Sep/110
Survey: analyzing the need for Multimedia Production in Portugal
For my MA report, I conducted a small survey about multimedia production in Portuguese newsrooms, and although it is not statistically relevant (only 13 responded), it was answered by some of the most important media companies in Portugal, including two reference national dailies and two major TV networks.
The results do not fall far from the expected: there isn’t still a solid investment in the newsrooms to create and publish multimedia/interactive content, in spite of the desire to do so, mainly because they lack the skilled professionals to do so.
Point by point here are the conclusions reached with the survey:
Confronted with the importance of multimedia in today’s news practice they all consider it is at least important but most don’t have the habit of producing them. This may be explained by the insufficient staff available to create them, many times overlapping functions as page makers, and the habit of only use in house production.
Most of the interactive content that comes from external sources is created by LUSA, the national news agency, which sells exclusive infographics or retail videos.
As you can see in the following chart, the types of content are mostly very simple to produce, being photo galleries and videos the most common. Very few take the time to build their own multimedia packages, but these have increased significantly in the last years in other brands that did not respond to the survey, some of them featuring multimedia packages on a regular basis.
When asked if their companies were interested in buying content created by others, the answers were quite conservative. It is understandable that they wish to have control over the process despite paradoxically they don’t produce multimedia content due to staff limitations.
And how much they would be willing to pay for a basic multimedia package? The example given was one with 4 videos plus an interactive chart. Most of them indicated the usual price range here in Portugal for this type of products, between 75 to 150€. This is clearly insufficient, even if we look at it as a one-man-band endeavour. To make them profitable, these packages would have to be made in a 10 to 15 hour period, and have at least 10 orders per month.
I’m currently producing a similar package and first video only took 7 working hours total (it was more than that but i’m not counting with hardware glitches).
But the idea of acquiring multimedia kits, which by definition would be pieces that could be assembled and adapted to each newsroom’s editorial and design guidelines, was more appealing. Again, the issue of control over news content creation is present.
I also asked for their insights about the need for multimedia production in Portuguese newsrooms and the answers were pretty similar: many agreed that though multimedia content is important “newsrooms aren’t ready enough to operate them” and “there isn’t enough money to invest in external production”.
This seems to be a structural problem within news organizations, as pointed out by others: there is a lot of interest in the newsrooms in multimedia contents, finding them valuable “from an editorial point of view” and as a support for their text stories.
However, “because of the unpreparedness of the professionals, or by having the need to recruit new staff or acquire external content, it will be difficult to persuade administrations of the importance of those contents, mainly because websites haven’t been able to impose a profitable business model”.
The idea that media administrations are reluctant to invest in multimedia was also reinforced in other answers.
So, as a freelancer, things don’t seem that bright for me. And all I can say from first hand experience is that there is a strong will to produce multimedia content in portuguese newsrooms. They just don’t have the time or the money in most of them.
What do you make of this picture? Let me know in the comments.
Sep/110
Video: Teaching the drums
This Sunday was spent editing a video for a multimedia package I’m doing about an independent cultural centre. My subject is Filipe, the drum teacher, and he gets to show off a bit.
The gear used was the 60D, audio by the H4N, and edited in sturdy but insufficient computer with Premiere CS4 an After Effects. The drums sound great, but the interview has that common hiss in these HDSLR, but I think I figured how to get the levels right next time. I probably went a bit overboard with color correction, maybe it’s too dark.
Let me know what you think, and wait for the coming videos and developments of this project.
Jul/110
Video – Kiosk Diaries
I had to try out my new gear and I asked a few questions to Pedro Silva, the owner of a newsstand in one of the most typical squares in my city and author of the blog Diário de um Quiosque (Kiosk Diaries, in a loose translation), where he writes about media, it’s costumers and news.
There’s some wind in the audio and I realized I lack a few wide shots, butI was just taking the camera and the audio recorder for a spin. Need to do it more often.
I also used universalsubtitles.org to create some subtitles in English, and I liked this tool a lot. Worth checking out.
Well, take a look and if you have any suggestions, ideas, evil remarks, be my guest.
