Dr Martin Potter

Martin Potter researches and lectures in Screen and Design at Deakin University. In academia, he has worked with James Cook University, Monash University and the Centre for Communication and Social Change at University of Queensland.

Martin has an extensive publication record as a documentary producer including 20+ hours of commissioned broadcast television content in Australia and he founded and ran 2 media companies from startup to sale.

Since 2006 Martin has focussed on transmedia production - exploring how creative work and distribution across a range of media can foster community and drive social change. As creative director and producer of transmedia and media for development projects, he has been extremely successful in resourcing project funding for innovative participatory media, art and documentary projects. This work has been funded by an array of international funders including UN agencies such as UNICEF, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UN-Habitat, the European Union Media Fund, US-AID, HIVOS (Netherlands) as well as Australian Federal Government agencies including Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Reserach Council, Screen Australia and the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and totals more than $10 million (AUD) in competitive grant funding.

As a creative practitioner, Martin has developed and produced the following acclaimed and internationally awarded transmedia projects:
Big Stories, Small Towns
The White Building

as well as the TED prize winning Stereopublic: crowdsourcing the quiet, Island Connect for ChildFund and US-Aid in Sri Lanka, the MediaLab for JCU and Science Stories for Monash University. Currently he is a member of the Alfred Deakin Institute, a fellow of the Deakin MotionLab and an Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage where he supports the storying and visualisation of the research across a range of media settings.

In 2012 he was Asialink Dunlop Fellow and Communication and Ian Potter Trust Fellow. In 2013 he was filmmaker in residence at the Bophana Centre in Cambodia, and finalist in the Communication for Social Change Award and in 2015 his PhD in participatory media won the Flinders University Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Doctoral Thesis Excellence. He is a board member of Engage Media, a non-profit media, technology and cuture organisation that uses video and open technologies to facilitate social and environmental change across the Asia Pacific.

Martin's focus is on non-traditional reserach outputs, however he has published extensively on a range of subjects. Recent articles explore the use of video essay in science based pedagogy, content manipulation on large scale online platforms and the development of local networks wthin his Big Stories, Small Towns transmedia project.