If you are looking for additional material to help you with your group report – then these notes compiled by Adrian Miles may be useful.
Documentary Interactivity
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Tag Archives: documentary designer
Review and review again
Hi everybody,
This blog entry on PhD to Start up? reminds me of what I tried to get across in the doco design studio this semester in terms of bringing design methodologies into the media production process…
With your final k-films – I have introduced you to sketching (keeping the design of something open to multiple ideas and potential external influences)…
in reference to the article below;
# don’t make the k-film from your desk – user test, run it past me, others – keep getting feedback (design is an ongoing conversation) and engagement with the client, the audience the real world…
# and “Don’t be passionate about your idea, be passionate about the problem you are trying to solve”
in this case the prompt you are aiming to address – this is the design problem you have set up for yourselves..
This is where people go back to the habit of fixating on an idea and loosing site of the whole, the context, the brief etc…rather than trying out multiple ideas/sketches to resolve the problem (i.e do a number of interface designs, move the previews around, try different colours in the background etc) chose the one that works best as response to the problem – what you are trying to communicate…get it looking aesthetic then user test…)
# Learn, Build, Validate, Review…and again, and again, and again
so many times I see media students complete their first iteration of a work then call the work finished – what I am seeing is a work at 50% of its potential – follow above and you will improve the work TEN fold (i,e look how far the Drawing Attention work has come in a week!)
Granularity
From a draft of an article that puts forward propositions for documentary designers (Seth Keen, 2016)
9. The documentary designer understands granularity as an affordance where fragments of content are independent, and offering meaning in a self-sufficient way. They are conscious of how the degree of granularity affects the complexity of the system of relations that is created.
In making a documentary, shots are recorded then edited together on a timeline to make a linear work. The completed documentary is one video file made up of numerous shots. In contrast, computers and the network provide the option to present video as separate files, what Manovich in The Language of New Media (2001) describes as “modularity”. For Manovich, modularity is the notion that digital media is made up of independent parts that can be divided into smaller units that can remain separate. Modularity then describes granularity, and granularity, as Miles in “Programmatic Statements for a Facetted Videography”, explains:
Granularity is a term that is appropriated from hypertext and refers to the smallest meaningful unit within a system. In hypertext this would be a node, in a blog it would probably be a post, and in video this is the shot. Obviously what constitutes “smallest” and “meaningful” are sensitive to different contexts, so that in classical hypertext a node could contain a single word, a phrase, or several paragraphs, as could a blog post, and of course a shot could be of extremely brief duration through to the recent examples of 90 minute plus continuous takes. (2008, 223)
The ability to keep video as separate granules represents a significant change for documentary makers in regards to how relations between shots are structured. Now the documentary designer is faced with multiple relations between shots, and determining the scale of granularity, and subsequently the level of complexity of the work is a key decision. As Brooks suggests “by using smaller story granules, there are more ways in which they can fit together” (1996, 327).
References:
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
Miles, Adrian. “Programmatic Statements for a Facetted Videography.” In Video Vortex Reader: Responses to Youtube, edited by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, 223–230. Amsterdam: XS4All, 2008.
Brooks, Kevin M. “Do Story Agents Use Rocking Chairs? The Theory and Implementation of One Model for Computational Narrative.” ACM Press, 1996. 317–328.