TFT Graduate Student David Harris' "How Do I Say This?" airs on mtvU

When Dr. Phil fails, users can find advice online with a new digital broadband forum.

Giving people advice they don’t want to hear can be hard, or worse, awkward. But now, the Internet is making it easy.

Thanks to “How Do I Say This?”, the brainchild of David Harris, a fourth-year graduate student in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, anxious participants can worry no more about those viciously awkward moments.

“We’re making videos for people who don’t know how to say something to somebody important in their lives,” Harris said. “In the previous films that I’ve done, they’ve always been about people who have something important to communicate and they don’t know how.”

“How Do I Say This?” is a digital broadband forum for users to offer troubles, suggestions and advice which are then transformed into short film clips online.

The Web site www.howdoisaythis.com, developed and maintained by Harris and his team, goes live today on its own page and mtvU.

Harris, a directing student, was inspired to develop the project by the mtvU and Cisco Systems-sponsored competition Digital Incubator, which called for ideas and submissions in new digital media.

The competition, now accepting a second group of applications, awarded 10 student groups from around the country up to $25,000 of funding for further development of their projects and an integral spot on the mtvU broadband lineup across college campuses for the next six months.

Other projects include New York University’s “Snagu,” an ongoing camera phone-based scavenger hunt, and Brown University’s “Tower 8,” a comic book rock opera set in a post-apocalyptic world.

According to Ross Martin, head of programming for mtvU, competitions such as Digital Incubator allow college students to creatively utilize broadband Internet, such as the network available at UCLA.

“(The project is) a way of incubating and empowering pioneering broadband students who are doing incredibly new, experimental and exciting work,” Martin said.

“We were looking for special projects, students who were really passionate about bringing their project to life in the digital space. It’s the Wild West — completely uncharted territory — and students like David Harris are leading the way.”

Harris and his team have been busily working to prepare for today’s launch date.

But the project is also contingent on the online community that will feed “How Do I Say This?” what it has trouble saying in real life.

“This is for everybody, for college students, for your parents, your uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews — and the idea is that everybody can be part of this art that we’re making together,” said co-creator Dagmar Weaver-Madsen, a graduate student in cinematography.

Each short film will be live-action, acted out by puppets (Harris is also a puppeteer) or hired actors, and almost everything in the clips — including the dialogue, props and characters — will be pulled from the ideas of the online community.

Site creator Aaron Koblin, a UCLA alumnus, spearheads the maintenance and programming of the Web site and is responsible for all of the online interaction.

Harris and Weaver-Madsen hope to update the site with a new clip every weekday, but the end of each month will result in a longer film that is a culmination of clips around a central theme.

Daily clips are not necessarily explicitly related, but the end result will offer newfound, thought-provoking advice from a myriad of sources.

“Everyone can see this communal video that they made, and they can feel like they were all a part of this film,” Weaver-Madsen said.

Once the Web site goes live, users everywhere can submit their own advice and problems and watch their suggestions come to life.

“Maybe it’ll be a way of connecting people,” Weaver-Madsen said. “We get to make some content for mtvU that might be funny and entertaining, but it ultimately might actually help people’s lives, and change them.”

One of the first clips of the program will feature collected advice for the struggling actor who should probably just get off the stage.

“The fundamental questioning of the definition of community is really provocative,” Martin said.

“The idea that no one has the answer, but everyone has the answer. You could leverage an online community to solve equations. It’s really powerful.”

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