You Tube & the Future of the Archive

There were two noteworthy announcements from You Tube last week. The first was that that they are opening what they are calling a “Creator Space” in London. The idea, according to You Tube’s Sara Mormino quoted in The Telegraph, is to help You Tube stars to “take their channels to the next level”. The offering, run out of You Tube’s Soho offices, will include a TV studio and editing facilities as well as lectures, workshops and face-to-face support for concept and story development. “Our partners from all over Europe, Middle East and Africa will be able to book time in the space to create and collaborate with other creators, learn new techniques, as well as gaining access to state-of-the-art audio visual equipment, to help them generate great new content for their channels.” It’s not clear exactly how this will play out – how access will be managed, what it will cost, and whether this is a one-off or a pilot, but it’s interesting to see You Tube getting involved in the provision of facilities and facilitation.

The same day as this announcement, the You Tube blog provided an update on another initiative. “Do you need a professional opening for your San Francisco vacation video? Perhaps some gorgeous footage of the moon for your science project? How about a squirrel eating a walnut to accompany your hot new dubstep track?” This was Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons (CC) announcing in a guest post, that, only a year since You Tube introduced the option to licence videos through Creative Commons, people have already made 4 million videos available for remix and reuse on the platform. With advice from Creative Commons, You Tube structured their offering to make it very simple to opt for a CC licence, offering only one option; CC BY -  which allows for sharing and reuse (including commercial) with credit. They backed that up with an automated attribution system so that source material would automatically be credited in any video which had been made by remixing CC material.

The approach has paid off, with an estimated forty years worth of footage(!) now available on You Tube under the CC BY license. This amounts to a pretty powerful documentary resource, which will also provide a boost to the culture of commons-based creative practice, by encouraging remixing and reuse, further spreading the practice of content sharing and the adoption of Creative Commons licensing.

You Tube’s isn’t the only open archive around by any means. There is plenty of CC content in Vimeo, who added Creative Commons search to their platform earlier this year. Meanwhile, The Internet Archive is an umbrella for a substantial range of free to use US fiction and non-fiction content including the wonderful Prelinger Collection of “ephemeral” films.  And recent collaborative documentary projects are resulting in a burgeoning of new archives. One Day on Earth have made the content that they have gathered through their two collaborative self-portraits of life on earth in 2010 and 2011 available. The Global Lives project plan to do the same with their 24 hour portraits. (Do please let me know of other open archives.)

This wealth of available content could herald a golden age of archive-based work. The question for would-be makers might be where to begin thinking about the possibilities. On this there is nowhere better to look for inspiration than to the work of the great film essayist Chris Marker, whose death at 91 was announced earlier this week. It’s not that he generally used archive footage himself, but his films feel like he could have done. La Jetee is made (almost) entirely from stills. In Sans Soleil we are asked to imagine the film footage as the archive of a (fictional) cameraman, whose reflections are the subject of the soundtrack. From that premise Marker weaves together disparate footage shot across continents into a meditation on time, place, memory and film itself. Consummate filmmaking.

 

i-Docs and the BBC

[The following post was published today on Open Democracy. It's one of a number of open letters to the incoming BBC Director General, that have been published on their OurBeeb website.]

You’re a journalist; investigating the working conditions of the miners who are fuelling China’s industrial growth. You follow leads, conduct interviews in the polluted, devastated landscape of Shanxi, where workers are living in grim conditions, risking their lives for the production of products that we consume. This is the experience of Journey to the End of Coal, a fine example of a new breed of documentary projects – web-based, interactive – emerging in the last few years. It’s a big contemporary issue, approached in an accessible, vivid way – a classic public service offering.

Immersive, participatory; digital platforms offer new opportunities to inform, educate and entertain. This is the BBC’s remit. Yet the BBC is not producing any of the recent documentary projects that take advantage of the interactive and exploratory potential of the web. Why not?

In the mid 2000s the BBC’s critics grew vocal, charging the Corporation with being too big and dominant on too many platforms. There were accusations that it was skewing the commercial market, and criticism of too much unfocussed investment online. The BBC came back with a new strategy. The BBC’s “unique selling point”, it was argued, were great programmes and news. Journalism would thus continue to have a big presence online. A few major TV brands – Human Planet, Doctor Who – would have significant interactive enhancements. BBC Radio too would have substantial web support.

Early BBC experiments in interaction and participation were abandoned. Interactive commissioners were gradually let go, and technology teams were consolidated in the Future Media & Technology Division, separate from editorial staff. On the positive side, that strategic and organisational refocus enabled the development of iPlayer. On the down side it relegated the emerging platforms to supporting roles and the BBC stopped learning about what their creative potential might be.

