discussions: interactive, participatory and collaborative documentary

Verbatim Theatre

Verbatim Theatre was used as a technique in Clio Barnard’s The Arbor (2011), highlighting elements of documentary performance and creating both distance and intimacy with the characters/participants. In Verbatim Theatre, the script is developed from documentary interviews with participants and then shaped into a narrative. In The Arbor, actors lip-sync the words to camera- often looking down the barrel, something that we wouldn’t see if it were the actual participants speaking to the interviewer. Another example of this technique is the musical theatre production of London Road. This story of a community affected by a serial killer was constructed through extensive interviews with the people around the area and associated by these murders. The interviews are woven into a narrative with songs and sung by actors. This has been adapted into a film (2015). In this example, the documentary technique provides the raw material which is shaped and  edited for a greater sense of verisimilitude.

 

The Art, Ethics and Technology of Documentary Co-Creation: Visiting Artist Katerina Cizek

Panel Discussion Video at MIT (re-posted from i-docs.org)

– Some interesting ideas about different concepts of co-creation and examples of participation practices in media/documentary making.
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Kat Cizek asks, with the possibilities of co-creation, why just make ‘one thing’. Multiple voices (multiplicity) can create art products to engage various audiences. She also brings up the issue of concepts emerging out of multiple conversations/discussions so at the most fundamental level, this is part of the co-creation process. The filmmaker then becomes part of a web rather than the initiator. 

Andrew Lowenthal: Engage Media

– How do we eliminate the ‘documentary maker’ so to enable the voices of the engaged communities to speak for themselves without the intermediaries?

Mandy Rose
– Jean Rouch and shared anthropology, Bill Nichols’ idea of  shared world, shared making, convening a dialogue, Zimmerman- “politics of convening”

Video Nation (BBC program Video Nation- early example of co-creation, pre-YouTube)

How can participants/co-creators define the terms of their projects?

Filmmaking as a tool for research (Rouch again). Participants as experts of their own lives.

Ethan Zuckerman: Promise Tracker (a tool used to hold government/ officials and decision makers to account).

– People in Brazil were asked to find an issue they cared about and to start tracking (documenting) it- monitoring and recording as an act of citizen (counter)surveillance or as Steve Mann called sousveillance.

Community data (as opposed to BIG data)

How does the technology afford or constrain the project?

Ethical questions are also raised about authorship and how this material might be used (or cynically, co-opted) by the ‘maker’ for their own uses, even though their intentions might be good. This is an issue that should be addresses early in ,the project so the intentions are clear that the co-creators continue to have a voice in how their material and participation is used for the project.

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