Jul/110
Video – Diário de um Quiosque – entrevista
O Pedro Silva é dono de um quiosque numa das praças mais típicas da minha cidade, e também autor do blog Diário de um Quiosque, onde, entre outras coisas, fala de jornais, dos clientes e de notícias. Como tinha que testar o meu equipamento novo fui-lhe chatear a cabeça com algumas perguntas.
O vídeo tem alguns problemas, particularmente por causa do vento, que acabou por eliminar algumas das partes mais interessantes das respostas do Pedro, mas essa foi a primeira lição do teste: levar sempre a esponja do microfone. De resto, faltam planos, especialmente gerais, e do ambiente onde o quiosque está inserido.
Mas era um teste, por isso foi muito útil este bocado que passei à conversa com ele, coisa que normalmente fazemos, e sem ninguém estar a gravar (felizmente…).
Se tiverem críticas, sugestões ou ideias, estão à vontade.
Apr/112
HyperDoc: the digital revolution and the narratives of reality
A few months ago I was invited to write an article for a special edition of MACA magazine, published on the occasion of the Festival Grande Angular of documentary and special reporting.
Since I’m all about digital narratives , my idea was to reflect upon the changes the online environment brought to documentary production, and which new conceptual, production and distribution possibilities exist thanks to this new logic.
You can find the Portuguese version here. Go ahead and share your thoughts in the comment box.
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Before the cinematographic fiction, moving images were initially dedicated to capture moments of everyday life, as we can see in the first experiments made by the Lumiére brothers. Restricted to a single minute of film, there wasn’t much they could do but capture short portraits of day-to-day activities, a fragmented, animated view on the surroundings. That contribution was decisive to change the way the world envisioned itself.
Today, a little bit over than a century later, we are going through another revolution, equally important and with even deeper effects in our relationship with the world. The internet and the advance in digital languages technology created new fields and methods to tell and share non-fictional stories, where personal vision and independence are paramount, just like the opening to participation of an unexpected element: the audience.
But to understand what can change, we must realize what already did.
The digital revolution
Our lives changed with the internet, and the way we deal with reality – ours and shared – changed profoundly in the last decade. If the Industrial Revolution took almost two centuries to change society and its habits, the Digital Revolution took less than two decades. We are in the age of ubiquitous, interactive, immediate, multimedia and – above all – personal communication.
Never so many contents were created and consumed like now, and most of them come from the “people formerly know as the audience”, in Jay Rosen’s disruptive concept. It’s a shift in the power of content creation and distribution, multiplied many times over with the coming of social networks like Facebook, which is forcing many industries to rethink their business models and production methods: first the record industry, then movies and, from the very beginning, news industry.
Their place as an unique source and the exclusive role as a mass scale distributors were questioned by digital society’s structure, based on creation, sharing and redistribution, and powered by the spirit of independence and affirmation of individuality.
Technological advance and digital gear development are also an important part of this new order of things, as a cause, consequence and metronome for this (r)evolution. Thanks to cheaper, higher quality products, it is not just simple to access information but also to create it.
Digital cameras – first in photography, then video and recently the combination of the two – reached such accessible prices that democratized the image creation process. And since they’re so easy to use , anyone can create their own collection, and with free hosting video and photo platforms like Flickr and YouTube a process that before demanded huge technical skills only available to a few became simple to all.
If we include cell phones that can capture, edit and publish visual narratives we can say that all that power is, literally, in our hands. The iPhone is the best example of the ability that the object formerly used to make phone calls has in that field.
This new logic and the new relationship between the common user generated a sort of hyper-real and hyper-personal metanarrative, not based on the reflection of reality itself, but on the slivers of the mirror that supported it. Millions of fragments of daily life, just like the Lumiére modestly did
Silver or LCD?
Documentary, as a format, took benefit from the digital reproduction means. Throughout history, documentaries were always limited to the parameters imposed by cinema and television. More recently, the documentarist’s vision gained more reach and longevity thanks to the DVD, allowing more profitability and recognition to a genre that has been capturing fans in a society immersed in narratives of reality and in real time. And, for the reasons stated before, using less expensive resources.