Since then, the BBC has pursued its focus on linear programmes. Meanwhile, in other major media organisations, production teams have been formed which draw together “old” media skills (video, storytelling) and “new” (experience design, interactivity), and a number of centres of excellence have been developing in the new arts of factual storytelling. Check out the interactive portfolio of the National Film Board of Canada – award winning projects like Highrise; a multi-year, global, participatory investigation into life in the most common form of housing on earth, the tower block, or Bear 71; an irresistible treatment of the deadly clash between humans and animals in the Banff National Park. Browse Arte TV, France’s interactive output. Explore Prison Valley, which uses a game-like approach to interrogate the US prison system, or Gaza/Sderot, a web doc through which the user is confronted with parallel lives in two villages within a few kilometers on either side of the Palestine/Israel border. These projects use compelling interactive formats to engage with pressing themes and questions.

You might say that the BBC already makes terrific documentary content; so why does this matter? There are a number of answers.  One of the BBC’s six public purposes requires that it take advantage of emerging technologies.  A BBC that doesn’t know how to deploy these new potentials risks becoming redundant to “the people formerly known as the audience” who take interactivity for granted. Looked at from a creative industries perspective, the BBC is the biggest UK commissioner and needs to be producing work in this emerging field – to develop skills and capacity in a sector that could be world-beating, as well as for the value that could offer its audience.

The BBC has been at the forefront of documentary innovation in the era of one-to-many media. With Charles Parker’s Radio Ballads in the 50s, Paul Watson’s The Family in the 70s, Video Diaries in the 90s, innovation delivered new shapes and types of programmes that showed us Britain and the world anew. There’s an opportunity now for a generation of BBC documentary that uses non-linear forms to throw light on the realities and challenges facing us now. Producing this work is part of the crucial project of re-inventing the BBC’s public service role in the participatory culture of the 21^st century. I urge the incoming DG to support that development.

UnionDocs Collaborative

Applications are now open for the UnionDocs Collaborative programme – a unique documentary study scheme at the wonderful UnionDocs in Brooklyn, NYC. I’ve curated a couple of events there and held workshops for the CoLAB. If you can apply, or know anyone who might be interested, I so recommend this opportunity.

“The UnionDocs Collaborative Studio (CoLAB) is a one-year program for a select group of 12 emerging media artists from the US and abroad. Based in one of NYC’s most exciting neighborhoods, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, UnionDocs offers a platform for exploring contemporary approaches to the documentary arts and a process for developing a collaborative project. The program consists of weekly production meetings, seminars, screenings and other public programs, along with regular masterclasses and critiques with visiting artists. Key benefits include dynamic interaction among a network of talented peers, direct exchange with visiting artists and industry experts, a structured environment for research and experimentation, mentoring on the production of original work and regular group critique, exhibition opportunities for the year’s collaborative project.

The CoLAB represents a new and alternative fellowship model, offering residency and visa support for six participants coming from abroad and an equal number of spots for local, non-resident participants. It is designed to be affordable and, although participants are asked to make the UDC their primary creative focus, the schedule does accommodate full-time or freelance work. Rather than applying with a project proposal or rough cut, all participants are selected on the basis of previous work and enter the program at square one, open to discovery and fresh connections. The CoLAB has presenting original work at premiere venues such as MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, the Harvard Film Archive, the Visible Evidence Conference, Camden International Film Festival, Hot Docs, and Direktorenhaus, Berlin, among other venues. We expect a very competitive group of applicants, representing some of the most exciting emerging talents in documentary.”

Apply here. Deadline June 30th.

Monmouthpedia

This week saw the launch of , “the world’s first Wikipedia Town” – Monmouth, Wales.  Wikipedia says the project will,“…cover a whole town, creating articles on interesting and notable places, people, artifacts, flora, fauna and other things in Monmouth in as many languages as possible including Welsh.” On Monday I heard Roger Bamkins, Chair of Wikimedia UK, talking about the project. According to Bamkins, the uptake and enthusiasm has been substantial with some articles already translated into 25 languages and a group of thirty local volunteers devoted to PR alone.  What’s different from Wikipedia to date is that there’s a locative aspect to content access. Over 1,000 plaques with QR codes (including 100 lovely ceramics like the one below) have been put up around the town so that you can access articles through a smartphone. Meanwhile, geotags in articles will mean you can take a virtual tour of the town using the Wikipedia layer in Google Maps, Streetview or augmented reality software including Layar.  There are and have been lots of initiatives in locative and local media but what makes this one powerful is that the Wikipedia platform makes it eminently replicable around the world.

