12 Tweets from 2012 – expanded

1. “Bear 71 – haunting, terrific interactive doc”

The new year saw the launch of one of the best interactive documentaries I’ve experienced  - a bear’s memoir of life and death in Canada’s Banff National Park! If you haven’t seen Bear 71 give it twenty minutes of your time today. You’ll be rewarded with Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’ engrossing, sad, smart meditation on the tension that results “where the wild world ends and the wired world begins.”  It’s a perfect marriage of platform, theme, and realisation. (Review January.)

2. “ i-Docs – a stellar lineup, a five minutes cycle ride from home.”

The second i-Docs Symposium took place in March. Brett Gaylor, Martha Ladly, Brian Winston, Sharon Daniel, Max Whitby were just some of the names in a terrific programme convened by Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi in my new home town of Bristol. I have to declare an interest, as the event is hosted by the Digital Cultures Research Centre where I’m a fellow, and I’m a contributing editor to the i-Docs website. But the Symposium was a major event in this field, and 2012 has seen i-Docs grow into a substantial international community and thriving website which I’m proud to be part of. For a balanced view, read Brian Winston’s review of the symposium here - it’s the account of a sceptic about interactivity. Follow i-Docs on Twitter or subscribe to the site for all the latest news and upcoming events.

3. “Watching this Mad (Wo)Men remix, again.”

This terrific piece builds a collective voice of defiance from private incidents of gender conflict in Mad Men. Enjoy!

4. “The power of dialogue – Question Bridge”

At Sheffield Doc Fest in June I saw the Question Bridge installation. Question Bridge is a transmedia work about black American life and identity comprised of questions suggested and answered by participating black men. The installation works by positioning the visitor among the participants’ talking heads. Addressed as if a member of the community, you are called on to imagine and hear from many varied perspectives how the world looks through African American mens’ eyes. It’s profound and affecting. I had heard about this project back in March when producer Chris Johnson presented it at the inaugural event of MIT’s Open Doc Lab. I was knocked out by the powerful simplicity of the idea, which you can see in the web version. Do catch the installation if it’s in your area.

5. “Sue Clayton’s remarkable Hamedullah – The Road Home”

In June Hamedullah – The Road Home screened at the very special Cube cinema in Bristol. Sue Clayton was there to introduce the film, which tells the story of Hamedullah Hassany, a young asylum seeker returned ‘home’ to Kabul by the British immigration system at 18, after growing up in the UK. It’s a remarkable piece of work made from video fragments which Hamedullah Hassany shot on a camera smuggled to him by Clayton when he was in detention prior to being deported.  The film starts with the statement that while the UK government deports young people it has never tracked what has happened to one of them on their return to supposedly safe environments. Through the bits and pieces of video that Hassany has managed to shoot and send back to Clayton the film tracks his return and the life that follows, and shows the physical and psychological hardship that he faces. It is understated but harrowing and constitutes an indictment of UK immigration law.

The project is also notable because of the impact it is making beyond simply raising awareness. A Facebook group has provided a hub for promoting the film and it has been shown widely this year. It is being used by barristers as defence evidence in deportation hearings. Building on the community that has grown around the film Clayton convened a meeting in September which initiated a collaborative research project to gather evidence towards a change in the law. Documentary has always had the potential to be a catalyst and organising platform. This side of documentary is finding fertile ground in the context of the affordances of networked culture.

6. “Have you tried CC’s new license chooser yet?”

The Creative Commons License Chooser launched in July makes it much easier to choose an open rights framework. Global Lives is an emergent documentary project which is showing what open rights can mean – as participants take advantage of content locally and the video recordings turn out to have unforeseen uses. Director of the Global Lives project David Evan Harris recently talked to Creative Commons about what CC means on that project. (There’s much more about Global Lives in this 2011 Collabdocs interview with Harris.)

7. “Summer reading – Artificial Hells “

This impressive book informed and inspired me over the Summer. Claire Bishop maps the aesthetically and politically divergent currents that have informed nearly a century of participatory art. She critiques the resulting work and the assumption that participation makes for “the ultimate political art”. Artificial Hells is a great read, a deep history, and challenges us to ask tough questions about collaborative and participatory work – the central one being; is it any good?

8. “RIP George Stoney”

July saw the death of the much loved and respected American documentarian and pioneer of access media, George Stoney, at the age of 96. (NY Times Obituary.) In 1968, while he was director of the National Film Board of Canada’s Challenge for Change programme his team handed cameras over to Native Americans who were protesting customs charges on a bridge across their land. The film that resulted, “You are on Indian Land” and the Challenge for Change output that followed inspired the development of access media in the US and beyond. Stoney went on to play a major role in a number of US access and alternative media projects as well as making films and teaching at NYU until the year before he died. While Stoney has gone it seems to me that his vision for documentary has found its historical moment. In the mid 2000′s the NFB set out to reinvent the Challenge for Change project in the digital age – an undertaking which led directly to the appointment of Kat Cizek as “Filmmaker in Residence” and to the multi award-winning Highrise project. Stoney was interested in documentary for community-building, a theme which is coming to the fore in a generation of purposeful participatory projects which are emerging now including Question Bridge (above) and Hollow – now in production, launching in Spring 2013. Stoney is much missed but his legacy is alive and kicking.