Documentary movies no longer need a screening room, or, ultimately, a living room. It doesn’t have to rely solely in traditional promotion nor distributed by the established channels. The biggest screening room is the personal computer and the modern advertising machine is based on social networks and sharing. And the best poster is the product itself
We know that it’s hard to make users to pay for online content. That doesn’t mean they can’t contribute to the making of the movies: merchandising, physical support editions with exclusive extras, special screenings, these are all ways to finance a documentary project. We can even ask to our potential audience to crowdfund our project.
There are platforms specifically dedicated to this type of funding and there are documentary makers trying to do it individually. Using the existing tools we can make make our work easily available, and with a smart use of the social networks, promote it. Documentary, like any other online content today, can be watched whenever and wherever the user wants to, in their device of choice, whether it’s an iPad, a smartphone or a computer. And the best part is that it’s no longer hiding in a shelf, but permanently available on the web, prolonging its longevity and reinforcing its value as a document
But the digital crowd can provide more than financial support. They can provide the story.
The audience is the content
Although there was much discussion about Ridley Scott e Kevin MacDonald’s A Life in a Day, that intended to mashup users’ contributions through Youtube into a movie revolving about the life in the world on the 24th of July of 2010, there was who anticipated that and did something in the same mold. Frank Kelly, an Irish independent filmmaker, used Twitter to create a feature film that gathered 140 short movies, 140 seconds long each, and shot synchronously in 140 places around the world by whoever wanted to participate.
In May 2009 he told me that “as an independent filmmaker who has no funding and is still trying to break into the film industry, the internet is an essential tool to continue to create work and connect with like minded people “ allowing him to do something that would have been impossible “10 years ago”. Adequately titled “140”, this movie has been reviewed favorably because of the efforts made to coordinate these scattered views that, together, produce a larger image of the planet than just the sum of its parts.
Even when creating documentaries in a more traditional fashion, audience participation and the importance of networks to collect information are of unquestionable value, or isn’t the internet the biggest archive and communication space in the world. Despite the dimension of this archive is practically infinite, collective memory and personal networks of each user are still valuable resources that de documentary maker can explore in a scale never seen.
Thus, the stand of the documentarist, like any any other content creator nowadays, is changed. It is no longer a unidirectional relationship, from one to many, but an involving process of constant dialogue.
Crossover
It wasn’t only the relationship with the audience, platforms and the distribution process that hás changed for documentary makers. The relationship with the very subject, the story’s characters and narratives have changed. The advantages allowed by a more portable and discreet equipment, the agility and discretion collecting audiovisual material have also increased, and also the speed and facility in editing.
New languages and production processes appeared thanks to the new technical possibilities provided by digital narratives. It is probably the biggest change in visual language the genre has ever seen since cinema verité in the 50’s and 60’s. More content, less expenses, more possibilities in post-production and the involvement of other formats inserted in the video opened new creative horizons for reality storytellers.
Journalism online, in long format and depth contents, borrowed the documentary “tone” to tell stories. If we look into one of the references in this field, project MediaStorm, we can find many natural features from documentaries present in those narratives.
They go beyond the limitations of video and they use native online narratives like audioslideshows, a narrative supported by synchronous audio and photography. Other trendy way to create documentaries, thanks to the characteristics of the online, and already tested in the traditional format in movies like Barakaand the Qatsi trilogy, are films that explore a non-textual style, based only in the power of images and music.
“Routines” series follow this model with a strong experimental component. These new ways to tell stories question and broad the very definition of what a documentary can be, in its form.
Even the duration of the movies no longer has a standard online. Many documentaries, or films that fall into that category, aren’t very long: they can be two or 15 minutes long, function as unique pieces or be part of a series. The liberty to easily approach any subject and dedicate the strictly necessary time to it came to prove that the importance of an issue, and its beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
There are no stories, concepts or characters too poor to work on. What the Digital revolution brought to the narratives of reality were processes and spaces for stories that were previously neglected or abandoned either by traditional media, or even by those who would be the only ones interested in telling them: the documentarists.
