In Summer 2010, two cultural heritage and new media scholars, Colleen Brogan and Zachary McCune, received a grant from AT&T and the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University to complete an intermedia documentary on an innovative international subject which addressed a critical need in society. 

Brogan and McCune proposed to create a multimedia documentary on Gaelic Games, unique sports only played in Ireland with fierce political and historical ties to the culture and heritage of Ireland. They interviewed athletes, club directors, coaches, and historians and produced new media content through Wordpress, Twitter, Vimeo, Youtube, all of which were pooled into the project's main site, http://www.heritageatplay.org. 

In the age of the Olympics when sports are seen as a universal language traversing all cultural boundaries, the team was interested in a country that fiercely protected and maintained their historic games. But also, McCune and Brogan understood that traditional documentary filmmaking, in the age of the Internet and all it's possibilities, was archaic and limited. The idea of making a documentary about Gaelic Games was novel and innovative, but the dedication to update the old system of documentary filmmaking was the critical need in cultural production which the team aspired to address. McCune was the first to use "intermedia" to describe their project, explaining that the documentary did not just exist in the final 32-minute final film product, but in the entire process and transparency of the project from start to finish and beyond. 

McCune and Brogan are thrilled by the final product and thankful for the support of the cultural institutions who helped to make it possible: they have also recognized that this "intermedia" style could be profitable and useful for many cultural institutions, both in evaluation and documentation of existing programs, and creating new long-distance content or educational programs specifically tailored to make use of multiple web platforms working in tandem.

The team is hopeful that a discussion of multiple-platform integration and intermedia usage in a cultural institution at the Museum and the Web 2011 conference will produce exciting future collaborations and opportunities to continue this type of work in partnership with institutions. 

All of the Heritage at Play project is licensed Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution and the project is entirely dedicated to open source exchange and collaboration.