The Future Of Doc.u.men.tar.ies
Yesterday, Andy and I had the opportunity to rap with a handful of UNCG film students, as his former professor (Matt Barr) invited him to present his documentary, reveal his creative process and expose the realities of the distribution game. I tagged along to introduce the possibilities of the web; how it can be used as both a creative channel and a viral mechanism for distribution.
Andy dove right in and introduced the story behind his documentary (Greensboro’s Child) to the students — the ties between the 1979 KKK shootings of five worker’s rights protesters and the unjust sentencing of a civil rights activist’s child to two life sentences for unarmed burglary just 7 years later.
The entire time I sat listening intently to my brother’s passionate presentation, I couldn’t help but notice the amount of times he mentioned his desire to not only go back into the film and improve upon his student-level production techniques (he began the documentary back in 1996), but to continue to document the unfolding story by re-editing the film and updating it with the findings of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
While I completely understand his intent and agree with the desired results, I just don’t agree with the approach — not in this day and age.
As a blogger and an enthusiast of web/documentary projects like the Echo Chamber Project and The War Tapes, my perspective of an evolving narrative is completely different than Andy’s.
When I think about Greensboro’s Child, I view it as a foundation of knowledge; an element that can be built upon with new elements of video, images and text to create an even broader and more reputable narrative thesis. It’s an impossible goal to continuously include the numerous, ever-evolving tentacles of the story (the Greensboro police department, the community attitude, etc.) within a single 1.5 hour long documentary.
So once the lights came back on and the students finished their Q&A, I introduced myself, a bit of my career history and proceeded to find my zone… Somewhere in the midst of my presentation, I introduced:
- myself as an activist, rather than a designer (a first)
- the possibilities of using cutting edge video distribution channels to introduce their voices to the world, such as youtube, currentTV, democracy
- how a mixture of blogging and video can have a more lasting reach than both tv and film (Rocketboom for example)
By the time my diatribe subsided, I found myself engaged in a conversation surrounding The People, Yes. Once we moved beyond the concept of the collaborative blog for the homeless of Greensboro, we evolved into a conversation about weekly trips into the community to capture the various stories of the underprivileged, on camera, and turning it back around as weekly shorts in a vlog. Heads were nodding left and right as the film students seemed eager to participate in such a project.
So I now have a new angle to TPY… and quite possibly a pool of energetic, dedicated, creative filmmakers to participate in the cause.
While walking off the UNCG campus, I turned around to take in a final glimpse… something, I don’t know what, just seemed different…
Tags: academia, activism, Andy Coon, blogging, citizen media, community, Current TV, David Horowitz, democracy, documentary, Echo Chamber Project, film, Greensboro, Greensboros Child, The People Yes, The War Tapes, UNCG, World 2.0, YouTube.
9 Responses to “The Future Of Doc.u.men.tar.ies”
- 1 Pingback on Mar 24th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
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Sean, The People, Yes sounds like a cool, important project. I’ve been trying to incorporate similar ideas about blogging and the evolving documentary in a project of mine called the Bronx Blog Project (http://www.bronxblogproject.org) in which I’m teaching ESL students how to blog, shooting it, and videocasting the process. It’s about encouraging the process over the finished product (though I hope there is one!)
Hi, I’m Deborah, the director of THE WAR TAPES mentioned above. First, thanks so much for the shoutout! We really appreciate it. We are relying on a grassroots effort to get the word out and really appreciate everyone’s help.
The internet made this paticipatory film possible. It is the first documentary filmed by soldiers themselves on the front lines in the middle of a war. The deal was, two years ago I got an offer to embed as a filmmaker, instead had the idea to give the soldiers cameras. Directed through near perpetual IM and email. The soldiers would quicktime clips to me from ambushes and self interviews, and we would talk about how best to tell the story, THEIR story. Pretty amazing process. Five soldiers filmed their entire year’s deployment with several one-chip high end Sony video cameras. The mounted tripods on gun turrets, inside dashboards and with the POV mounts on their kevlar. They filmed all of the footage in Iraq, over 800 hours of tape. They became cameramen and journalists. We did it together.
The web is a critical partner in our evolving narrative now, as we continue to tell the story, just exactly as Sean noted in the above post “as a foundation of knowledge; an element that can be built upon with new elements of video, images and text to create an even broader and more reputable narrative thesis.” I really believe that this new model of ‘living’ narrative constructed from a center narrative will reverberate much longer and farther, like the ripples in water displaced by a single stone. At least, that’s my hope. *smile*
I’m really passionate about the power of the blogosphere in making the difference. I still believe in the power of the individual to change our world.
@josh - thanks for the heads up on your project. your intro video with the students is exactly the type of conversation i plan on having within our community here. i’m already digging the read… so rich… your approach reminds me of a passionate conversation i had over at hip hop blog a while ago…
@deborah - thanks for stopping by. the embedded, cnn perspective in the beginning of the war, made me sick to my stomach nightly. so much play by play it felt as though the soldiers were simply pawns of a government/media chess game… no kidding, huh?
the web is a great medium for telling evolving stories. permalinks are akin to a pebble dangling over a puddle, or a glacier dangling over an ocean, waiting to be discovered and dropped… the in-the-moment of a story may have passed, but the findability of the information object is forever. who needs a history lesson when you have the web?
come on back when you can… individuals can make a difference, but together we make change. (that sounded really corny ;-)
Corny is cool — shows you have a heart. I’m all about together.
Sean, that was one intense conversation at hip hop blog. I admire your restraint and attempts to reason with someone who had his/her mind made up before entering the conversation.
Conversation — online or face to face — is incredibly important. If we alienate ourselves from it we lose the ability to reason and risk becoming idealogues.
Thanks for the excellent story and links to some cool stuff. I’m a music blogger from the Bay Area who is struggling with some ideas about a documentary. After reading your piece above and after attending vLoggercon in SF yesterday, I’ve started to see whole new possibilities for my project. Thanks a lot for the writeup!