9. “New DG Tony Hall should follow Entwistles line on digital” 

George Entwistle may have resigned as BBC Director General after only 54 days, but his successor Tony Hall should heed his call for genuinely new forms of digital content . The fact that the BBC’s iplayer and the bbc.co.uk  service made it into the top ten brands of 2012, despite the damage that the BBC’s reputation had suffered this Autumn, underlines what the BBC has to gain by getting its digital offering right. Between 1996 and 2001 Tony Hall oversaw the development of the BBC news online proposition. Let’s hope he builds on that pioneering work now, giving BBC commissioners and producers a remit to make content that’s not just on digital platforms but native to them. (Open letter to the New DG – June)

10. “On the road to new forms of storytelling…we want to be in the driver’s seat. Ingrid Kopp – Looking under the Hood “ 

Ingrid Kopp, TFI New Media fund commissioner presented at Power to the Pixel Cross Media Forum in London in October. Kopp called for documentary makers to embrace the maker culture of the web. Her talk ranged across code, inter-disciplinary collaboration, participation, storytelling as software and hardware – urging documentarians “to open up their digital palette as creators” and access what Steven Johnson has called the “adjacent possible”.

11. “Looking forward to Sunday’s Interactive Documentary Conference at IDFA”

I attended and reviewed the IDFA conference in November. Seventeen projects were nominated for the 2012 IDFA DocLab Award and they are all worth checking out. I particularly like the oblique portrait of Chile being created by Christopher Murray, Antonio Luco and associates in MAFI – Filmic map of a Country – an ongoing collaborative project. No commentary. No interviews. No cuts. Carefully framed angles on the day-to-day life of a nation.

12. ” Zeega is so exciting.”

I’ve written about the terrific Mapping Main Street project and interviewed producers Kara Oehler and Jesse Shapins here (June 2010).  Unfortunately, Oehler ended up remortgaging her flat to pay for that project. The team felt that this was not a viable production model for interactive documentary. With creative technologist James Burns, Oehler and Shapins set about creating a tool that could enable anyone to make interactive work without investing their life savings. That ambition has led to Zeega, which launched this year. It’s an open source tool for web publishing and interactive storytelling which enables the simple, elegant inter-connection of stills, moving images, maps and more. Zeega takes its place among a gathering roster of interactive production tools that have emerged in the last two years. They include Klynt, Popcorn Maker, 3WDOC, Storyplanet and Galahad. ( 3WDoc, Klynt and Popcorn Maker were compared by Maria Yanez and Eva Dominguez. for the i-Docs Symposium back in the Spring. ) One thing that distinguishes Zeega is the sensibility of the team. Named after Soviet film artist Dziga Vertov, it is shaped by an experimental documentary aesthetic which is expressed in its the visual style as well as in the projects that have been made within Zeega to date. But the Zeega team see their mission as not just facilitating interactive making, but in re-making the web itself as a connected, rich media environment. Will Zeega become the Blogger of the teens? We’ll have to wait and see. Meanwhile check Zeega out. And there’s lots more about the development and mission of the project in “The Zeega Revolution” -  a Q & A between Jesse Shapins and Sandra Gaudenzi on i-Docs.

i-Docs 2012

Tickets are now available for i-Docs 2012. Following 2011′s successful inaugural event i-Docs 2012 has been expanded to two full days and will take place here at Bristol’s Watershed Media Centre on March 22nd and 23rd. Convened by Judith Aston and Sandra Gaudenzi on behalf of the Digital Cultures Research Centre (the home of my research), the symposium brings together producers, scholars and students of interactive documentary to grapple with the diverse practices and theorisation of this fast developing field.

There’s a very strong lineup this year including keynotes speakers reflecting cutting-edge and award winning work – Jigar Mehta (i8 Days in Egypt), Brett Gaylor (rip! A Remix Manifesto, Popcorn Maker) , Submarine Channel (Collapsus), Katerina Cizek (Highrise), who’ll be presenting via Skype, as well as the esteemed documentary scholar Brian Winston, from whom we can expect a challenging intervention. Panels will look at themes including Layered Reality, Participation and Activism. An important  feature of this year’s symposium will be sessions examining some of the key emerging tools for authoring and creating web documentary – Popcorn maker, 3WDoc and Klynt. It’s a rich programme with concurrent sessions running much of the time which has been carefully structured to provide the space for in-depth discussion of work and ideas.

The full programme is now online where you can also buy tickets. I hope to see you there.

Meanwhile do explore the  i-Docs website whicb is fast becoming a rich resource (though I should declare an interest as a contributing editor.)  ”You’ll find academic and blog references, an archive of existing i-docs , a forum open to discussions about all the possible forms of i-docs you can think of. A team of experts have joined forces to open the discussion on what is interesting and/or new in this emergent field, and on the ethical, aesthetic, political and financial consequences of the i-doc genre. We welcome your participation! Feel free to mail your papers and ideas to the co-editors of our discussion section, or simply comment on their posts.”