But if we have tools, spaces, freedom to tell those stories, we must understand that, since it’s an environment in constant evolution, the digital, networked world facilitated other ways to make documentaries, beyond the linear narrative.
The future is not linear
One of the most important characteristics in multimedia language, i.e., a language that includes different, interdependent media, is interactivity and the possibility that each user has to find its own way through the narrative, instead of following a story passively. This type of “reading” is defined as non-linear. The implications of these two key-elements of the online medium affect deeply the way the documentaries of the future are built, being the future right now.
Online, video can coexist with other formats and integrate with them. A documentary can be based in a narrative supported by a map, a timeline, or those two things simultaneously, where users can navigate through blocks of visual information, videographic or not, in a more or less immersive experience according to their choice. The opposite can also happen, providing interactive characteristics to video , opening a new world of possibilities to any element within the story.
And reality itself can be the support for the documental narrative. With the development of Augmented Reality applications in mobile devices like smartphones, documentaries have a new canvas: the physical world, with the documentary work superimposing to the image captured by the phone lens, and using technologies like GPS and special recognition.
What documentaries can do, just like any other narrative based in real physical spaces, is to tell a story street by street, mixing past and future in the image of the present that we see in the naked eye. The future of the documentary is thus full of possibilities.
The only thing that is not changed is the passion and the need that move documentary makers to provide a view over a specific aspect of reality. Conscience agitators by nature, they should look to digital society like a true admirable new world, where their work can reach audiences and dimensions unthinkable only 30 years ago, where the life and repercussion of their narrative fragments can cut deep and leave their mark way after the time they were created. Their responsibility is to document, and their glory will be to persist in an ocean of information, that grows deeper and deeper.
The main feature of documentary is to not have defined borders, and to be in constant evolution. There was no better time to be like that.
I’d like to also add the interactive docs by the National Film Board where documentaries are being developed under the multimedia a nd interactive demands. A great example is the project Out My Window.
Another text that caught my attention recently was this post called “10 big ideas for the future of Film” at MediaShift.
Apr/112
HiperDoc: a revolução digital e as narrativas da realidade
Há uns meses atrás a Rita Alcaire convidou-me para escrever um artigo para um número especial da MACA, associado ao Festival Grande Angular, de documentário e Grande Reportagem.
Como a minha vida são as narrativas digitais, a minha ideia foi transmitir que mudanças o ambiente online trouxe aos documentários, que possibilidades novas de concepção, produção e distribuição existem graças à nova lógica proporcionada por ele.
Espero que gostem e agradeço o vosso feedback.
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Antes da ficção cinematográfica, a imagem em movimento dedicou-se, no seu início, a captar momentos da realidade quotidiana, como nas primeiras experiências dos irmãos Lumiére. Restringidos a um minuto de filme, pouco mais podiam fazer do que pequenos retratos do dia-a-dia, um olhar fragmentado mas animado do mundo que os rodeava. Essa sua contribuição foi decisiva para mudar a forma como o mundo olhava para si mesmo.
Hoje, mais de um século depois, atravessamos uma outra revolução de igual importância e com efeitos ainda mais profundos na nossa relação com o mundo. A internet e o avanço na tecnologia das linguagens digitais vieram criar novos espaços e novos métodos para contar e partilhar histórias não ficcionais, onde a visão pessoal e a independência ganham preponderância, assim como a abertura à participação de um elemento inesperado: o público.
Mas para se perceber o que pode mudar, temos que entender o que já mudou.
A revolução digital
A nossa vida mudou com a internet, e a forma como nos relacionamos com a realidade – a nossa e a partilhada – alterou-se profundamente na última década. Se a Revolução Industrial demorou quase dois séculos a transformar a sociedade e os seus hábitos, a Revolução Digital precisou de menos de duas décadas. Estamos na era da comunicação ubíqua, interactiva, imediata, multimédia, e, acima de tudo, pessoal.
Nunca se criaram e consumiram tantos conteúdos como agora, e grande parte deles são da autoria das “pessoas conhecidas anteriormente como o público”, no conceito disruptivo de Jay Rosen. É uma mudança no poder de criação e distribuição de conteúdos, exponenciado pelo advento das redes sociais, como o Facebook, que está a obrigar várias indústrias a repensar os seus modelos de negócio e os seus métodos de produção: primeiro a indústria discográfica, depois a cinematográfica e, desde o início, a indústria de produção de conteúdos jornalísticos.
