Introduction of the experts

Alex Jablonski

began his career in New York as a member of the prestigious DGA Training Program. In 2003, he joined 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks as an editor for Spike Lee where he’s been a part of Lee’s last four films, including Inside Man. While at UCLA, Alex has distinguished himself with both his fiction and documentary work screening at numerous festivals nationwide including at the Florida Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Festival, True/False, the Seattle Int’l Film Festival, and the Palm Springs Int’l Shorts Festival. He has also received the Hollywood Foreign Press Award for Film Directing and has twice won the Mary Pickford Award in Documentary Filmmaking.

In 2010, Alex was named to Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” for his documentary series “Sparrow Songs.” He wrote a blog about making of The Sparrow Songs.

Alex is working on a new documentary, Low & Clear.

Richard Koci Hernandez

is a national Emmy award winning video and multimedia producer and worked as a photographer at the San Jose Mercury News for 15 years. His work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and international magazines, including Stern.

In 2008, Richard was awarded a national Emmy award for the New Approaches to Documentary category for his work on the Mercury News video entitled, Uprooted. In 2003, Richard was the recipient of the James K. Batten Knight Ridder Excellence Award. His work for the Mercury News has earned him two Pulitzer Prize nominations. His photography and multimedia work has won numerous awards on the national and regional level, including two Emmy nominations. Richard was named deputy director of photography and multimedia after spearheading the creation of MercuryNewsPhoto.com.

Richard also runs the very popular online journalism blog Multimediashooter.com. He is currently a visiting Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism supported by a Ford Foundation grant to produce digital news sites for San Francisco Bay Area
communities.

Brian Storm

is the founder and executive producer of MediaStorm, a multimedia production studio based in Brooklyn, New York.

MediaStorm publishes diverse narratives that speak to the human condition, offers advanced multimedia training and works with an eclectic group of clients to create multimedia stories and interactive applications. MediaStorm has been honored with numerous accolades including four Webby Awards, three Emmy awards and the first duPont Award for Web-based production.

Prior to re-launching MediaStorm in 2005, Storm spent two years as vice president of News, Multimedia & Assignment Services for Corbis, a digital media agency founded and owned by Bill Gates. Storm led Corbis’ global strategy for the news, sports, entertainment and historical collections and he directed the representation of world-class photographers for assignment work with a focus on creating in-depth multimedia products.

From 1995 to 2002, Storm was the first director of multimedia at MSNBC.com, a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC News, where he was responsible for the audio, photography and video elements of the site. In October of 1998, he created MSNBC’s The Week in Pictures to showcase visual journalism in new media.

Zach Wise

is an award-winning producer for The New York Times. Most recently his work at The New York Times has garnered a Peabody award and an Emmy nomination for “Choosing a President”.

Before coming to the Times, he was the Senior Multimedia Producer at the Las Vegas Sun, where his work won many awards. He contributed to a Pulitzer prize winning piece on construction deaths on the Las Vegas Strip.

His work at the Sun was also recognized at the Webby Awards, National Headliner’s Awards, Online News Association and NPPA Best of Photojournalism. Wise was also a visiting professor for The School of Visual Communication at Ohio University where he was the executive producer of the Soul of Athens multimedia project and taught the classes that produced it. The project went on to win multiple awards from POYi and NPPA’s Best of Photojournalism.