If you’ve not seen it yet, you can now view Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott‘s mega collaborative project – Life in a Day – on You Tube. Alongside the film you can access (all ?) the content on the interactive gallery. It’s interesting that the two propositions are now side-by-side. When I saw the film in the cinema I was dying to pause and see the whole contribution from particular contributors. I’m looking forward to trying that now. The question for me is; does that put back some of the context that is missing from this beautifully put-together film?
The people at The Daily Crowdsource – the “#1 site for crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and open innovation news” – have come up with a proposed taxonomy of their field in an info-graphic. David Alan Greir says; ” In order to develop best practices, common ways of handling common problems, and a unified way of presenting the group to the public, we need a standard set of categories. This document is an important step in that direction.” As they define it, “Crowdsourcing involves getting a crowd of people to help you with a task. You ask an undefined group of people to perform a task for you, and anyone who’s interested may perform the task. You’ll get finished work from dozens of participants, which you get to select the best one(s) from.”
Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon which demonstrates the ambiguity of public participation. If, as Henry Jenkins recently suggested, Web 2.0 is,” a corporate strategy which attempts to capture and monetise aspects of participatory culture”, then crowdsourcing is one of the mechanisms of that strategy, through which companies can get unpaid input on a rebrand, the outsourcing of micro-tasks to low paid workers etc. If we are interested in cultural expression, crowdsourcing is a troubling concept. The word itself suggests an anonymity among those taking part. The transaction is a many-to-one business – an odd reversal of the one-to-many dynamic of broadcasting. Yet Crowdsourcing is proving a powerful phenomenon in the cultural sphere. Take a look at some of the success stories on Kickstarter, for instance, the crowdfunding platform for the arts.
In the field of production, various documentary projects have been created through crowdsourcing, as it’s defined above. The wonderful “Man with a Movie Camera: a Global Remake” was a very deliberate experiment with this method, and can fit neatly into the “Microtasks” category, though perry bard, the artist/producer, broke the template in a significant way by setting herself a rule to include everything that was submitted. bard’s work brings to mind Aaron Koblin‘s early art pieces that explored the crowdsourcing of micro-tasks - The Sheep Market & Ten Thousand Cents.
Ridley Scott & Kevin Macdonalds’ feature documentary “Life in a Day” has been described as a crowdsourced project and could fit readily into the “Contests” category, as described above. It began with an open call to action which solicited a mind-blowing 80,000 video contributions. The filmmakers then made the selections, and participants received various levels of reward if their content was included, with a lucky few getting the prize of joining the Oscar winning director at the Sundance Festival. Yet this is certainly a co-creative work, albeit with highly uneven levels of editorial control.
“You ask a group of people to perform a task”, as the definition says, but when that “task” is an expressive act of recording video, then what comes about is footage which speaks of and from a place, and individuates members of the crowd. Macdonald certainly shaped “Life in a Day’, but it was made from individual contributions which have an integrity and vividness in the finished film. (I did question, though, the decision not to caption those individuals on-screen with their name and location.)
So it might feel comfortable, but it’s not simple, or I suspect useful, to draw a dividing line between crowdsourcing (bad) and more elaborate forms of collaboration (good). The affordances of crowdsourced and collaborative production are with us now, though we’re in the early days of articulating the values, aesthetics and ethics of the documentary processes and forms that they allow.
How do we delineate crowdsourcing, collaboration and co-creativity in these works? How do we understand a shared process of meaning making? Is participation in these projects a good in itself? How do the process and the finished product interrelate? If there is profit – financial, reputational – who benefits? These are complex questions, without ready answers.
I think it’s helpful to think of these questions alongside the definition of Participatory Culture, developed in 2006, by Jenkins and co-authors Ravi Purushotma, Katie Clinton, Margaret Weigel and Alice Robison. They describe a participatory culture “as one,
With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
Where members believe that their contributions matter
Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).”
This definition doesn’t provide answers to the questions posed above, but shifts the terms of the discussion towards issues of value, context and community.
Meanwhile, that info-graphic brought something to mind – the umbrella, the retro colourway, the “U… of C…” – ”The Umbrellas of Cherbourg“! A film from 1964 with sung dialogue, an extravagant visual style – an aesthetic so singular, idiosyncratic, it’s the very essence of an auteur sensibility (and fabulous. Do go and see it.) Now that is a strange collision – Jacque Demy and crowdsourcing – and surely an excuse for a clip.
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.
Today sees the filming of a global collaborative project; One Day on Earth, which the organisers are describing as the “largest participatory media event in history”. It’s hot on the heels of Life in a Day, the Ridley Scott, Kevin Macdonald project that I wrote about back in July for which You Tubers were invited to record on July 24th, and at first glance seems barely distinguishable from that initiative.