As Editor, New Media at BBC Wales I was involved in an earlier Wales experiment in participatory local web . In the early 2000′s we developed a network of “Where I Live” websites which combined BBC News, Sport and Weather journalism with content by local people.  (There’s a 2002 interview with me about the project here.)  For reasons I’ve explored here before the BBC decided this type of work wasn’t a strategic priority, and de-commissioned the project after a few years, but various things were evident from the experiment.  All sorts of people were keen to create and share content that reflected their locality in the context of a public service project. In an expression of  what Clay Shirky has called cognitive surplus, they provided detailed knowledge, unique points-of-view, and items from personal archives which were of great interest to a local and wider public.  BBC research about Where I Live showed for example that people who didn’t think of themselves as interested in history were interested in accessing historical content about their own area.

As well as the participatory method, two things connect Monmouthpedia to the emerging documentary projects that most interest me. The first is the way that digital has the potential to connect people in and to the material world.  While Monmouthpedia manifests itself on the web, and is associated with a mega social media brand,  the project is about connections and impacts in a locality. The project partners include the County Council, 200 businesses, several universities and nearly every school and community group in the area. Fostering these community connections is very much the Wikimedia Foundation’s agenda.  As they say. “There are a lot of opportunities for community involvement including teaching and learning of I.T skills, local history, natural history, languages and people of different ages working together.” More concretely,  the project has proved the catalyst for a Wales first – a free, town-wide wi-fi network.

Additionally, I’m interested in the power of open rights framework in these participatory processes, making local content accessible and available for new uses by those involved – as knowledge, cultural and economic resource.  In this case the museum have adopted the QR codes for visitor information. Meanwhile it’s hoped that the translated articles might play a role in introducing this historic town to potential tourists.  You can find out more about Monmouthpedia on the Wikimedia Foundation blog or, if you aren’t too far away, get along to tomorrow’s events.  I think we can expect lots more Wikipedia towns before long.

On Crowdfunding

In his seminal 2001 book, The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich proposed that,”new media transforms all culture and cultural theory into an “open source”. This opening up of cultural techniques, conventions, forms and concepts,” he suggested, “is ultimately the most promising cultural effect of computerization”. Opening up is just what we are seeing now in every aspect of documentary – from crowdsourced research, through collaborative production, to interactive forms and immersive audience experiences, and, recently, to live content and data accessible through the web.  Crowdfunding, which has taken off around documentary in the last couple of years, is yet another of those opening up effects, with the public getting involved in financing production. Now two documentaries that have received crowdfunding for completion costs – Battle for Brooklyn and The Loving Story -  are on the Oscars shortlist, and recent weeks saw the news that the major US platform Kickstarter is expected to raise $150m in 2012 – that’s more than the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) – the major US cultural funding agency – invests.

As Manovich also observed, like so many of the phenomena in what we used to call “new” media,  crowdfunding is by no means new. Fundraising, as opposed to charitable giving, has a long history. The Statue of Liberty pedestal was paid for by over a hundred thousands micro-payments (brought about by a major newspaper campaign.) Last year the Welsh blogger Carl Morris posted an example of “crowdfunding” from the 1920s – the collective financing of a poetry collection published in the Welsh diaspora of Liverpool/Lerpwl. As Morris notes – you can read his post via Google Translate -  this example shows various characteristics of the models employed by Kickstarter (US), IndieGoGo (US based, global platform), WeFund (UK),  and the escalating number of crowd-funding platforms now coming into being. The donors get a perk – in this case their credit – with the biggest contributions given top billing. There are also differentiated levels of donation – these credited donors have paid for printing while another group are mentioned as also having pledged, perhaps smaller, support. This was a community supporting the production of a desired cultural work, which is exactly what is happening on crowd-funding platforms today. So the practice isn’t new, but it’s found fertile ground in social media, micro-payment systems and in an environment where despite hard times for some, others have disposable income and want to be involved in producing something worthwhile.

The crowdfunding pioneers of of the digital age were music fans. The breakthrough in documentary was The Age of Stupid, for which Franny Armstrong and associates raised production money through a series of campaigns between 2004 and 2009. (Franny Armstrong was early to see many of the possibilities of the networked documentary, and really worked them on that project. Although a few years old now, there‘s lots of valuable information and insight in her company, Spanner Films’ detailed, informative crowdfunding guide.)

