Walking Cinema

This is Darius Brown, a genealogist and one of the main characters in Walking Cinema's project Free & Equal. He's looking at a historic sketch of the Jan 1, 1863 Emancipation Day celebration turned into a 360-degree augmented reality (AR) experience. The cool thing is that he is sitting in the vicinity of where the actual celebration took place in Port Royal, SC. And his third great-grandfather, Isaiah Brown, was a sergeant in the United States Colored Troops and likely at that celebration.

We’re beta testing Free & Equal, our location-based podcast of Reconstruction history in the Sea Islands! Here one historian is facing the Beaufort River and looking at augmented reality (AR) to see the Civil War battle in which the Union forces overtook Beaufort in 1861. Walking Cinema uses AR to develop the narrative and interact with the environment that you’re in.

Replicas of Freedman’s Bank cards have been aged, framed, and are ready to be installed in the Rhett Gallery in Beaufort, SC! Walking Cinema’s location-based podcasts partner with local businesses to make installations that allow audiences to find artifacts that add to the narrative and allow them to interact with the story and characters. Isaiah and Cuffee Brown are the 3rd and 4th great-grandfathers of the protagonist in our latest location-based podcast, Free & Equal. Can... you read Cuffee Brown’s occupation? Works for Himself. A short sentence with huge meaning, considering Cuffee and his son Isaiah were both born enslaved. If you look under Isaiah’s name it says D, 33. Once obtaining his freedom, Isaiah became part of some of the first southern African American troops to fight for the Union: Company D, 33rd Regiment, United States Colored Infantry.

Some fun things to do this weekend, including Walking Cinema's Museum of the Hidden City! Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit San Francisco also looks like an amazing immersive experience.

Join Michael Epstein and poet Samuel Getachew at SF Urban Film Fest on Sunday for a discussion about how immersive storytelling can help us better understand the histories and future of our cities #sfurbanfilmfest It's free! 2/21 at 2:30 PST. Register here: https://sfurbanfilmfest.com/2021/special_events/hidden-city/

In producing Walking Cinema's immersive audio documentaries, we consider how poetry can function as narration. As you are immersed in a location, poetry can evoke emotion and musicality and rhythm that your typical NPR narration cannot. We're so proud of Samuel Getachew, Oakland's 2019 Youth Poet Laureate and a writer/poet/narrator in Walking Cinema's project Museum of the Hidden City. He was featured in this The New York Times collection of young Black poets. Listen to his heartbreaking poem "justice for - " as well as poems of other talented artists. We also loved Alikah Tony's poem "insecure words." https://www.nytimes.com//2020/10/09/arts/young-black-poets

We're excited to announce that Walking Cinema received a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities! We will continue work on Boston’s Hidden Sacred Spaces, an immersive podcasting project that examines how American spirituality is transforming, as seen through the architecture and design of informal places of worship in airports, malls, prisons, and other hidden spots around the Boston area. In collaboration with Center for Independent Documentary, Brandeis University, and NPR One.

Look at the right side of the photo, can you see a brick building? It's to the right of the oak tree. That is the Brick Baptist Church, on St. Helena Island. It was initially built by slaves for white plantation owners, but in 1861 after the Union forces took control of the island, slaves were freed and they assumed control of the Brick Baptist Church. It became the location of the Penn School, one of the first formal schools for African Americans in the South. This photo de...picts Laura Towne's school sometime betwen 1863-1866. Note the name of the school-- "the Penn School." Towne was from Philadelphia, and the school offered a curriculum modeled on the schools in New England. Beaufort and the Sea Islands became a different kind of southern town because of the mix of influences there-- the Gullah Geechee culture that preserved many aspects of African culture for over 150 years, and white Northern influence of the abolitionists who arrived during the Civil War. Free and Equal is a project with @nehgov @nationalparkservice @uofsc that tells stories of Black freedom in the Sea Islands, SC in the Civil War and Reconstruction era, and considers what those stories mean today.

Present to Past. This is one stop in the Free & Equal tour, a lovely building in Beaufort, SC that is sitting on the sight of injustice. Before the Civil War, masters brought their slaves here to be punished. Swipe right to see the blue building from an alternate angle, and then swipe to see what this spot used to look like. In the old photo, you can see people under a wooden gazebothat was a market. Slaves in Beaufort were allowed to grow and sell some of their own crops.... It’s likely that this arrangement made slaves less likely to escape or revoltmasters in Beaufort were terrified of this. But this small taste of freedom was overshadowed by the jailhouse in the back. If you zoom in, you can faintly see bars over the windows. Free and Equal is a project with National Endowment for the Humanities, National Park Service, and University of South Carolina that tells stories of Black freedom in the Sea Islands, SC from the Civil War and Reconstruction era, and considers what those stories mean today.

Augmented reality helps you experience the layers of history in one place. Over the course of the Civil War era this #beaufortsc building transformed from City Hall to the Office for Freedmen back to City Hall. Swipe right to see it transform to the modern-day building standing in its placethe Carnegie Library, which has served as a library, town hall, museum office space, and currently leased to the Beaufort Chamber of Commerce. The Free and Equal Project, with @nehgov and @nationalparkservice will use audio, GPS, and augmented reality to reveal Civil War and Reconstruction history in Beaufort, SC.