O seu lugar como fonte única e a exclusividade na distribuição em grande escala dos seus produtos foram postos em causa pela estrutura da sociedade digital, assente na criação, partilha e redistribuição, e movida pelo espírito de independência e afirmação da individualidade.
O avanço tecnológico e o desenvolvimento dos equipamentos digitais também são uma parte importante desta nova ordem das coisas, como causa, consequência e metrónomo desta (r)evolução. Graças a produtos cada vez mais baratos e com maior qualidade, não só é mais fácil aceder à informação mas também criá-la.
As câmaras digitais – primeiro as fotográficas, depois as de vídeo e entretanto a combinação das duas – atingiram preços tão acessíveis que democratizaram o processo de criação de imagens. Por serem fáceis de utilizar, qualquer pessoa pode fazer o seu próprio registo, e com a entrada em cena de plataformas gratuitas de alojamento de fotos e vídeos, como o Flickr e o YouTube. Um processo que antes exigia um enorme conhecimento técnico e estava apenas ao alcance de alguns tornou-se simples para todos.
Se incluirmos os telemóveis, que podem captar, editar e publicar narrativas visuais, podemos dizer que todo esse poder está, literalmente, na nossa mão. O iPhone é um grande exemplo da capacidade que o objecto, que anteriormente só servia para fazer chamadas, tem nesse campo.
Esta nova lógica e a nova relação entre o utilizador comum com a realidade gerou uma espécie de metanarrativa hiper-real e hiperpessoal, não baseada num reflexo da própria realidade, mas nos estilhaços do espelho que o suportava. Milhões de pedaços do quotidiano, tal como os irmãos Lumiére modestamente fizeram.
Prateado ou de cristal líquido?
O documentário, como formato, veio beneficiar com os meios de reprodução digital. Ao longo da sua evolução histórica, sempre se viu limitado aos parâmetros impostos pelo cinema e pela televisão. Mais recentemente, a visão do documentarista conseguiu ganhar mais alcance e longevidade graças ao DVD, permitindo um maior grau de rentabilidade e reconhecimento de um género que vem ganhando adeptos numa sociedade imersa em narrativas do real e em tempo real. E, pelos pontos apresentados anteriormente, exige custos cada vez mais reduzidos.
O filme documental já não precisa de uma sala de cinema, ou, no limite, de uma sala de estar. Não precisa de se apoiar unicamente numa promoção tradicional, nem de ser distribuído pelos canais estabelecidos. A maior sala de exibição do mundo é o computador pessoal e a máquina de publicidade moderna assenta nas redes sociais e nas recomendações. E o melhor cartaz é o próprio produto.
É ponto assente que é difícil fazer com que os utilizadores paguem por conteúdos online. Isso não significa que não contribuam para que estes sejam criados: merchandising, edições em formato físico com extras exclusivos, sessões especiais, são tudo formas de financiar projectos documentais. Podemos até pedir ao nosso potencial público para contribuir financeiramente para a realização do nosso projecto, aquilo que se chama de crowdfunding.
Existem plataformas dedicadas a esse tipo de financiamento de filmes e há documentaristas a tentar fazê-lo individualmente. Usando as plataformas existentes podemos disponibilizar facilmente o nosso trabalho, e com uma boa utilização das redes sociais, promovê-lo. O documentário, como qualquer conteúdo online hoje em dia, pode ser visto quando o utilizador quiser, onde quiser, na plataforma que quiser, seja num iPad, num telemóvel ou no seu computador. E o melhor de tudo é que não fica escondido numa prateleira, mas continua permanentemente acessível na rede, prolongando a sua vida útil e reforçando o seu valor como documento.
Mas a multidão digital pode fornecer mais do que apoio financeiro. Pode fornecer a história.