“ Together, we will showcase the amazing diversity, conflict, tragedy, and triumph that occur in one day,” the promo explains,” If you believe in something, if you have one message you can put in the world’s time capsule, one story you can put in the record of history, we hope that you will be inspired, and really go out and find it, and put it in the capsule, put it in the document, put it in our film.”
Sounds familiar, but where the focus of the call to action for Life in a Day was “compelling and distinctive” content and directorial point of view, One Day on Earth has a social purpose, or a number of purposes, as the Friends and Causes pages on the website makes clear. In particular many of today’s recordings will have a sustainability theme as 10:10:10 (10th October 2010) is a day of action for a number of organisations addressing climate change including 350.org, a partner in One Day on Earth. Another interesting feature of One Day on Earth’s mission statement is that the content created today will become a user created shareable documentary archive. That’s a major piece of work to deliver, but could be of immense value. Additionally, with one project on You Tube and the other on Vimeo it will be fascinating to see how the raw content and the edited films from the two projects compare.
Writing back in July I thought that, with the producers’ star names and the lure of a trip to the Sundance Film Festival for a lucky few, Kevin Macdonald and the Life in a Day team would receive a lot of content. I’m not sure anyone could have predicted that they would be trawling through 80,000 contributions from 197 countries. That’s an awesome shooting ratio. The editor, Joe Walker, explains how they’re processing that material on the Life in a Day channel.
The You Tube Collab gets the Hollywood treatment in a project just announced. Oscar winning filmmakers Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald have joined forces with You Tube and the Sundance Institute for a “historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature shot in a single day.” Through a multi-versioned promo available in 20 languages they’re inviting You Tubers around the world to video on July 24th for “Life in a Day”, to create a portrait of 24 hours on earth. Macdonald will cut selected contributions into a feature documentary which will premiere at the Sundance Festival and on You Tube in January 2011.
As well as working with existing You Tubers, the team behind “Life in a Day” are responding to the unevenness of digital inclusion by, according to the Wall Street Journal article, “distributing 400 to 500 cameras to NGOs and non-profits in 20 different countries and areas “on the wrong side of the digital divide” so that as many voices as possible will have the opportunity to be heard.”
“Life in a Day” is the latest in a spate of ‘life on earth’ projects which have been shaped by the affordances of digital video and participation. These include Yann Arthus Bertrand’s epic 6 Billion Others for which he and his team travelled the world shooting over 5,000 interviews, Bob Geldof’s forthcoming Dictionary of Man, and the Global Lives project, the latter providing a particularly interesting contrast to “Life in a Day”.
The mission of “Global Lives” is “to collaboratively build a video library of human life experience that reshapes how we as both producers and viewers conceive of cultures, nations and people outside of our own communities.” To do this the US producers recruited 500+ volunteers who have between them recorded 24 hours in the everyday life of ten individuals selected to “roughly represent the diversity of humanity” so that, for example, six of the ten are Asians, and six are under thirty. The ten twenty four hour films they have made have been combined to produce an immersive installation which ran from February to June this year at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and heads to Europe in July. An online library will follow.
While “Life in a Day” encourages You Tubers to be auteurs, offering a strong point of view, Global Lives producers worked to a format designed to suggest a lack of mediation, effacing the distance between the subject and the viewer. As the producers describe it, there is “no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life…we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own.”
In Ridley Scott’s You Tube interview about “Life in a Day” he promotes taking part as a chance to become a filmmaker, like him – “if you want to do what I do, go out, get a camera, get some buddies…Just do it.” You Tubers whose footage is selected for the finished film will be credited as co-directors, and twenty of them will be flown to Utah to attend the Sundance Festival premiere. The project announcement has already provoked a buzz on the “Life in a Day” comments section, with mixed responses – people saying they plan to take part, and are thinking about what they’ll record, and others questioning Hollywood “cashing in” on user content, and asking what the chances really are getting selected. But with front page promotion on You Tube, and the potential reward of credit on a feature documentary, the team can expect a lot of submissions, and though only a tiny proportion can possibly make it into the final cut, all of them will be available to view on the “Life in a Day” Channel.
One of the more sceptical comments suggests that what Scott and Macdonald propose to create is in a sense what You Tube already provides everyday – a snapshot of the world via a kaleidoscope of videos perspectives. It’s a valid point. And as we can each navigate our own routes through that participatory content, search and view by theme, browse and encounter the unexpected, and make our own assessments of what we find, there are legitimate questions about whose perspective is served and what kind of value is added in turning that into a linear experience. It will be interesting to see if “Life in a Day” presents any convincing answers.
