Seth Keen

Grayson’s k-film/online documentary ‘Live Audio-Visual performance in Australia‘.

A book ‘Survival Guide‘ being brought together on making documentaries on the Internet.

This “survival guide” was designed to provide filmmakers, producers and journalists with some tools required to develop their own web-documentaries. How to include interactivity in your projects? How to reach a bigger audience? How to develop a creative funding strategy? How does the web affect storytelling? How to pitch or crowdsource your webdocs? To answer all these questions, this unique book brings together interviews with 30 world-known cross-media experts, producers or authors.

Zeega

Found this HTML5 interactive documentary platform via the Sensate Journal.

Zeega is an open-source HTML5 platform for creating interactive documentaries and inventing new forms of storytelling.

Zeega will make it easy to collaboratively produce, curate and publish participatory multimedia projects online, on mobile devices and in physical spaces.

Documentary YouTube bibliography list from Dr Strangeglove’s online YouTube bibliography compile:

Beattie, Debra. ‘Documentary Expression Online: The Wrong Crowd, A History Documentary for an ‘Electrate’ Audience.’ Studies in Documentary Film 2, no. 1 (2008): 61–78.

Hight, Craig. ‘The Field of Digital Documentary: A Challenge to Documentary Theorists.’ Studies in Documentary Film 2, no. 1 (2008): 3–7.

Juhasz, Alexandra. ‘Documentary on YouTube: The Failure of the Direct Cinema of the Slogan.’ In Thomas Austin, ed. Re-Thinking Documentary. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008.

Landesman, Ohad. ‘In and Out of this World: Digital Video and the Aesthetics of Realism in the New Hybrid Documentary.’ Studies in Documentary Film 2, no. 1 (2008): 33–45.

Sørenssen, Bjørn. ‘Digital Video and Alexandre Astruc’s Caméra-stylo: The New Avant-garde in Documentary Realized?’ Studies in Documentary Film 2, no. 1 (March 2008): 47–59.

Vladica, Florin, and Charles H. Davis. ‘Business Innovation and New Media Practices in Documentary Film Production and Distribution: Conceptual Framework and Review of Evidence.’ Working Paper, Faculty of Communication & Design and Rogers Communications Center, Ryerson University 12 October 2008.

I found this article ‘Linking geographical facts with cartographic artifacts” by Bill Cartwright really useful when I first started thinking about issues around to many talking heads in the Real Vision: Colombia prototype developed with World Vision and the final Bogota:Colombia online version. The age-old documentary problem of there being to many expert opinions (as talking heads) was one aspect that I thought could be developed in a new direction online.

This lead to developing the Locative Painting project to explore how online video could be fused with mapping technologies, to create supporting information alongside video content on the web. This approach ties in with the concept of tagging and using text in the form of titles, tags and categories to accompany video content. I realise across both of these approaches there is a core element of what I am looking at in this research , the ability to explore in a networked infrastructure, the combination of video with other media forms. This reminds me of Miles’ vogs and the way text sound graphics and video can be brought together in varying combinations within the video frame. The difference is I am for the moment exploring this within the frame of the browser.

In a NGO context pinpointing locations and where people live can be problematic due to privacy issues, but in another context like cultural history in the Locative Painting project, geographical positions can provide additional information that both supports and extends video content captured at a specific location.

Thinking this through, in an NGO context what is potentially valuable is statistical type information, the types of background that an expert can talk about in detail provided in a graphic form. This saves the user from the process of listening through the duration of a video and also gets around the issue of granularity with interviews. A process that some people are critical of with video comments in tools like seesmic.

Maps (or more likely information visualisation type mapping – data visualisation) in this instance would not point to individuals but be used to show things like water issues, crime problems, transportation issues, in a way that can be taken in very quickly with graphic visuals. Locative Painting for me is a project that enables me to explore this idea and google maps is a dynamic form of graphic visual that can be altered by the user with differing map views (roads, satellite etc) and variation in scale.

In Cartwright’s article which is situated in cartographic research, he refers to the potential of new media, “rich media” being utilised for what he calls “geographical storytelling”. In setting up this exploration, there is a really useful reference to the idea of what constitutes information and knowledge when thinking about the creation of online systems and content. (p. 332):

Today has been dubbed ‘‘The Age of Access’’, where connectivity drives towards the access of everyone to everyone, everything to everything, and everything to everyone. Knowledge has been promoted as one of the
benefits of new technology and mapping. Cartographic products and systems need to be knowledge based. Dr Samuel Johnson (London 1775 in Boswell 2004) said about knowledge and information that ‘‘Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information.’’