Late last year I took part in Convergence Catalyst, a Sheffield Doc Fest/Crossover skills development event held in Swansea. I was on a panel about crowdfunding with Slava Rubin, co-founder of the IndieGoGo platform, and Charlie Phillips from Sheffield Doc/Fest. Afterwards I interviewed Rubin to find out more IndieGoGo and what makes for a successful crowdfunding campaign. According to Rubin, there are three things that make a crowdfunding campaign work – “Having a good pitch. Being proactive. Finding an audience that cares.” As Rubin emphasises, there’s no magic trick, and, let’s be clear, many projects don’t get anywhere. Successful projects come about from concerted, time-consuming promotion to the potential community of interest. Rubin emphasises the need to start with your own networks. If you succeed there then funding from strangers may well follow. If a campaign looks strong according to IndieGoGo’s multiple indices of dynamism it is deemed to have the “GoGofactor” and then gets the promotional weight of the platform behind it, a decisive factor in success.

Yet for a documentary, crowdfunding can be about much more than fundraising. It’s a community-building process which has a number of potential benefits. The engagement involved in public fund-raising also of course involves a type of user-testing of the idea. It might lead to valuable research input and will certainly produce feedback, meanwhile building an audience and a group of powerful advocates / promoters. That all these things are going on is very clear in the commentary on the pitch page of successful campaigns.

A look at some recent documentary successes show that the crowd by no means equates to the lowest common denominator when it comes to themes that attract contributions or the quality of the work. As I write, the featured documentary on IndieGoGo is Beauty in Truth, a film about Alice Walker by award-winning director, Pratibha Parmar, which raised $55K.  Also successful, The Linor Documentary, a campaigning film that follows Miss World winner and rape victim Linor Abargil as she confronts her own experience and the issue of sexual violence. Projects which look like they may well hit their targets include a film about Chinese-American adoptees, Somewhere Between, a film about Thorium; The Future of Energy, which the maker explains isn’t well known because it’s “so darned complicated”, Out on a Limb,  about advances in prosthetics, and a film about the philosopher Simone Weil – exhibition costs sought. Important themes, neglected subjects, complex subjects, serious-minded work – not a Big Fat Gypsy Wedding in sight!

The questions crowdfunding raise for me are around editorial attitude and independence. Fracknation is a documentary response to Josh Fox’s Gasland, the film which brought fracking to public attention in 2010. Fracknation will explicitly attack that film, challenging its evidence, and will present an alternative view, putting the case for fracking, defending those whose livelihoods depend on it. It’s an investigative documentary on a contentious, political subject.  As I write the fundraising campaign is $30K beyond its 150,000$ target budget with 17 days to go. But what if funders in this case are also those with a vested interest? Might that compromise the integrity of the story? For 1$ contributors can get the perk of an Executive Producer credit. In professional terms an Executive Producer is not just about delivering finance but can also act as an arbiter of standards – portrayal, ethical, aesthetic. What happens to those issues, I wonder, in this scenario? What are the implications of offering credits that usually come with responsibilities?

In fact the team behind this project are experienced documentary makers with track records in investigative broadcast media, and given how publicly they are laying their reputations on the line, I expect that their approach will be solid. But these questions arise when we de-couple documentary from its historic frameworks, in this case frameworks of commissioning, and the compliance requirements that come with it. Concerns around legitimacy and reliability aren’t unique to new forms of documentary of course. These are typical of tensions that are arising across the digital sphere as old business models give way and lines between professionals and amateurs blur. It’s going to take time for snags in this new environment to surface and even longer for new protocols to be developed.

So it’s still early days for documentary crowdfunding. We can’t yet see all that this new form of funding will mean for the genre. It’s clearly a model that’s going to thrive in the US context, because of the size and relative wealth of the potential investor population. Crowdfunding in poorer regions and smaller linguistic communities is going to be tougher. It’s exciting though to see new revenue flowing into documentary, and the wealth of projects looking for support. And of course this is a perfect approach for collaborative projects.

The field is growing all the time. Last year saw the launch Mobcaster, a platform for funding and showing independent television, which has already seen some successful factual projects. The Canadian HotDocs Festival have started their own crowdfunding platform, Ignite, dedicated to “Canadian documentary works-in-progress”. Meanwhile, some filmmakers are going it alone to avoid the percentages that the commercial platforms take. Sheffield Doc/Fest were early to highlight crowdfunding, and have partnered with IndieGoGo to co-promote selected projects. Charlie Phillips, Director of Sheffield Doc/Fest MeetMarket told me, “… the decline of public funding has been accompanied by an understandable unwillingness to accept corporate or 3rd sector sponsorship – on both the public and private side the compromises it entails are countered by the inherently democratic nature of getting crowd support. But it’s not just the funding that excites me, it’s the concurrent movement- and community-building arising from crowd support, that can potentially lead to a more collaborative and democratic distribution and exhibition system as well.”

If you are thinking of trying it, do check out the interview with Rubin which you can read in full here.

