Tagged: documentary

The organisation of complexity – Frankham reading

  • poetic approach to documentary characterised by an openness of form that facilitates moments of pause and contemplation
  • poetic work as an experience in itself –> this links back to the wedding photographer ‘experience’ example from last semester
  • conversation becomes the model
  • openness of form to generate critical interaction and enlist the audience as co-creators of meaning
  • relational aesthetic
  • Frankham considers works that utilise fragmented and list-like structures as a way to activate webs of connection between a diversity of material and subjects –> for example Adrian’s bike example
  • Frankham quotes Kate Nash regarding webdocs: the temporal ordering of elements is less important than the comparisons and associations the user is invited to make between the documentaries elements –> this idea links back to my old favourite adage that books belong to their readers, which John Green mentions in a Looking For Alaska forum:

Q. What happened the night Alaska died? Did she kill herself or was it an accident?
A. This is going to be the answer to a lot of the questions y’all ask about Looking for Alaska: I don’t know.
The questions I didn’t answer in the book are questions I either didn’t want to answer or didn’t feel like I should answer.
I know I say this all the time, but I really believe it: Books belong to their readers. And if I were to speculate about something outside of the novel, my voice would inevitably be privileged over the voices of other readers, and I really don’t want that.
We have to live with ambiguity, and that’s a lot of what I was thinking about when I wrote the book. Sometimes, there are questions that NEED answering—did my friend kill herself or was it an accident, for instance—but that never get answered.
I wrote the book because I wanted to explore whether it is possible to reconcile yourself to that ambiguity, to live with it and not let your anger and sadness over the lack of resolution take over your life. Is it possible to live a hopeful life in a world riddled with ambiguity? How can we go on in a world where suffering is distributed so unequally and so capriciously?
So I knew from the moment I started the book that we would never be inside Blue Citrus with Alaska on that night. And I can’t know the answer to your question, because I can’t get inside that car with her, either.

  • A poetic application of associational form creates relationships between elements that are more often felt than thought
  • Mosaic structure – a configuration that indicates the limits of representation –> the tyranny of representation, as discussed in our previous lecture: representation can only say a little bit and in doing that represents the whole, and as such is a tyranny.
  • Fragmentary nature = incompleteness. They are glimpses rather than ideal chronicles. –> But we create regardless? Do we have to find our peace with that?
  • Yet we have an infinite set of elements, so perhaps this wealth of incompleteness is/can be appealing? –> can we embrace fragmentation, provisionality and complexity?
  • Webdocs allow for the possibility of a structure founded on user contributions. An emergent structure, revealed s users work their way through a site and add contributions
  • Montage as a complex system of linking discrete objects: organising complexity, sifting through infinite possibilities and making sense of the patterns that emerge
  • Montage is simultaneously the practice of collecting, creating and understanding
  • Different outcomes: material can be organised for the sake of clarity, to obfuscate, to emphasise, to challenge etc –> we’ve all seen data manipulated to back up a particular argument
  • Vernacular nonfiction: an iterative process of noticing, recording and tagging –> this idea lends well to hashtagging on Instagram, Twitter, etc
  • These associative, poetic approaches to documentary are necessarily selective in the kind of material that is chosen and the way it is used.
  • Potential for new connections to be implied and invented between previously dissociated signs.
  • For Philip Rosen, it is in the synthesizing and sequencing of documents that acts of documentary can occur –> I think this is especially relevant in our K films, as it was only upon putting all of my films together that the highly autobiographical nature of the task became apparent to me. I clearly do have a filming style and different patterns emerged that spoke more about me than about the subjects.
  • How the pared back form of the list can be poetic –> reading this line I was reminded of a clip from Skins in which Cassie lists her likes and dislikes:

Interpreting the gaps – lecture notes

  • Documentary wants to engage with the world and change our understanding of something. It is never just art for art’s sake. Documentary changes how we notice and experience our place in the world.
  • Art can be for itself: eg, ballet for ballet, music for music: not every song has to be a political commentary, etc.
  • Adrian mentioned a bot sending a news story, and more information can be found here.

This morning, two minutes after the earthquake struck, the USGS Earthquake Notification Service sent out the details of the earthquake and its location and strength to anyone listening. At that same moment, Schwencke got an email: a story on the earthquake was ready to be published. Though Schwencke gets the official byline, the Quakebot does the dirty work. Indeed, the biggest delay in the story going live was the time taken for Schwencke to roll out of bed, turn on his computer, double check the Quakebot’s accuracy, and press publish.

  • Designs change. We used to think we’d always need journalists, but do we? Based on the bot, maybe not.
  • Learn by doing –> By trying things out, as Anna said, we learn what we like: we learn what kind of filmmakers we want to be by making films.
  • Media specific criticism matters. TV has been defined by advertising = four ad breaks = a very specific structure.
  • Experience design –> eg the wedding example from last year.

I-DOCS: Who are you, where did you come from and what will you become?

A definition of i-docs comes from the reading Interactive documentary: setting the field by Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi: any project that starts with an intention to document the ‘real’ and that uses digital interactive technology to realize this intention.

I agree that the definition should be purposely left broad, however I’m interested in the fact that authors have put ‘real’ in quotation marks. This begs the question of what is ‘real‘, a whole other philosophical discussion.

