ripping reality

(the trailer for BLOOD IN THE MOBILE…will the feature doc crossover into obsolescence?)

While attending one festival can be exhausting, several in a row has given me something like vigour. Perhaps a tolerance is built up. Like with certain drugs and other things to which one should just say… maybe later.

Though its possible this, sure, ebullience was rooted in the shock of awaking to sunshine, my first natural intake of Vitamin D since arriving in Europe. So it was, given the natural light, a morning for optimism and epiphanies. Unprepared to spoil the mood in the darkness of actual documentaries, I spent the day basking in the radiant opportunities of Sheffield’s Crossover Summit.

I think “crossover” is the new “convergence,” and certainly means that “new media” is permanently retired to jargon’s shady lanes. Based on my observations at Sheffield it, crossing over, refers to a given content vessel’s ability to be malleable and deliverable and participatory across many platforms. But based on the expressions of some docster vets looking on (and their complete absence as speakers), crossing over also means, “Fuck, I thought I’d be retired before I had to deal with this shit.” 

(Cont’d from landing page…)

Ideas omnivore Steven Johnson opened the proceedings with a satisfying keynote, offering a few greatest hits from his excellent writings on technology and media. Drawing, I believe, from Henry Jenkins, Johnson’s gyst was that the narrative forms which are now thriving are those which are democratic in every way possible, forms which are available to and from every point of media access, and which in turn can be obsessively discussed, mapped, and even transformed by their participants.

Within this context, then, works that are open to “the attentions of the ingenious” (a phrase grabbed from Joseph Priestley, also the subject of Johnson’s new book) have the best chances of cutting through the clutter to find engaged users (“audience” = old media). As an example of these intentions in current documentary culture Johnson cited the website for DIGITAL REVOLUTION (working title), BBC’s in-progress “open and collaborative documentary on the way the web is changing our lives.”

Following some policy talk about the Beeb and Digital Britain, much of the remainder of the day was devoted to best practices, with various “factual media companies” and “creative studios” (“production company” = old media) showcasing their wares. Of these, UK based Ten Alps (co-founded by Bob Geldof) was most impressive. In particular I tweaked to their local online TV projects, Kent TV and Fermangh TV. Its not difficult to see how such sites will become the leaders in local news.

Its remarkable to sit through an all day conference at a documentary film festival and seldom hear the word “documentary,” and certainly never following “feature.”  While much of the Summit was quite interesting and occasionally inspiring, I also felt a depressing government retraining scheme undertone, auto workers being taught how to become systems engineers.

Yet, its also clear that within a crossover culture documentary filmmakers are well poised. As Johnson observed, doc makers are naturally multi-disciplinary, curious synthesizers, and always jumping from field to field. More practically, another speaker noted that strong production skills remain valuable, and indeed essential to crossover projects.

I was reminded of a eureka moment during a recent demo panel I moderated in Reykjavik. Director Frank Piasecki Poulsen, producer Ole Tornbjerg and, yes, their webmaster, Mikkel Skov Petersen, are currently in production on BLOOD IN THE MOBILE. The project is about illegal mining in the Eastern Congo. While traditionally financed as a broadcast documentary, the team is also blogging and posting video as they progress. They also have all the usual social networking tools in place, along with recently launching a fundraising campaign via pledgie.com.

None of this is particularly vanguard, and indeed is increasingly ubiquitous.  Yet, as they walked us through the website my question for the BLOOD IN THE MOBILE team seemed to catch them off guard….isn’t THIS the documentary? I mean, if you’re telling an unfolding story with text and video while engaging an audience not just with narrative, but also with a call for action, why do you then need an hour long summary for television, or film festivals?

Will the feature doc cross itself over into redundancy? The optimist in me sees the spirit, community and addictiveness of a live screening event as impossible to replace. Let’s hope the crossover sunshine allows creative documentary to flourish and not flounder.