The Connected Documentary

Are you happy?

Today we launched The Are you happy? Project website. The project invites people to provide their answers to the question which provoked such a memorable response when it was posed by Marceline Loridan and Nadine Ballot on behalf of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin on the streets of Paris fifty years ago, in the seminal 1960 documentary “Chronicle of a Summer“. You can see clips from that classic sequence, and Rouch talking about the film (in an interview I did with him in 1991) on the website. (As I explained in an earlier post, Jean Rouch is an inspiration for the project in another way too – though at the epicentre of auteur culture he saw his film-making practice as a collaborative venture, a “shared anthropology” as he called it.)

Jean Rouch, Marceline Loridan and Edgar Morin plan the street interviews in a scene from Chronicle of a Summer.

“Chronicle of a Summer” was one of the earliest uses of 16millimetre sync sound filming so these vox pops were some of the first that were filmed and they have an engaging quality and an authenticity that still feels fresh today.  I want to find out whether it’s possible, after all this time and in a very different media context, to use the same question as the starting point for a meaningful exploration of contemporary feeling and values.

Happiness crops up in the news from time to time, but I didn’t anticipate, when I thought of making, “are you happy?” the starting point for a collaborative documentary, that it would be a topical question as it has become with David Cameron’s announcement of plans to include happiness in measures of national well-being. This isn’t a novel idea. The former King of Bhutan introduced a concept of “Gross National Happiness” back in 1972, and the idea of measuring well-being beyond the economic has been gathering steam in Western democracies in recent years.  But the UK initiative has proved controversial. Given the timing it’s being seen by many as an attempt to deflect from the harsh realities of Coalition cuts. I wonder if this debate will play into peoples’ responses to this project, though I don’t want contributions to be confined to the UK. Abdulmohsen Alajeel made a promo for the project from interviews he did in the Gulf States.

We’ll be gathering contributions via Vimeo as well as making recordings in person. If you want to keep in touch with developments please join the Facebook group or follow us on Twitter. If you have suggestions or if you’d like to get involved please do get in touch. Meanwhile, what comes to mind when I ask, are you happy? Do tell, or make a recording with someone you think we should hear from…

Where Documentary meets Web 3.0

I’m working on a proposal for a project that experiments with the Semantic Web and just came across Kate Ray‘s informative, witty documentary on the subject. It’s an engaging overview featuring key players, and reveals the philosophical disputes around this emerging generation of web technology. It’s makes nice use of music too –  I particularly love the klezmer in the intro. It also makes me think that I’d probably better update this blog’s tagline.Watch and enjoy!

Sunflower Seeds

There’s lots of coverage today of the new installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The Chinese artist Ai WeiWei has covered the hall floor with 10 million porcelain sunflower seeds that have been hand made and individually painted, work which took 1,600 artisans over two and a half years.

According to the Guardian review, “Ai also likened the artwork to Twitter – a vast sea of ideas and communication contributed by individual people. Ai now uses Twitter regularly after the blogs he kept were in turn censored by the Chinese authorities. One of his online projects has been to amass the names of those killed in the Sichuan earthquakes of 2008.”

WeiWei is keen to communicate around the work and is inviting visitors to post their questions or answer some of his by video at the exhibition or via Twitter. The piece does look extraordinary. I’m planning to get to it soon.

Postcript: As I tagged this post ‘participatory’  I was struck by how eloquently the work itself, and Ai Weiwei’s emphasis on open discussion around it, expresses the absence of free participation in China.

Arcade Fire

Since my recent post about The Johnny Cash Project, its director Chris Milk has followed that up with the launch this week of another very interesting participatory piece, a collaboration with Google Creative Labs and Aaron Koblin in his role as Technology Lead there.

The Wilderness Downtown offers an interactive experience of the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait”. Invited to select the address of your childhood home you can (providing you live in territories covered by Street View – see below) become the subject of your own music video as images of your street, house, and area are effectively woven into a multi-screen interactive work. It’s an evocative, slightly uncanny experience as a live action and then CGI figure appears to run through the hyper-familiar but strange (not-quite-as- remembered) landscape of one’s own childhood.

The piece is innovative on a number of fronts. It takes advantage of Google Maps and Street View as archives for personalised storytelling – an inspired idea. It turns the thoughts provoked by a ‘lean back’ viewing experience into a creative act; at a certain point in the song you’re asked to write a postcard to your youthful self. It also showcases the interactive potential of HTML5 – find out more about how it’s done on the Chrome Experiments blog.

Music video producers have been slow to pick up on the potential of participation but The Johnny Cash Project and The Wilderness Downtown show just what a powerful space this can be.

Google Street View Coverage