Chris let me know recently about a online documentary that he made titled ‘Thumb Candy’ on SMS text culture in the Philipphines that he put together within a blog. He gives Videodefunct a plug on the More about the project page as being an influence on using tagging and a blog to classify the video content.
I did some research on this korsakow application awhile back and wanted to note the link. There is certain flexibility like creating rule scenes. From the abput page:
They are interactive - the viewer has influence on the film. They are rule-based - the author decides on the rules scenes relate to each other, he does not create a fixed order. They are generative - the order of the scenes is calculated while the viewer looks at a Korsakow-project. Korsakow-projects can only be viewed on a computer. They are delivered via internet-streaming, DVD-Rom or CD-Rom.
Not long after getting up the first prototype version of videodefunct published, the Palabras project appeared on the video vortex mailing list:
Palabras, which means “words” in Spanish, is a set of software tools and interfaces designed to facilitate collective self-representation, and promote social inclusion through participatory media production. Typically, in workshops at local cultural centers at each Palabras site, participants learn to use inexpensive digital video cameras to document their daily lives and a custom-built web application to edit, organize, and share their videos online.
There is a demo video of screenshots to show how it works. The emphasis on tags and participatory content creation is excellent.
The web application was devised to facilitate the discovery of connections between participants’ personal stories, at each site and across cultures, allowing participants to label or “tag” their own video content and create an emergent, social taxonomy - or “folksonomy” (folk+taxonomy).
1000 stories is a project by Florian Thalhofer and Mark Simon.
These are vignettes of people in a type of environmental portraiture style. Florian in a vlog structure publishes candid interviews where he lets the people talk openly, along with short clips that he narrates their personal stories over the top of with subtitles in English and other written stories with supporting images. These posts viewed as a group begin to demonstrate his simple intention to provide his viewpoint on another country through a process of interaction with people with a video camera. The varying approaches used to capture these stories also begin to utilise the multi-format nature of a blog where there is a potential to document a subject in a number of ways using mixed-media.
Starting in New York on October 1, Florian Thalhofer, a new-media artist and documentary filmmaker from Berlin, will travel all over the United States by motorcycle (generously provided by BMW), while U.S. filmmaker Mark Simon will travel throughout Germany by car. During their month-long journeys, each filmmaker will write about his experiences, collect stories, and conduct interviews, all of which will be posted daily at www1000stories.com – their video log.
Their route will be determined by interested folks in the U.S. and in Germany who reply to their “Americans wanted”/ “Germans wanted” ad on the web. Readers are invited to get in touch via www1000stories.com to suggest itineraries and potential interview candidates and to comment on the project.
ipods are great for research - I watched and listened to on the train a video download from the conference Beyond Broadcast 2006 Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. I checked out the talk by Peter Armstrong from OneWorld.net as part of the ‘Panel II: What the emerging participatory web media services are doing’. He focused on video online in his talk referring to the following sources:
Some of his points. With interactivity the podcast mode cuts this off i.e democracynow video. Interactivity for Armstrong is about liveness where the audience has the chance to email, phone-in be actively involved. A key part of his talk was the question for video databases - Make your own work and host it; or tag other work across the Internet (like google video for example); or just aggregate other work. Also, Armstrong believes ‘freedom’ is the significant objective for media producers, where they are not tied to or beholden to media organisations or governments.
A series of exclusive three-minute online documentaries following people whose lives are shaped by the internet.
Each weekday from 1pm you will be able to watch the latest episode from one of the five storylines, getting to know and help our real-life Web Lives characters. The series is also interactive - with certain episodes you’ll be able to vote and help shape the development of a storyline.
This quote is amongst some writing about a recent new media documentary master class on mediamatic. I liked the idea of using a blog as a tool to engage in a two-way conversation as part of the project.
Florian Thalhofer, who is the inventor of the Korsakow system, showed his latest interactive multichannel documentary project about a social housing project in Bremen-Nord. He spent a month in Bremen to film and interview the locals and kept an online diary so that people could react to it immediately. So he used the Internet as well as live images as a basis to create an interactive film.
The BBC Innovation Labs 2007 covers amongst other things some valid questions on online documentary production. Note ‘UGC’ is an acronym for User-Generated Content.
Cross Platform Documentary: The growth of social media services had led to an explosion of new and innovative ways of realising and delivering documentary online. How can films be made, presented, shared, augmented, annotated, located, classified and discovered using these new tools? What impact does this have on the craft of documentary and what models should be explored in the future? How can we discover what constitutes documentary in the digital space? Does it have to be ’snackable’? Can it be modular and episodic? Is it possible to be an auteur and simultaneouslly incorporate UGC content?