The world’s first open source 3D documentary and more!

Mozilla’s mission, as Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, explained at the start of proceedings at the Mozilla Festival yesterday, is about building choice, freedoms and technologies into the web to make it a place where we can be makers, not just users. Mozilla are putting their supporters money where their mouth is, building these values in practice through open-source projects which began with the Firefox browser. The ethos of the Mozilla Festival is “less yack, more hack”, and the running order is made up of learning labs and workshops where projects are developed in a sprint. This years theme is “Media, Freedom and the Web”; the question, “what if media can be as open as hypertext has been?” and the open plan spaces of Ravensbourne College‘s RIBA award winning campus in North Greenwich, were abuzz yesterday (and will be today) with people working on ambitious, important projects including The Data Journalism Handbook - which will give aspiring journalists a toolkit for accessing and making sense of data available through the web. See the Festival site for the agenda and some of the coverage.

So there was a lot to be excited about at the Festival. Even so, the release of Mozilla’s Popcorn 1.0 – the HTML5 tool that “makes video work like the web” was the big story yesterday.  If you are a regular reader of this blog you’ll know about Popcorn – a tool for linking video to other web content – which has been in pre-release over the last year. (CollabDocs posts include Open Video Conference 2010). If not you can find out more in this backgrounder on Popcorn from Matt at Mozilla (thanks for the post title.)

Kat Cizek’s One Millionth Tower, a ground-breaking documentary spin-off from the Highrise project, is made with open-source tools – Popcorn and Web GL  (which enables the interactive generation of 3D graphics). It premiered at the Festival last night. (Unfortunately I had to leave early but experienced the hoopla via my Twitter feed on the train home. ) You can see it in linear form, more importantly explore it (you’ll need Chrome or Firefox) now on Wired.com. This is surely the first time the magazine has led on a documentary story, which underlines the significance of this moment for the moving image.

As Wired puts it; One Millionth Tower, ”is not just a static story recorded on film and then edited together for audiences. It exists in a 3-D setting made possible by a tool called three.js, which lets viewers walk around the high-rise neighborhood. Moving through allows viewers to see the current state of urban decay, then activate elements to show ways the residents would change their world, like an animation showing where a new playground or garden would go.

The interactive movie is chock-full of photos from Flickr, street-views from Google Maps and changing environments fueled by real-time weather data from Yahoo. Everything is triggered by Popcorn.js, which acts like a conductor signalling which instruments play at what times.”

Brett Gaylor, filmmaker and Mozilla lead on the Popcorn project has said, “This is the moment where web video grows up as an artistic medium. In the same way that earlier film pioneers experimented with new techniques like montage, we’re now seeing ‘web-made movies’ that pull in real time information from the web.”

One Millionth Tower isn’t a totally slick product. It’s not an end in itself, but it involves significant innovation which has come about through a happy confluence of open-source politics, some very talented people, and imaginative investment by Mozilla and the National Film Board of Canada. Cizek explained how the approach emerged in an interview with CollabDocs a few months ago. There’s lots more background on One Millionth Tower on Wired. Check out the Open Technology video for an explanation of the open-source technologies involved in the piece. But let’s not forget the theme of urban life and community which is the subject of One Millionth Tower, and the inspiring collaborative approach to documentary production which the project reflects. This is Cizek and her team reinventing documentary for social change as a 21st century practice. (Read more about how Cizek was hired by the National Film Board of Canada to rework the seminal Challenge for Change project here.)

As Cizek says in the Open Technology video, “The philosophy behind open-source technology is that the technology is all of ours to own. That’s exactly the philosophy behind all the projects of Highrise. One Millionth Tower is about us owning our urban space and having the power and the vision to transform it.”

The Popcorn 1.0 release includes the Popcorn Maker, an easy to use authoring tool. Try it, you’ll be linking your video to other web content in moments. We have been used to video sitting on the web within a player, aloof from the linked and networked character of its environment. Popcorn changes that. Seeing it in action on your own video content is the best way of getting a feel for why this matters for documentary.

The Connected Documentary

i-Docs 2012

Following the success of i-Docs 2011, dates have now been set for i-Docs 2012. The Symposium is again taking place in Bristol, UK, hosted by the Digital Cultures Research Centre (where I’m based.) It’s a full two days this time – on the 22nd and 23rd of March.

A brilliant line-up of keynote speakers are already in place. Katerina Cizek (Highrise), Brett Gaylor ( popcorn.js, rip! A Remix Manifesto), and Jigar Mehta (18 days in Egypt) - reflect some of the most exciting interactive documentary work and developments going on right now.

As regular readers of this Blog will know (Posts – Jan’11, Nov’10 , Sept ’10), Brett Gaylor leads Mozilla’s Web Made Movies team where they have been pushing the development of “Semantic Documentary” by building open source authoring tools for their popcorn.js library that facilitate the integration of video and web content within HTML5. The latest version – the Popcorn Maker – should be unveiled at next month’s Mozilla Festival in London. Cizek and Mehta are both doing ground-breaking work with popcorn.js. (Find out more about Cizek’s The Millionth Tower and see the trailer here. Check out the 18Days popcorn prototype here.) So, among other things, i-Docs 2012 will be a great opportunity to get to grips with this game-changing phenomenon for documentary. (For more about what “Semantic Documentary” is all about take a look at this report in Wired about a popcorn.js workshop that took place last month in San Francisco.)

