When the documentary is not a film: Tales from launching a web-native collaborative project

Guest post by Jigar Mehta, i-Docs 2012 keynote speaker on Thursday 22 March. On January 25th 2012, the one-year anniversary of the start of the Egyptian revolution, we launched 18DaysinEgypt.com. No red carpet, no world premiere. It was a moment that we had spent many months building towards, but the site was not our final product. The launch was the …

Interactive Media: the first 40 years

A guest post by Brian Winston. People might remember Barbara Kopple’s Oscar winning documentary Harlan County, USA. It was about a bitter strike in the Kentucky coal-fields in 1974. Most memorably, the company goons were so out of control they even started shooting at the film crew. But my memory of Harlan County coverage is a little different. It centres on …

18 Days in Egypt – An interview with Jigar Mehta

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/35368376] “For the first time in history, citizens are recording an actual revolution in real time. Throughout the 18 days of the 2011 uprising—in the year since—and now—Egyptians are filming pivotal events on their cell phones, taking pictures, texting, tweeting and facebooking their extraordinary bid for freedom. Now, “18 Days in Egypt”, the collaborative documentary project, aims to capture the …

Call for Political Remix Videos

The call for Political Remix Videos (PVRs) is open until December 25th 2011. EMBED, together with the European Cultural Foundation and the Doc Next Network, call for international PVRs. Works participating will become part of EMBED events. Some of them will be included in the Doc Next Network media collection. Since last year, EMBED has been collaborating with the Doc Next Network …

How can 3D worlds be used in documentaries? A review of One Millionth Tower

Kat Cizek, and her NFB team, have just launched Highrise’s latest baby: One Millionth Tower. This is the fifth experiment in four years of what is now becoming a networked documentary, rather than a simple idoc. When Highrise started at the NFB in 2008 it was described as a “multi-year, multi-media documentary” but I have to admit that the whole concept was not very clear …

Global Lives – collective production, open video

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm-VTHCPpHc&feature=relmfu]   Since 2004, getting on for a thousand filmmaker volunteers have between them recorded, translated and assembled footage following one day in the life of ten world citizens, chosen to reflect key global demographic realities. Decisions in the project are made by a collective. All the content is licensed under Creative Commons and is going to become an open archive. The …

Some Thoughts on Social Change through Story-telling

In addition to their obvious contributions to non-fiction narrative media, the unique characteristics of interactive documentary may find another area of usefulness in cultural and social anthropology, especially as paradigm shifts continue to evolve regarding the power relationships between those being “studied” and those who are doing the “studying.” Beginning in the 1960s, traditional techniques for conducting ethnographic field research …

Storytelling and interactive documentary

When discussing what is new about interactive documentaries, I am genuinely excited by the possibilities for using Web 2.0 to create community hubs through participatory documentary making. The producer/director often assumes the role of a curator and takes responsibility for creating a narrative framework as a catalyst for audience-generated content, leading to the possibility of immediate dialogue with and between …