When Sam Gellman booked a trip to North Korea, he knew people would be interested in seeing the photos he brought back. But he had no idea the work would go semi-viral.

Over the past month, Gellman’s North Korea set on Flickr has received more than 220,000 hits from people across the globe wanting to get a glimpse of one of the world’s most secluded nations.

Gellman, who is an experienced travel photographer but makes his living working in financial services in Hong Kong, said all the attention has been instructive.

“I think that the world is really just intrigued with what normal life looks l...

Aman Ali, Bassam Tariq, and filmmaker Musa Syeed discuss a web strategy for their documentary during a hack day at Mozilla's office in San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO — Filmmakers and coders hunkered down for two days of creative collaboration here during a first-of-its-kind hackathon that explored the future of web video — specifically Popcorn.js, Mozilla’s HTML5 media toolkit designed to amp up interactivity.

“We always talk about this idea of how in the future, filmmakers will need a technology partner almost the way they need an editor today,” said Matthew Meschery, the director of digital ini...