O público é o conteúdo
Apesar de se falar muito do projecto A Life in a Day de Ridley Scott e Kevin MacDonald, que pretende juntar contribuições de utilizadores através do YouTube para fazer um filme que mostre pedaços de vida à volta do planeta a 24 de Julho de 2010, houve quem se tivesse antecipado e feito algo dentro dos mesmos moldes. Frank Kelly, um realizador independente irlandês, usou o Twitter (popular plataforma de comunicação para comunicar em 140 caracteres de cada vez) para criar uma longa-metragem que juntasse 140 mini-filmes de 140 segundos cada, e que fossem filmados em sincronia em 140 pontos do mundo por quem quisesse participar.
Em Maio de 2009, ele disse-me que “como um cineasta independente que não tem verba e ainda está a tentar entrar na indústria, a internet é uma ferramenta essencial para continuar a criar trabalho, e conectar-me a pessoas com ideias semelhantes”, permitindo-lhe fazer algo que “teria sido impossível (…) há 10 anos atrás.” Intitulado adequadamente de “140”, o filme já está terminado e tem recebido críticas favoráveis pelo esforço de coordenar estes retratos dispersos que, juntos, dão uma imagem do planeta maior do que a mera soma de todas as partes.
Mesmo na criação de documentários mais tradicionais, a participação do público e a a importância das redes para obter informação são de um valor inquestionável, não fosse a internet o maior arquivo e o maior espaço de comunicação do mundo. Apesar da dimensão desse arquivo ser praticamente infinita, a memória colectiva e as redes pessoais de cada utilizador são ainda recursos ricos que o documentarista pode explorar a uma escala nunca antes vista.
Assim, a posição do criador de documentários, como qualquer outro criador de conteúdos nos nossos dias, altera-se. Não é mais uma relação unidireccional, de um para muitos, mas um processo envolvente, de permanente diálogo.
Crossover
Não foram só a relação com o público, as plataformas e o processo de distribuição que mudaram para quem faz documentários. A própria relação com o assunto, com os sujeitos da história e as linguagens também se alteraram. Com as vantagens que um equipamento mais portátil e discreto permite, a agilidade e discrição na recolha de material audiovisual também aumentou, assim como a facilidade e velocidade de edição.
Novas linguagens e processos de produção foram surgindo graças às novas possibilidades técnicas que as narrativas digitais permitem. É provavelmente a maior mudança de linguagem visual no género desde o surgimento do cinema verité nos anos 1950/1960. Mais conteúdos, menos custos, mais possibilidades de pós-produção e envolvimento de outros formatos inseridos no vídeo de base, abriram tremendas possibilidades criativas para os contadores de histórias reais.
O próprio jornalismo online, para conteúdos de longo formato e de profundidade, apropriou-se do tom documental para narrar as suas histórias. Se olharmos para uma das referências neste campo, o projecto MediaStorm (www.mediastorm.com), podemos ver várias características do documentário presentes nessas narrativas.
Ultrapassam os “limites” do vídeo e usam narrativas eminentemente online como audioslideshows, um formato que usa como suporte o áudio e a fotografia sincronizados. Outra forma de realizar um documentário que está em voga graças ao online e às suas características, e já testada nos moldes tradicionais como nos filmes Baraka e a trilogia Qatsi , são os filmes que exploram um estilo não textual, baseando-se apenas no poder das imagens e da música.
A série “Routines” segue este modelo com uma forte componente experimental. Estas novas formas de contar histórias vieram questionar e alargar a própria definição do que um documentário pode ser, na sua forma.
Mesmo a duração de um filme deixou de ter um standard com o online. Muitos documentários, ou filmes que podem cair nessa categoria, não são muito longos: podem durar dois ou 15 minutos, podem ser objectos únicos ou fazer parte de uma série. A liberdade de se poder facilmente abordar qualquer tema e dedicar-lhe o tempo estritamente necessário veio provar que a importância de um assunto, assim como a sua beleza, está no olhar de quem o observa.
Não há histórias, conceitos ou personagens demasiado pobres para serem abordados. O que a Revolução Digital trouxe para as narrativas do real foram processos e espaços para histórias que eram anteriormente negligenciadas ou abandonadas quer pelos meios tradicionais, quer mesmo por aqueles que seriam os únicos a querer contá-las: os documentaristas.
