Now the Field is Open

Here’s a recent talk I gave in a session on Future Documentary at a BBC Academy event. My focus was on crowd-funding, collaboration, and “connected documentary”.

The Connected Documentary

Documenting Change

Today’s Guardian includes a supplement, Documenting Change, in association with Crossover Labs / The Sheffield DocFest which starts this Wednesday. Collaborative and participatory documentary is featured, with more detail on projects I’ve posted about here in the past - 18 Days in Egypt and One Day on Earth - and mention of new initiatives including “Libya: True Story”, in production from the One Day on Earth stable, which follows “a handful of activists’ struggle to declare independence from the Gaddaffi regime.”  Worth checking out.

Burning Man – a documentary

Filmmaker Mike DePrez is fundraising on Kickstarter for “Captured” a collaborative documentary about Burning Man, the annual festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert which has huge significance in the story of participatory culture. As DePrez explains, “The idea is simple. There are hours of amazing footage of the Burning Man Festival sitting around on shelves, seen only by a few friends of the people that shot it.  By initiating a large web campaign with the backing of the Burning Man organization, I plan to Capture as many of these video gems as I can and create a documentary that ties them all together into an amazing, emotional, visual story.”

With so much video being shot now, we’re going to see more and more of this type of work – documentary making from the ever increasing archive of what Jean Burgess has called “vernacular video”, with filmmakers using the web and social media to find and gather footage. The team behind 18 days in Egypt are doing just this for the Egyptian Revolution.

There’s nothing new of course about the archive documentary – it goes back to the “found footage” work of Soviet film pioneer Esther Shub. She meticulously combed newsreel archives and “remediated” the footage she found to give the people’s perspective on the Bolshevik Revolution in “The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty” and other films. (If you are in NYC, you’ve got a chance to see “The Fall…” at MOMA this Thursday.)

The archive has since become a key resource for TV history and re-contextualisation of archive content has been explored by documentary essayists from Alvarez to Marker and Curtis. What’s particular now is the growth we’re seeing in documentary making from “vernacular” archive resources from within a community of interest. This isn’t a position that ensures critical distance, but, as DePrez’s pitch suggests, what an insider can bring is passion, privileged access, and a depth of knowledge which can deliver riches for cultural and political history.

Regrettably, I’ve never been to Burning Man, so this documentary will probably be my best shot at getting a feel for its legendary atmosphere and participatory ethos. DePrez needs $4,000 by May 15th. He’s got a way to go. I hope he makes it.

18DaysinEgypt

18DaysinEgypt is a project just announced that fuses citizen journalism and documentary, “to tell the story of the Egyptian revolution with the same tools that helped share it with the world in realtime…a crowd-sourced interactive documentary of the events in Egypt from #Jan25 to #Feb11…

The call to action asks those involved to, “Imagine a timeline that includes yours and everyone else’s shared experience as the revolution unfolded…With thousands of hours of footage recorded during this historic event in addition to social media updates, we believe that there is a wonderful story to be told of the pulse of the movement, minute by minute.”

The approach is simple; invite people to tag content that’s already on You Tube and Flickr - to draw it together and make sense of it through location, date, theme. Meanwhile an uploader is in development to draw in tweets and media from other platforms.

While the team behind 18DaysinEgypt are US based, the project has local support – it’s been promoted on the Egyptian platform Beena. To make it work, they’re going to need to reach and involve the many people who made the media, and will no doubt need to demonstrate that they can be entrusted to tell such an important story.  As well as the interactive proposition, a feature documentary is envisaged. It could be fantastic. I look forward to seeing how 18daysinEgypt evolves.