The concept of the interactive documentary as something controlled by the producer is changing, as Michael Mascioni reveals.
Interactive documentaries have traditionally been conceived as a genre allowing users to select and explore different informational segments, elements, and themes in a framework largely circumscribed by the producers. Now, that concept is expanding significantly with the rise of ‘collaborative documentaries’ that have adopted crowdsourcing elements and extensive use of user-generated content. n the process, interactive documentaries have become more vital media forms and afforded more varied perspectives on diverse issues and topics.
Jesse Shapins, co-founder of Zeega, which has developed an open source platform for interactive documentaries, believes collaborative documentaries are a “growing genre that will transform the media landscape”. He characterizes them as “extended documentaries” that espouse a “new attitude towards reality” that span multiple media. They essentially represent a “redefinition of the production model” by harnessing “the properties of networked media to create collaborative content”.
Collaborative documentaries represent a new model of collaborative structures between media makers, broadcasters, and audiences, explains Shapins. According to him, one of the key challenges with those documentaries is “building a collaborative structure that is meaningful and engaging”.
One of the significant benefits of collaborative documentaries is their ability to enable the “integration of multiple perspectives about a particular topic or place”, according to Shapins. Collaborative documentaries allow for “common elements to be approached from many different perspectives”, he elaborates.
In the view of Shapins, documentaries about places are “uniquely suited” to the collaborative model, as they provide a “common space” where “many different perspectives” can be offered about those places. Overall, collaborative documentaries work best when they centre around “overarching” themes and structures, he asserts. “Not all documentary subjects lend themselves to the collaborative approach,” he notes.
Shapins cautions that production costs for collaborative documentaries aren’t necessarily lower, especially because of the costs involved with managing communities connected with those documentaries. One of the key challenges of collaborative documentaries is proper community management, he says.
Concerning the quality of audience content in collaborative documentaries, Shapins stresses that such documentaries should always ensure that such audience material is “sufficiently engrossing and meaningful to fit into the larger structure” of those documentaries. Generally, audience photos are more useful in those documentaries, he’s found. Producers of collaborative documentaries tend to rely more on their staff to produce audio material and edit material in general, as those tasks are more challenging for audiences, Shapins adds.
Zeega’s goal has been to provide tools to enable easier production of collaborative documentaries.
The company has partnered with the Association of Independents in Radio on their project called Locallore, which will support ten different media makers to innovate new forms of public media at radio and TV stations, explains Shapins. These media makers are producing local radio or TV documentaries about their particular locations.
Zeega is also working with a local artist on a collaborative documentary called Cloud of Unknowing, which entails developing a “social history of the impact of toxins on the place where the artist grew up, one of the first superfund sites in the country”.
In addition, Zeega is working with UnionDocs on a large scale collaborative documentary with 12 artists on the history of South Williamsburg. The multi-platform documentary will integrate online content and physical installations to create a historical document about that location. Union Docs has been experimenting with collaborative documentaries for a long time, points out Shapins.
LIVING VERTICALLY
One of the larger scale collaborative documentary projects is Highrise, which was launched by the National Film Board of Canada in 2009, and will run until 2014. The web documentary is designed to show “how people live vertically”, and envisions “how high rise living might be reinvented”, according to Gerry Flahive, the project’s producer.
Basically, Highrise is designed to enable collaborative storytelling, explains Flahive. According to him, the goal of collaborative documentaries such as this is to “involve users along the way” rather than treating them as mere “subjects”. Flahive stresses that Highrise was intended as a “web documentary” from the start, and not as a TV program.
Highrise’s latest interactive documentary, One Millionth Tower, focuses on life in a single apartment in Toronto, and grew out of a “community media workshop” held in that building, says Flahive. The producers of Highrise worked with “photographers, professors, and residents in 13 cities around the world” to yield 13 stories in its documentary Out My Window. For that project, which was launched in 2010, Katerina Cizek , the documentary’s director, communicated with production teams on the program electronically via ‘Skype – Out My Window- Participate’, and gave users an opportunity to submit their photos, views, and stories relating to the program. Over 800 photos submitted by users were eventually used on the documentary.
The site for One Millionth Tower, one of the Highrise documentaries, was accessed “tens of thousands of times” just a few days after its November 5th launch on Wired.com, reports Flahive. He points out that the collaborative documentaries part of the Highrise project are very diverse – some of the collaborations are traditional and others are untraditional. Also, some are “very intense” and others are less so. Although the documentaries use input from many different sources, they still retain “the signature voice of a filmmaker”, who serves as an “author of original content and a creative curator of content.”
For the documentary Out my Window- Participate, the producers created a Flickr site that enunciated the program’s philosophy and was used as “an entry site for users to submit photos and other material”, reports Flahive. That material was then “vetted by creative collaborators to ensure that the content selected was good and meaningful”. Also, that content was presented in a “360 degree” context that lived up to “our high standards,” he adds.
Flahive observes that some interactive documentaries overall “cost less because they are often primarily photo-based” and the producers “saved considerably on travel cost”. At the same time, he acknowledges that such projects incurred higher costs for innovation because the producers experimented with new web technologies such as WebGL and Popcorn, which “took some time to work out”.
ENGAGEMENT AND SHARING
Australian Documentaries developed a “collaborative documentary called Water Stories, focusing on water issues of particular concern to residents of Western Sydney. The program had its red carpet premiere in Western Sydney in November, while the website for the documentary went live last March, reports Kylee Ingram, Head of Production at Australian Documentaries. The documentary utilizes a process called CrowdTV, and was intended to allow viewers to “take part in every step of the documentary’s creation”, she says. Ingram believes “environmental topics are perfect for collaborative documentaries” because they “focus people and bring them together over a common goal.”
As a result of this process, Water Stories engendered “deep engagement and sharing around” the program’s environmental subject, reports Ingram. Viewer input in the documentary ranged from the 30 people that actually proposed ideas for the program to the few hundred that commented and voted on the ideas presented by the 30 viewers, according to Ingram. Buoyed by the response to Water Stories, Australian Documentaries plans on opening up the process in “the next generation of CrowdTV in order to allow viewers to select producers and directors for particular films they’d like to see, says Ingram.
Significant opportunities lie ahead for collaborative documentaries, especially with the rise of online video and multi-platform content. Flahive has found growing interest in collaborative documentaries among documentary filmmakers, and believes there will be “considerably more collaborative documentaries” in the near future.
www.zeega.org
www.airmedia.org
www.uniondocs.org
www.highrise.nfb.ca
www.australiandocumentaries.org