Mas se temos ferramentas, espaço, liberdade para contar essas histórias, é preciso também entender que, como se trata de um ambiente em permanente evolução, o mundo digital e em rede veio trazer outras formas de se fazer documentários, não sendo só a narrativa linear do vídeo a única opção.
O futuro não é linear
Uma das características mais importantes da linguagem multimédia, ou seja, de uma linguagem que engloba meios diferentes, interdependentes, é a interactividade e a possibilidade de cada utilizador seguir o seu próprio caminho na narrativa, em vez de passivamente seguir uma história. Esta leitura define-se como não linear. As implicações destes dois elementos-chave do meio online afectam profundamente a forma como se constroem os documentários do futuro, sendo o futuro agora.
Online, o vídeo pode coexistir com outros formatos e integrar-se com eles. Um documentário pode basear-se numa narrativa assente num mapa, numa linha temporal, ou nas duas coisas em simultâneo, onde os utilizadores navegam por blocos de informação visual, videográfica ou não, numa experiência mais ou menos imersiva de acordo com os seus desejos. O contrário também pode acontecer, com a adição de características interactivas ao próprio vídeo, abrindo um novo mundo de possibilidades para cada elemento dentro de uma história .
E a própria realidade pode ser um suporte para a narrativa documental. Com a implementação de aplicações de realidade aumentada (“Augmented Reality” ) em dispositivos móveis como os smartphones, os documentários ganham outra tela: o mundo físico, com o trabalho documental super-impondo-se à imagem captada pela lente fotográfica do telemóvel, e usando tecnologias tão diversas como o GPS e o reconhecimento espacial.
O que os documentários podem fazer, assim como outras narrativas assentes em espaços físicos reais, é poder contar uma história quase rua a rua, incluindo passado e futuro na imagem do presente que vemos a olho nu. O futuro do documentário está assim cheio de possibilidades.
A única coisa que não muda é a paixão e a necessidade que movem os documentaristas em fornecer um olhar sobre um determinado aspecto da realidade. Agitadores de consciências por natureza, eles devem olhar para a sociedade digital como um verdadeiro admirável mundo novo, onde o seu trabalho pode atingir públicos e dimensões impensáveis há apenas 30 anos atrás, onde a vida e repercussão dos seus estilhaços narrativos podem cortar fundo e deixar marcas muito tempo depois de terem sido criados. A sua responsabilidade é documentar, e a sua glória será persistir num oceano de informação, que cada vez se torna mais profundo.
A principal característica do documentário é não ter fronteiras definidas, e estar em permanente evolução. Nunca houve melhor altura para algo ser assim.
Em adenda, gostaria de destacar os trabalhos realizados pelo National Film Board canadiano, onde a linguagem documental está a ser desenvolvida dentro das exigências multimédia e interactivas trazidas pelo online. Um excelente exemplo é o projecto Out My Window.
É este o futuro do documentário no ambiente digital, ou seja, é este o futuro do documentário na sua concepção técnica e narrativa.
Sep/100
I’m a smartass
Don’t you hate people that keep saying “I saw that one coming” or “I told you so”? I hate even more when I see people saying stuff i said before, and better than I did. But it’s comforting to know that sometimes a crazy idea is not that crazy at all.
In one of Google Reader items I saw the presentation of a new video tool:
Interactive video transcription and captioning service 3Play Media has an answer with a video clipping feature it announced today that “allows users to quickly create and share specific portions of a video simply by highlighting the spoken words in the transcript.”
Rather than introducing a video by asking your friends to use somewhat inaccurate controls to skip ahead, the service helps take them directly to the part of the video you intend, right down to the specific word. The service creates a link that includes start- and stop-time information. When you click on the link, you’re taken to a page that shows not only the video, but a word for word transcription alongside it.
This reminded me of one of those crazy ideas I sometimes have. In January this year I wrote:
I hate to transcribe every single word from an audio recording, and I’m also really slow taking notes. So, what about some voice recognition magic, that would get every little word out to text format, while recording the audio, and the timeline for editing that audio would be words themselves. Not getting it? You’d edit the statements like a Word doc, but if you chose a paragraph you’d have the audio associated to that specific bit ready to export. And send it immediately for publishing.