The Call for Participation at i-Docs is now live. You’ll find it here. Convenors Sandra Gaudenzi and Judith Aston are seeking “papers, presentations, workshops, panels or ANY alternative forms of debate!”  As Sandra puts it on her Interactive Documentary blog,  ”i-Docs is rapidly establishing itself as a unique community event, where i-doc producers, broadcasters, academic, artists and researchers can meet and exchange ideas that will influence the future of i-docs. Don’t miss out!”

Meanwhile, do take a longer look at the recently launched i-Docs site, which alongside Sandra’s own Interactive Documentary blog looks like becoming a key resource in this fast-developing field. I’m honoured to be among a formidable group of contributing editors who have expertise in pervasive media, gaming, digital storytelling, and more.

We’re looking for guest contributors to the i-Docs site. If you’d like to submit a post on the theme of collaboration/participation do please get in touch with Maria Yanez or me, or check out the other themes and editors here.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year. I’m kicking off the year with some thoughts and questions prompted by looking back on 2010.

I’ve noted a flurry of global projects this past year as producers have taken advantage of participatory video and the online network to reflect daily life. The most interesting to me is the ongoing Global Lives project which attempts to counter a lack of global coverage in North America with a detailed reflection of 24 hours in some typical daily lives around the world (posts in July and November). I’ll be interviewing David Evan Harris, founder of Global Lives, for this blog later this week. Two other projects underway are attempting to synthesise crowd-sourced content shot around the world in a single day into linear documentaries. The blockbuster You Tube based feature documentary Life in a Day, being made by Oscar winners Kevin MacDonald and Ridley Scott, (posts in July and October ) chose July for filming, while the NGO sponsored One Day on Earth on Vimeo (post in October) opted for 10:10:10. The jury’s out on these as neither is yet complete though Life in a Day is nearly there and will be released in January.

In the most recent in a series of videos promoting Life in a Day, director Kevin Macdonald and editor Joe Walker talk about the process of making sense of the more than 5,000 hours of user generated video that their call to action generated. Despite the challenge presented by the sheer quantity of material MacDonald says that working with You Tube content has been great, giving them unusual artistic freedom to shape the work as they choose, a “purity of motivation” as he calls it, without a financier pushing for a product that will recoup his investment. It’s an enviable position for a documentary maker to be in. But as the participatory mode starts to get established in the industry we are going to have to think about the economics of these projects and ask at what point volunteer effort becomes unpaid labour, collaboration becomes exploitation. As Trebor Scholz puts it, in his trenchant criticism of what he calls “Playbour” (Play + Labour) in the digital economy, “free comes at a price”.

Scholz’s thought resonates for me in thinking about another of the year’s creative themes – the use of Data Mining to personalise the user experience in music videos. Arcade Fire’s video for “We Used to Wait”, The Wilderness Downtown (September post) made well-judged use of this affordance incorporating footage of the viewer’s own family home – courtesy of Google Maps and Street View –  to create a moving exploration of growing up, memory and identity. In December, the Japanese band Sour followed up their 2009 hit Hibi No Nieiro, with its virtuoso use of crowd-sourced webcams, with Mirror, which features data-mined content. The interactive video was produced by Masashi Kawamura, who was also behind the 2009 video, in less than a month, with $5,000 raised on the mass funding platform for creative projects Kickstarter (the success of which is itself a noteworthy story of 2010).

Mirror combines band footage with content drawn in (with permission) from the users social networks, along with other material that’s freely available. Try it here. It’s a cleverly realised piece that’s been much admired (“absolutely wild“,”very cool“) but it backfired for me. Seeing my photos, content about me found through search, and even routes I’d walked when visiting friends and family on holiday (revealed by my phone location) woven into the video gave me a distinctly queasy feeling, as it graphically illustrated just how accessible all that personal information is. Here’s one person’s version:

There’s a gathering disquiet about the implications of all the data we’ve been giving away more and less unwittingly in our dealings online, data which is being monetised and potentially scrutinised. Data Mining and Dataveillance are emerging as major political issues for the next decade. Yet all this material is also a rich creative resource. I’m sure we’ll see an immediate explosion of projects imitating Mirror and The Wilderness Downtown, but I can imagine a backlash too, with personal content becoming a no-go area.

Both the Arcade Fire and Sour videos are made possible by HTML5, the latest version of the hypertext coding language, which integrates video into web pages rather than show it from a separate media player. These two experiments suggest how HTML5 is going to have a profound effect on video online – transforming it in the context of the emerging Semantic Web from a media which has been isolated from other web elements into an integrated part of the web – “semantic video” or  ”hypervideo” as it’s been called.

