft mixology, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE gin will debut a new “Custom Tonic Bar” that offers festival attendees the unique opportunity to design their own tonic -- based on their emotional profiles and flavor preferences—determined by an innovative “Tonic Journey”iPad app. Free and open to the public, the interactive “Custom Tonic Bar” will add another unique and immersive layer to this year’s #Storyscapes experience.

For the first time, Bombay’s North American Brand Ambassador Gary Hayward along with Nick Kosevich (founder of leading flavor science house Bittercube) will guide guests on a discovery of their personal taste profiles – adventurous vs tame, type of occasion, etc. 

Translating those profiles into a story of flavor using the exclusive Tonic Journey iPad app, guests will create one-of-a-kind Gin & Tonic formulas authentic to their palates. To conclude, guests will name their tonic, and even design and lay out their own bottle label, all using the app.

Within three weeks, a scaled-up version of their final product will be delivered to their home to create 40-45 of their signature gin and tonics.

STORYSCAPES 2015

The five Storyscapes interactive installations presented at this year’s Festival are listed below. Today, I experienced “The Enemy,” which was created by Karim Ben Khelifa.

During the virtual immersion experience, which felt utterly real, I was being photographed.  When I completed it, I was immediately rushed over to the creator and egged on with “tell him what you think, please…”  Turning, all I could manage was “wow.” 

“That’s what we want him (Karim) to hear, “ the virtual mask operators requested.  

So - that’s what I shared with him.  Karim looked at me and smiled, and taking my hand he said “thank you!!!"

The Enemy

Project Creator: Karim Ben Khelifa

Two combatants from opposite sides of a war observe each other. We are in the middle.

This project, at the crossroads of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and storytelling, takes us on an extraordinary odyssey through some of the most contested conflicts in the world. In the first chapter you are immersed in a virtual reality gallery, moving between an Israeli, and a Palestinian soldier. Creator, Karim Ben Khelifa is a conflict photographer who is pushing his work a step further with this creative investigation of the limits of empathy.

Do Not Track

Project Creator: Brett Gaylor 

To what extent are you being tracked? In this personalized documentary series about privacy and the web economy, creator Brett Gaylor will reveal what the web knows about you— that is if you share your data with him. From mobile phones to social networks, and personalized advertising to big data, this project shows how the modern web is increasingly a space where our movements, speech, and identities are being recorded.

Door Into the Dark

Project Creators: Anagram 

"This is a labyrinth.” Find out what it means to be lost in an age of infinite information.

Using groundbreaking locative technology, this immersive documentary combines captivating storytelling with a visceral physical experience: feel your way into the dark—blindfolded, shoeless, and alone— along a taut length of rope that leads to a vivid aural world of real people who have been profoundly lost. Your encounter with these characters takes you deep into their sensations, risks, and illusions. To find your way into the light you must surrender to the unknown.

Karen

Project Creator: Blast Theory, developed in partnership with National Theatre Wales.

Karen is an app that mixes together gaming, storytelling, and psychological profiling. Karen is a life coach and she’s happy to help you work through a few things in your life. As soon as you launch Karen, she will ask you some questions about your outlook on the world. As she becomes more and more curious, Karen starts to identify things about you that she shouldn’t know. Where exactly is this going to end? 

The Machine To Be Another - Embodied Narratives

Project Creator: BeAnotherLab

BeAnotherLab will be presenting a series of Embodied Narratives that will allow you to inhabit the body and life story of another person, while interacting with artefacts from their life. Imagine the possibility of creating stories that can be felt through your own body as something real. For three years BeAnotherLab has been working with an extended community of researchers, artists, activists, and members of the public to create performance-experiments related to the understanding of the other and of the self.