Artwork by Naomi Reid – http://www.naomireid.com

Interactivity is seen as a means through which the viewer is positioned within the artefact itself, to play an active role in the negotiation of the ‘reality’ being conveyed through the i-doc… it involves going beyond the act of interpretation to create feedback loops with the digital system itself.”

The article mentions that “different understandings of interactivity have led to different types of digital artefacts“. The importance of different perceptions and perspectives I’ve never really seen discussed, but it is essential as it comprises our eccentric and endless world-view.

Guadenzi proposes four interactive modes: the conversational, the hypertext, the experiential and the participative.

The conversational modepositions the use as if ‘in conversation’ with the computer“, eg ‘factual games’ or ‘docu-games’.

The Hypertext modelinks assets within a closed video archive and gives the user an exploratory role, normally enacted by clicking on pre-existing options.

The Participatory modecounts on the participation of the user to create an open and evolving database“.

The Experiential modebrings users into physical space, and creates an experience that challenges their senses and their enacted perception of the world“.

Aston proposes that “the most interesting work in i-docs often arises when genre is transcended and boundaries are blurred“, which based on my previously mentioned obsession with contrast and conflict I agree with this statement wholeheartedly for any creative work.

The 90-9-1 principle is mentioned in the reading, which suggests “there is a participation inequality on the Internet with only 1% of people creating content, 9% editing or modifying that content, and 90% viewing content without actively contributing“. The simplest way I imagine this rule is through YouTube, with 1 per cent of people making videos, 9 per cent of viewers commenting on videos, and 90 per cent watching without interacting at all. Because of this rule, whenever I see a YouTube video with 10 per cent or more of views translated into ‘likes’, it is pretty clear to me that the audience of this video has enjoyed the content.

The 90-9-1 rule

Reading all these facets regarding i-docs from the symposium I do find myself wondering if this need and want for interactivity is misguided. I’ve never once felt inclined to comment on a YouTube video, tweet a TV show or send a photo to a news broadcaster, and I think the 90-9-1 principle is valid for a reason. When I turn on a Louis Theroux doco, I lean back and watch what has been neatly packaged for me, no input necessary. I think the creation of these different modes is endlessly inspiring for creativity, but I do wonder at the success of these projects in a world where only 9 per cent of us contribute.

In the reading The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists by Craig Hight, ‘digital documentary’ is suggested as offering “the potential to change the nature of documentary practices, aesthetics, forms of political engagement and the wider relationship of documentary culture as a whole to the social-historical world.

Hight permits that the “digital transformation suggests a radical shift in the basis of documentary culture“, with remediation and the appropriation of cultural forms coming into play. Studying Studio Art in high school I was very interested in this idea of re-appropriation, with themes of conflict and contrast being explored, as well as the spaces between all things and what they mean. The following video Simmons & Burke (Repute Re-Appropriation) from Gabriel Sunday on Vimeo demonstrates this reappropriation in art in the form of a mini documentary, so I think it’s… appropriate.

Hight asks the question: “what effect on film-making practice will follow from the inclusion within iMovie of a preset selection for something that is labelled the ‘Ken Burns effect’, which mimics that director’s trademark panning of photographic material as a central device for the construction of historical narrative?” Similarly, why couldn’t someone create a Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino effect in order to create new possibilities such as trailer re-imaginings, and why shouldn’t they? I think it’s imperative for new media to maintain a sense of playfulness, and these options may spawn a million mediocre mashups, but they also provide new avenues to creativity.

“The possibilities that derive from the ability of desktop computer software to merge existing traditions of photography, information design, and the varieties of moving image production into an expanded palette for motion graphics. The result is a distinctive ‘hybrid, intricate, complex and rich visual language’, one that is becoming more and more accessible to amateur media producers.”

DVD has allowed for the rise of specialist distributors, while online distribution has created opportunities for distribution of independent documentary productions, not to mention the proliferation of user-created material such as YouTube. “This kind of online environment provides for bother the flowering of the work of new documentary auteurs, and also their swamping within an ocean of more mediocre offerings.” This makes me question how we find the good things: do we depend on others to share things with us, whether that is our friends on their Facebook walls, advertisements or suggestions from YouTube based on other videos we’ve watched?

Hight also brings up computer games in talking about new digital forms of media, which I previously haven’t considered as a type of documentary, but based on the number of games revolving around real historical events, it does open doors for what interactive documentary is and could be.

 

 

There is a story to be told here

Part of the interactive documentary Explore Shoreditch, this section uses interactivity to allow users to explore an audio interview and tilled video/photo gallery.

This section is fun to use and allows an interactive experience. It aims to explore a possible form that documentary could take on touch-devices.

Interactive documentary experts Mandy Rose, Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi unpack the mysteries of interactive documentaries: what are they, what is exciting about them and how do they relate to the documentary tradition?

Through analysis of a range of interactive projects, all of which place new logics of authorship and storytelling at their core, the session provides participants with a set of conceptual tools to assist in the development of their own work.

Data Driven Stories: Aaron Koblin for the Future of StoryTelling 2012

Come to your Census (interactive media)

Working with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Spinifex have taken data visualization to a unique, eye catching new level through an amazing interactive projection on historic Cadman’s Cottage to promote the release of ABS’ 2011 Census data.