Brett Gaylor and his associates in the open source Web Made Movies project at Mozilla have been busy experimenting with semantic video in 2010. (Posts in September and October ) They’ve created the popcorn.js library and a number of rapid fire demos exploring popcorn’s potential for web documentary. In early 2011 they’ll be adding Butter to Popcorn as Gaylor explains on Tumblr. Butter is a graphical interface that allows filmmakers to create popcorn pages linking their video to other web content. Meanwhile further work on popcorn.js is underway to make it more open and useable. You can keep track of developments at Web Made Movies.

Two of my favourite pieces of the year – The Johnny Cash Project (August and November) and Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake (October) – show us what a crowd-sourced aesthetic can be. In an interview when she was nominated for the You Tube Play awards, artist Perry Bard explains how she 
abandoned her original idea to remake Vertov’s seminal 1929 documentary herself shot by shot as “truly boring”. Man with a Movie Camera is such an inventive, energetic, ecstatic piece – a celebration of the city, modernity and the potential of cinema itself – that it is hard to imagine how one individual could dream up a remake that wouldn’t look dull in comparison. So Bard, an experienced producer of collaborative public art, threw that thought out in favour of the unpredictable strategy of crowd-sourcing. She didn’t know what would come of it, but she committed herself to an open approach, with rules never to upload anything herself, and never to get rid of anything. Her leap of faith was richly rewarded with the submission of hundreds of Vertov-inspired contributions, ”a collision course of one-night stands, people from all over the world, Bangkok next to Beirut” as she says, which turn out to be the perfect match for the heady rush of the original.

In a similar way, the aggregated frames of The Johnny Cash Project (August and November posts), each drawn by a devoted fan, collectively make a big enough statement to memorialise the epic talent of “The Man in Black”. Again, one person’s homage might have been nice, but there’s a pitch of energy that the crowd brings, when each participant has committed themselves creatively to their own contribution. These projects work artistically as a quilt does, where an accumulation of contrast becomes a pattern with an aesthetic coherence of its own.

Quilting’s been on my mind this year as a metaphor and precursor of digital collaborative work and the excellent Quilts exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum  was one of my cultural highlights (July). Henry Jenkins drew my attention to another contemporary characteristic of quilting in November, when he memorably kicked off his opening remarks at the DIY Citizenship Conference in Toronto; “My grandmother was a Remix artist…”

Finally, I think online documentary came of age this year, with Katerina Cizek’s “Out My Window” (November) which brought us first person insights into the lives of suburban highrise dwellers – with form and content working together just right.

There’s no reason to think developments in 2011 will be any less interesting. I’m looking forward to it.

The Open Video Conference

Having worked in TV and then for a decade in “new” media I’ve felt acutely aware of inhabiting distinct cultures in my professional life. It’s perhaps been most apparent when I’ve been involved in cross-platform projects. Linear and non-linear production structures and processes don’t easily mesh, and I’ve been in situations with good creative people from different sides of the fence regarding each other as if they’re aliens. This can be about a lack of understanding of each others’ processes, but it’s also about underlying values.

Openness, in particular, is written into the infrastructure of the web and it’s a core principle for many who work on that platform. For producers in the one-to-many world of broadcasting, editorial control is a raison d’etre (in the BBC’s case it’s interesting to note that corporation control is a requirement of the Charter) and there’s still a widespread assumption that closed processes are key to quality. People interested in widening participation have therefore tended to work from the margins of broadcasting – in independent film, community video and access TV. So it was a real treat for me to attend the Open Video Conference in New York last weekend, a forum in which progressive currents in the two cultures come together.

‘Open video’ is about defending and extending the democratic potential of video on the web. It’s not just a technical issue, it encompasses rights, tools, platforms, methods and literacy, as Conference Director Ben Moskowitz explained in the programme;

“…we’re going to need to ensure that creativity is compensated; that the tools for making and watching video are accessible and widely distributed; that the network for delivering video is open to all producers, big and small; and that public policy supports the ability of mass numbers of people to participate in the video conversation. We are saturated with video—basic literacy now demands that it’s just as easy to make and share video as it is to consume it.”

The short film above, based on interviews with attendees at the first Open Video Conference in 2009 is a great introduction to the territory.

The conference, organised by the Open Video Alliance and sponsored by organisations including Mozilla (open source software foundation) and Kaltura (open source video platforms), ran for two days followed by a hackday on Sunday. There were over sixty sessions and hundreds of attendees – panels, showcases, practical discussions around new technologies – with three streams running much of the time. You can see the full programme here. Inevitably there was lots that I missed, but I saw and heard lots that was important and thought-provoking, and there was some inspiring content on show. Here are the CollabDocs highlights.

Vincent Moon, an artist new to me, talked to us from (a dimly lit room in) Paris via Skype. He described his approach – handheld, often single-take field recordings of musicians – as a deliberate reinvention of video for the web, with the camera a catalyst to bring people together. “My point is not to make movies but to make relationships – basically, to meet people, and I found a good pretext to do that.” His videos, which you can see on his own site, on Vimeo and You Tube, really deliver – by taking advantage of the haptic, go-anywhere qualities of the camcorder he creates a fluid, intimate form that feels live.  Moon is a nice example of a documentarist who is unafraid of sharing his work under a Creative Commons license – you can read his thinking on that here. (If you want to know more about what Creative Commons means in practice you can hear from a range of producers in this video produced by Intelligent Television, a US organisation to promote cultural and educational video who were among the conference sponsors.)