Contemporary cartographic products can provide information that enables expert users to enhance their knowledge of a particular subject. But, in the hands of an inexpert or novice user, such systems may only provide a ‘‘basket’’ of data and information, with no real way for understanding of what is contained within that basket or its relevance. T. S. Eliot has said that knowledge should not be confused with information – there is a need for New Media-enhanced cartographic products to provide the means of acquiring knowledge and not just voluminous amounts of information.

Similarly when online video and more broadly documentary is being used to document an aid program at a specific location there is considerations to be made in regards to how a user needs to be directed in terms of them comprehending the data that has been collected and archived. Cartwright in this article provides storytelling as a framework to address this type of issue. This leads me to another extract from this informative argument, which reviews the way that stories are captured and told in relation to providing a sense of place.

Stories can just provide statements of facts, where no embellishment is required and the user only wants to know ‘‘the facts.’’ These facts can be stand-alone, or supported by ‘‘on-line’’ experts who are able to give expert opinions on the geographical space being explored. It may be a narrative, where a documentary-type video, supported by a comprehensive, and interactive, narrative can ‘‘walk’’ a user through ‘‘unknown territory.’’ Users may construct their own story, or be ‘‘talked’’ through an area, where they construct a story using programme support materials and aural navigation aids. Finally, they may decide that they wish to experience a landscape by investigating a ‘‘literate landscape’’ by being told a story.

These approaches provide ‘food for thought’ for my next field trip and recording video content that relates to historic landscape paintings. The Bogota documentation tapped into some of these approaches with an emphasis on people compared to Locative Painting which has an focuses on location.

References:

Cartwright, W. E., 2005, “Linking geographical facts with cartographic artifacts”, Cybercartography, Taylor, D. R. F. (ed.), Elsevier Science Ltd., pp. 331 – 338.

Boswell, J. (2004) The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D., Adelaide, eBooks@Adelaide
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/b/boswell/james/b74l/index.html

Cartwright, W. E., B. Williams and C. Pettit (2003) ‘‘Realizing the ‘Literate Traveller’ ’’, Spatial Sciences Institute Conference Proceedings 2003, Spatial Sciences Institute, Canberra

Further to this I need to look at other narrative and place-based connections in the article USING/DESIGNING DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES OF
REPRESENTATION IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN KNOWLEDGE PRACTICES.

These are my quick notes from Adrian Miles’ recent lecture for the course Intergrated Media One in the Media department at RMITR University. I have attempted to quote what was said vrebatim and paraphrase other points from my own perspective.

The three references being referred to below:

Lumiere Manifesto
Softvideo
Vernacular Video

Lumiere Manifesto

“What would it be to think about the Internet as a studio?”

This reading in context is related specifically to video blogging practice rather than online video more broadly. There is an understanding that video blogging is seen as a type of documentary practice. Miles has written about this previously and identifies blogging as a documentary practice in that essay.

Miles, Adrian. “Blogging and Documentary.” OzDox. Sydney, November 9th, 2006.

The Lumiere Manifesto, Miles suggests focuses on the camera as a recording device where the camera records what is in front of it. But, they are not stating that this is treated as being a direct recording of reality, instead it is about looking at what is around you and capturing moments that have significance for you personally.

“Simply stop and look around at the world…”

What they promote as a manifesto is easily carried out due to accessibility to hardware and software but also because the treatment of the content is simple and does not require complicated scripting, expensive hardware/software and post-production.

In this manifesto what these writers and makers advocate has a very different approach to video –sharing websites like YouTube, which is dependent on the constant addition of content. In comparison the are wanting content producers within the specific constraints outlined to make short duration videos that have a certain beauty, resonance, poetics amongst the plethora of video content online.

The emphasis is not about narrative in this manifesto, with the focus more on the “subjective and objective” with a connection to the personal.

Softvideo

In this overview of Miles’ own essay he opened with the comment that video should be seen as having the same qualities as a blog. Key characteristics here is granularity, time and links.

Granularity in nutshell, is about video being more porous, like the way you can have access to copy and paste parts (quoting) with text. In the end this is about systems that allow video to be more granular.

