Big Stories, Small Towns is a collaborative online documentary series, ongoing since 2008. The goal of Big Stories is to work with and within communities to tell their stories. The Big Stories filmmakers live in a small town for between one and three months. There they run digital storytelling workshops with the community, mentor people in filmmaking and work with people of all ages from primary school kids to seniors. The resulting films are intimate, insightful and inspiring portraits of caring community life. We've now visited three towns in South Australia Port Augusta, Murray Bridge and Raukkan. Our fourth town is the first international Big Stories project: Ban Lung in remote northern Cambodia.

At the Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival in March 2011 we launched a brand new version of the Big Stories website, designed to support the project through the next ten towns and beyond. Now with Big Stories 2, we are pioneering the use of HTML5 to present a rich online documentary experience. HTML5 is the next generation web language designed to deliver the kind of rich multimedia content previously developed only with Flash but with the benefit of working well on mobile devices such as the iPad and iPhone.

The Big Stories CMS has been developed as a key part of Big Stories 2 and is the foundation for the future of Big Stories. The CMS enables filmmakers around the world to produce their own Big Stories and publish them online without the intervention of web developers. Big Stories CMS is integrated with Amazon CloudFront, a cost effective content distribution network that serves video at high speed and low cost from high speed data centres in Europe, Asia & North America. This enables us to achieve the complex video requirements of HTML5 and deliver video content at a blazing fast speed to people all over the world.

Our involvement with Big Stories has been an incredible experience. Collaborating on cutting edge technology with great filmmakers and gaining critical acclaim is rewarding. Building a platform that shines a light on caring and courageous individuals in small communities is humbling.

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cms website cloud digital storytelling