A month after winning  an Interactive Emmy for Star Wars: Uncut – their crowd-sourced fan remake of Star Wars: A New Hope – producers Casey Pugh and Jamie Wilkinson still seem pretty bemused at that turn of events. The project’s creator Pugh had been working at Vimeo, puzzling over how to get filmmakers to collaborate and had noticed Aaron Koblin’s projects in crowd sourcing – The Sheep Market, Bicycle Built for Two Thousand, and Ten Thousand Cents.  Jamie Wilkinson was running Know Your Meme, a site which studies internet phenomena. Together they looked for a subject where fan enthusiasm would motivate participation. Star Wars was an obvious topic  – a ‘gimme’ as Pugh put it. He was a fan, and in terms of online traffic Star Wars gets more hits than Jesus! (Similar thinking – that sci-fi fans were an online community with critical mass and with the passion  and expertise to get involved – was behind My Science Fiction Life – the collective biography of British science fiction that we made at the BBC a few years back. It paid off – they are an exceptionally connected community.)

Pugh & Wilkinson cut “Star Wars: A New Hope” up into 15 second segments, made a website that allowed users to choose which scene to work on, gave participants the structure of a deadline, and promoted the project – quite modestly – to their own networks. Within months fans had recreated the whole film, using all sorts of witty, inventive styles and approaches. LucasFilm were (wisely) cool with it, and keen that The Empire Strikes Back be given the same treatment, though apparently not interested in paying for it to be done. So Pugh has an Emmy but no job, meanwhile he and Wilkinson are wondering what other movies to treat the same way. Ideas to team@starwarsuncut.com

It was good to hear from Scott Draves, an early innovator in open-source digital art, who gave a lightning introduction to his beautiful distributed screen saver project Electric Sheep project, which is now ten years old.  A “cyborg mind composed of 400,000 computers and people worldwide”, is how he described it, a collective work, “where all the computers running the software are working together to render animation and share the results.” A voting system introduces a Darwinian dimension with the ‘fittest’ designs growing stronger. There’s loads about Draves and his projects online, including this gem, a terrific extended interview with veteran Manhattan cable talk-show host Harold Channer .

HTML5 represents a turning point for video online, and there were a number of sessions devoted to it –  showcasing HTML5 players, streaming solutions and cross-platform delivery. HTML5 makes video “of the web not on it” as rip! A Remix Manifesto producer Brett Gaylor put it, showing Mozilla’s experiment in semantic web – the popcorn.js demo – that I wrote about recently. To show the potential of popcorn Gaylor had created a new demo that updated Kuleshov‘s famous Soviet era demonstration of the effect of film montage – cute.

The conference wasn’t all good news though. Former Obama innovation adviser and legal scholar Susan Crawford used her keynote to warn against complacency in taking the current openness of the web for granted. She sees this Autumn as a potential tipping point for the open internet with the increasing consolidation of ISPs and two significant pieces of legislation in the pipeline in the US – one that could result in the preventative blocking of domain names suspected of actual or intended(!) copyright infringement (COICA), the other that could require new websites to comply with design guidelines so that the FBI can potentially access them which could mean needing a license in order to launch (CALEA). “Your voices are not heard in Washington”, she warned the gathering, urging the building of more powerful alliances between web advocacy bodies like the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation).

Media literacy was a major theme of the two days, and the cultural anthropologist and videographer Michael Wesch made this the subject of his talk, “Towards Open Video Culture; What’s at stake?” Though he cited a number of diverse projects as evidence of the maturing and achievements of online collaboration and creativity – the breakthrough crisis information crowdsourcing of Ushahidi, the musical virtuosity of Eric Whiteacre’s Virtual Choir and the political effectiveness of Greenpeace’s video riposte to Dove’s “Onslaught” online advert - Wesch’s talk was less up-beat about digital culture than in his often cited, must-see 2008 Library of Congress speech.

Wesch challenged the widespread assumption that the younger, ‘digital native’ generation are generally confident in navigating and making sense of the contemporary media landscape. He characterised his students as “meaning seekers”, who feel passive in the face of all the content that’s out there, and made an urgent case for the role of teachers in higher education in developing what he calls “participatory literacy” – the critical thinking and making that students need to become “meaning makers”.

He gave the example of Shawn Ahmed who, inspired by Jeffrey Sacks‘ (“The End of Poverty”,”Common Wealth”), dropped out of college at Notre Dame to start his Uncultured Project – “haphazardly trying to make the world a better place”. For Wesch, the role of the contemporary teacher is to collaborate with students in learning through engaging with just such real-life problems as those that Ahmed felt he could only pursue by leaving college.