Miles writes more about this idea of granularity in a section in a book chapter titled ‘Programmatic Statements for a Facetted Videography’ available in the Video Vortex reader pdf download.

Miles argues that softvideo in a simplified analysis is about video content being highly granular, made up of small bits that remain self-contained, enabling the ability to arrange them into a multitude of configurations. Miles, using the example of a linear edited sequence being made of a number of shots on the timeline, argues that a potential softvideo quality is lost, when all these individual shots are merged together when the final edit is exported into one video file.

The underlying motivation for the softvideo essay is that online video broadly should not just be seen as a delivery platform for old genres where the Internet is merely a distribution environment.

Podcasting was used as an example of this popular type of approach towards online video where nothing is changed in the content in terms of it being re-purposed for the Internet, as a different platform. wih different characteristics. A comment Miles used in a previous lecture “The ipod is treating your content like a book.” Turning this around – what is there beyond the podcasting approach?

“If we take the networks as the starting point for making – what will these objects look like?”

Time as a concept within these broadcast models radio, TV, cinema is transferred directly to the Internet and seen as being fixed and “industrial”. Within a networked environment like a computer and the Internet time does not need to be fixed in this way.

As an example of this argument, Miles has demonstrated the way QuickTime as a multimedia software, that includes video does not rely on the cinema editing software model of frames per second to playback a duration of time. QuickTime can hold a frame and play that frame for whatever set duration is created. This is an approach that responds to how time can be manipulated in a digital environment compared to transferring the film frames constraint in the analogue medium of film into non-linear software like iMovie and Final Cut Pro. This software approach towards video editing ties in with the similar approach taken towards the Internet being used as a distribution platform for TV and radio content.

Links are also an affordance, that need to be utilised in networked video. Granularity is a result of the ability to create multiple links between bits. Remembering as discussed above that film editing is fixed but also made up of whole lot of parts as shots that are edited together. In other words granularity has always been evident even in film editing but never been utilised as the focus remains on the end result, the large singular artefact rather than the parts that make up the edited film.

But, it seems to be an ongoing struggle to get online video to be seen as being anything else but a narrative that emulates previous media like cinema and televison. Software that has invigorated the potential to explore the softvideo affordances like granularity; time and links has come and gone. Ezedia the software we are currently using in this course stopped being updated a few weeks ago. Live Stage Pro has had a similar fate. What do we work in now (Keynote the Mac version of Powerpoint)? Perhaps there are some answers in the shift to open video being explored by Mozilla within the firefox browser? Making video a first class citizen of the Web

Softvideo as a concept in the end as Miles pointed out invigorates an inquiry to look at alternatives outside the status quo with the objective to find out why this may be important.

“What would you make, and why is it worth doing?”

strong>Vernacular Video

With this essay it pays to remember that it comes from the context of video art. Video art is what is being challenged here.

The accessibility of hardware and software has changed. In the past equipment was expensive and only accessed through arts funding. With this in place how does video art make itself special? – Could it be by making itself even more elitist as a “high art practice”? The response is not to continue the high-art elitist approach, which sees video art as being only made available in the white cube.

The difference being argued for is about aesthetics (to use Sherman’s word “elegance”), being used to differentiate the artist from the populist mass online video practice, taking place. Video Art takes itself into the ‘vernacular’ domain, with the challenge being to work out what type of approach makes aesthetics “relevant”.

Perhaps one approach could be focusing on form. The same formalist approaches that made video art distinct as arts practice in the gallery, could be applied within the environments where video is more broadly being articulated and distributed. Formalism in art responds to medium as a way of discerning an arts practice. For example in painting Pollock draws attention to paint as a viscous material. Painting as a practice moves to being more “self-reflexive” with the focus on form rather than content. The focus is on the medium itself as way of separating itself out from other arts practice like sculpture, for example.

What could eventuate if that formalist approach was taken in these new environments?

Kyla sent this reference across for PP. An ABC production Sydney Sidetracks that places archive audiovisual material in relation to map location points in Sydney. A part of the set-up caters for people to refer to the material on their mobiles at the locations.

Sydney Sidetracks presents a selection of documentary recordings about Sydney’s changing street life. We’ve dusted off the archives for you to explore online or take out with you on your mobile next time you visit the city. Use the map page to explore key locations around inner city Sydney. Selected locations feature audio, video and photos about that place – an event in time, a person who once lived there, a building now demolished, a story to be told.

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 about 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.