Director of Media Services, Vermont Community Access
Bill Simmon is a filmmaker, writer, and media educator living in northern Vermont. He’s the Director of Media Services at VCAM—a nonprofit media center in Burlington, Vermont—where he trains local citizens in the tools and techniques of digital video production and postproduction. He also teaches film production and editing at Vermont colleges.
Bill has presented on topics including new media, blogging/podcasting/videoblogging, filmmaking and the democratization of media and technology to many groups and conferences, including SXSW Interactive and the national Alliance for Community Media and NAMAC conferences. He has served on the boards of the Vermont International Film Foundation and the ACLU of Vermont.
Bill is also an award-winning director of short narrative and documentary films.
Production skills and techniques matter, but Bill’s primary focus is on storytelling. In any narrative medium—film, photography, radio, theater, comics, prose—a good story is *the* critical component, and the things that make a story “good” are fairly universal—across cultures, time periods, and media. Is there a clear and relatable main character? What does she want? What are the obstacles in her way? What’s at stake if she fails to achieve her goals? Etc. These are essential questions regardless of the story you’re trying to tell and the medium with which you’re telling it.
“To hell with facts! We need stories!” – Ken Kesey