There was lots of discussion at the Open Video Conference but it wasn’t just a talking shop. There were practical sessions, showcases of new technology, and panels that were well cast to create fruitful dialogue.  A thread that exemplified the engaged and grounded quality of the proceedings was on Human Rights video. It began with “Cameras Everywhere: Human Rights and Web Video”, a panel introduced by Sam Gregory from Witness which set out the thorny and, in this context, potentially life and death issues around ’informed consent’, intentionality (how to maintain the original context in a video’s ongoing life online), and the tensions (due to the dangers of re-victimisation and retaliation) between privacy and freedom of expression. It was a lesson in just how entangled (new) media, message, and ethics are. But it didn’t end with the theory. The panel was followed by a workshop to define practical and technical responses to some of the challenges – approaches to anonymisation for instance, compression solutions to make video available in regions with low bandwidth etc. Then, at the hackday on Sunday, developers got stuck in, in dialogue with producers and advocates, to prototype technical solutions. A really worthwhile use of the assembled knowledge and talents.

All that, and I didn’t even get to see The Daily Show‘s video guru Adam Chodikoff, a mega session on the theory and practice of remix, or The Yes Men (but hey, this is the open web, I can still post the trailer from their new movie…) Happily the conference was recorded and I look forward to the videos being available so that I can catch up with some of what I missed. I’ll post a link then.

Finally, a big thanks to the Open Video Conference for travel support.

Web Made Movies

John Grierson provided an enduring definition of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality”. In the twenty first century, actuality encompasses all the data the web has to offer. Some artists – perhaps most notably Jonathan Harris in projects including We Feel Fine (20006) and I Want You to Want Me (2008) -have been experimenting for some time with this data for non-fiction storytelling. On the Semantic Web that’s now emerging, data is becoming accessible to creative treatment in new ways.  This has transformative potential for video storytelling, as The Wilderness Downtown, Arcade Fire’s ground-breaking interactive film that I wrote about in my last post shows.

The people at Mozilla’s Open Video Lab, Web Made Movies, are developing open source applications in this space, their mission to create,” a new kind of cinema that works like the web”. They’ve recently released a demo which shows what can be done with video, HTML5 and javascript. A video plays, and as people, places and themes appear, related data is triggered and windows around the video player show relevant text and stills. The demo pulls in APIs from Google, flickr, Wikipedia, Twitter, as well as automatic machine translation from Google Translate, and attribution data from Creative Commons. (You can watch a brief explanation of the project too.)

The demo’s a pretty busy experience – a “pop-up video on steroids” as the makers describe it, and it’s going to be a creative challenge to find meaningful ways of fusing these kinds of sources. But it’s an important proof of concept and I think very significant for what documentary might become. Writing about it on the Tribeca Film Institute blog, Ingrid Kopp stresses the way it breaks down the divide between video and other types of web content, “the new technology is allowing video to be part of a connected web that creates links to new sources of information and new methods of interacting with that information…We all know that the web is changing the way we watch films but it is also fundamentally changing the way we can tell stories.”

The Project Producer of Web Made Movies is Brett Gaylor who made “rip! A Remix Manifesto”, the award winning 2009 collaborative feature documentary investigation into remix culture and copyright in the digital age. He’s joined Mozilla to continue the work he started at opensoucecinema.org. He and his team are looking for filmmakers and developers to get involved with the Open Video Lab and to explore HTML5 and the Popcorn.js demo at a Hackday alongside the the Open Video Conference in NYC on Oct 1st and 2nd. If I can be there I will…

The Jean Rouch Project

On Wednesday I was lucky to be at a Paris screening of the seminal documentary – “Chronique d’un Ete” (“Chronicle of a Summer”) which was being shown, almost fifty years after it was made in 1960, to a gathering including the co-producer Edgar Morin and two of the original participants – Marceline Loridan-Ivens and Nadine Ballot.

I was in Paris for a conference, Le Projet Jean Rouch? (The Jean Rouch Project?) which looked at the legacy of the pioneering French anthropological film maker Jean Rouch, who died in 2004. (The conference papers I refer to later in this piece are available as pdfs on the conference website).  Rouch is a figure I’ve been interested in since the ’80s when I was alerted to his work by Michael Eaton who wrote the first English language Rouch study . I interviewed Rouch in ’91 for a BBC Late Show special about documentary, and his ideas have influenced the way I’ve thought about work I’ve produced since – in particular BBC 2′s Video Nation.

Rouch started making anthropological films in West Africa in the 1940s, having gone there as an engineer, and embarked on a body of work which, while it drew on the past – Rouch sited film makers Vertov and Flaherty in particular as influences – was highly innovative and still feels fresh today. Imagine a film in which two young men from rural Niger enact their own story of trying to survive in the unfamiliar modern urban surroundings of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, narrated by one of them – in the persona of Edward G Robinson. That’s “Moi un Noir” – 1958. Or picture an African on the streets of Paris conducting an anthropological study –  persuading passers-by to let him measure their heads and inspect their mouths. Not “Meet the Natives” – 2007, but Rouch’s “Petit a Petit” – 1969, featuring Rouch’s long-time friend and collaborator Damoure Zika.

Rouch is interesting for a number of reasons. In terms of content, he took anthropology into the African city, pointed to the contemporary content of ritual, and to the growing influence of American culture in everyday life and fantasy in post-war West Africa. But he saw filming not as some kind of documentation but as a form of engagement in which the camera is a catalyst, a player. He wanted to get right inside the world he was filming – “to get rid of one’s own systems of thought, to better understand other peoples’ thoughts” – and this is expressed in his films through first person, subjective narration. Film-making for Rouch was a collaborative process in which film-maker and participants jointly create meaning, a project he called ‘shared anthropology’. I was in Paris because I’m interested in how this idea of shared anthropology might be deployed in the development of collaborative documentary practice today. I was also there because I’m taking Jean Rouch’s 1960 film “Chronicle of a Summer” as the starting point for a collaborative piece I’m going to be producing half a century later in 2010.

At the screening on Wednesday, Edgar Morin described how “Chronicle of a Summer” came about after a conversation in which he proposed that Rouch turn his anthropological eye on the people of Paris. (Morin’s account brought to mind the genesis of the British Mass Observation project which similarly arose out of a dialogue about ‘bringing anthropology home’ – in that case between anthropologist Tom Harrisson, filmmaker Humphrey Jennings and journalist Charles Madge. This parallel was explored in a conference presentation by Elena von Kassel Siambani the morning after the screening.)

The film that emerged from Rouch and Morin’s discussion involved one of the first uses of 16mm handheld camera and sync sound. This technology was by no means off-the-shelf. The filming was very experimental technically and it took a development process across the shooting period to achieve reliable sync, as Vincent Bouchard and Severine Graff explained in their conference papers. Rouch’s ’50s films were shot silent with narration added afterwards. What he was striving for was a handheld set-up flexible enough to film spontaneous speech in real-life settings. As subject matter Rouch and Morin settled on the everyday life of “the tribe of people living in Paris”, their brief; “What is your life? Are you happy?” Their film unfolds as a disparate group of people consider those questions from different perspectives during the course of the summer of 1960. The film reveals French society in a process of change – divided over the repression of the independence movement in Algeria, living with the legacy of the Occupation, with class, race and identity in debate. At the same time the film is an investigation into this new spontaneous filming method, a reflection on the ethics and aesthetics of documentary still  relevant today.

I didn’t understand much of the Q & A at the Paris screening as my French is rudimentary, and there wasn’t any translation, but I did make out Edgar Morin relating that a young man who’d recently seen “Chronicle of a Summer” had summarised it as;“…a reality show, with a critical dimension.” It was an apt observation. The unfolding of events and feelings on camera, the “pro-filmic event” as Rouch called it, that was key to his film-making, is these days a crucial ingredient  in reality TV, with Big Brother acting as the catalyst to ensure that something does happen. You can see Rouch as the provocateur in this clip from “Chronicle of a Summer”. It’s not my favourite sequence – Rouch’s interventions seem heavy-handed out of context and without the “critical dimension” that is crucial to the film. But the sequence does give a flavour of “Chronicle of a Summer”, and it’s the only clip available on You Tube. So here it is.

In 2010, on the fiftieth anniversary of  ”Chronicle of a Summer”, I’m planning to revisit the questions that Rouch and Morin posed in their film, to try and start a conversation about contemporary life and values. I’ll use the web as the platform, and want to involve diverse participants from around the world, bringing together distributed responses – in video and stills, combined perhaps with some form of data visualisation. While Rouch and Morin’s 1960 film investigated the potential of the new handheld sync sound filming, “The Happiness Project” (working title) will investigate the potential for participatory online documentary. There are lots of challenges, and issues to work through regarding how to go about. At the heart of my investigation is the question of how to combine peoples’ recordings to tell a larger story – in a form that works on the web, and is editorially satisfying.

I’m not the first person to be experimenting with collaborative documentary by any means – there have been some really interesting creative responses already in this space – including work by Kutiman and MadV on You Tube, and Brett Gaylor’s “RiP! A Remix Manifesto” - an important, entertaining feature documentary that’s currently winning lots of prizes at Film Festivals (and will be the subject of my next post). In producing “The Happiness Project” as practice-based research, I get to build on what others have done, experiment, and share my findings. I’ll be posting here about the project as it develops, inviting people to get involved, and and reflecting on what works and what doesn’t.

Rouch didn’t see the explosion of non-professional video content that has happened on You Tube – he died just a few months before the service launched. But he did anticipate the age of participatory media. Back in 1973 he wrote; “Tomorrow will be the time of completely portable colour video, video editing, and instant replay… and of a camera that can so totally participate that it will automatically pass into the hands of those who, until now, have always been in front of the lens.” I hope that “The Happiness Project” might contribute a new dimension to shared anthropology, by developing ways for those who have “always been in front of the lens” to tell their collective stories.

Postscript ~ Rouch is a contested, at times contradictory figure and if you’re curious about him I’d urge you to read beyond this brief introduction. As a brief overview Michael Eaton’s terrific obituary piece is a must. The diverse perspectives of “Building Bridges” open up the complexity of Rouch’s work.  Rouch’s relationship to Africa has been subject to critique by, among others, Manthia Diawara in  “Rouch in Reverse” . Steven Feld’s  “Cine-Ethnography” which I’ve drawn on here, is a rich resource of Rouch’s own writing.  A new book - “The Adventure of the Real; Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema” by Paul Henley sounds promising.