Not exactly the same idea, but pretty much the same principle. If 3Play Media tweaked the code a bit I think they could do what I proposed.
Jun/102
MA Online Journalism – The Paranoia Timeline
One of the assignments i did for my Online Journalism module was a timeline depicting some of the major events that caused social stir across the world in the last 20 years. Some were real, some were just, well, paranoid behavior, hence The Paranoia Timeline. This is a description of the project – that stayed incomplete, still in a conceptual phase - and the steps and views i have on it.
I would like to hear from you, about what can be done with archive journalism, with different narratives, and if you want to help me develop the timeline (it’s filled with mock content, and it’s maybe in the 5% of its full potential) let me know. I wanted this to be a collaborative project, with different people contributing with ideas, videos, text, pictures, graphs, opinions, so any help is more than welcome.
So you can have an idea of what is the spirit of The Paranoia Timeline, here’s a small video i edited as a promo.
“Paranoia is a thought process heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion.” Wikipedia
The Project
In an attempt to explore new ways to report stories, I decided for this project to use a timeline as a platform to report on some events that had social impact in the last 20 years. The kind of aftermath these events had is not constrained to geographical levels, and they altered our everyday lives, and in some cases, our world views and personal experience. Some of these events caused social hysteria or global discussion and forced governments to act in ways that affected the common citizen.
The Paranoia Timeline[i] is based in a type of journalism that I believe to be quite ignored by mainstream media, which is archive journalism. This type of reporting works with – as the name implies – with archive information and preexistent content, and my idea was to use available data and information to create a retrospective view on a few events that fulfilled the parameters presented before. Being the Internet the world’s largest archive, it was logical to work exclusively with online content, and reuse it to make something new, using computer assisted reporting and mashups.
Though the current result falls short of my initial goals, it is a prototype for a more involving experience, and I consider it to be a work in construction. What I’ll be defending here is a concept with a few examples using interactive tools, but I realize this is just a small sample of what it can really be: an immersive, ongoing project, with more interactive features, providing a journalistic approach to issues highly debated and prone to partisanship, many of them used by religious and political groups to spin their own ideologies to the general audience. The purpose is to create context.
Research
First of all, I had to look for the most reliable and customizable timeline creating tool available for free[ii]. After pondering a few options, I chose Dipity[iii], mostly because of its reliability and ease of use, but I must admit I preferred something even more powerful: Dipity still has some glitches.
The first question was how to pinpoint in importance and time the events for this timeline. At first I used my own memory and experience and then used other people’s to limit it to the most important and visible ones. Wikipedia is a great resource when it comes to sum up the most important events in a decade, so I looked up the decade entries, in this case the 90’s and the 00’s. It was a good starting point to find the candidates for this timeline, and, simultaneously, to have more links for my research.
But when it came to limit those events in time I had a problem: how could I limit the span of the importance of the events in public opinion? The best way I found was to use Google and their timeline tool.
By searching for peaks in the timeline created by Google, I could define exactly the period when the subject was widely discussed. Since Google also has the Google News Archive, with copies of pre-Internet newspapers, I also had a long run perspective for the subject at hand that could be used for historical context.
Other valuable resource was Archive.org. This website has an immense collection of media under public domain that can be used to illustrate some of these stories. I made a pastiche video using almost exclusively footage available there, with the exception of some stock footage available for free at a specialized website. The video works as a promo for the website, and it should have included two interviews, but I wasn’t able to do any of them. Still, my idea was to create an audiovisual narrative for each subject of the timeline, like a mini documentary series, using both archive footage and actual interviews with experts. I also tried to use Google’s Newstimeline[iv], but it wasn’t embeddable I had to give up the idea of having a scrolling timeline with newspapers about the specific subject.
Data
I chose two subjects to investigate using data: the recent swine flu and the credit crunch. Both of them are rich in statistical information so I decided to do a death map for the flu[v], and a graph showing loan evolution in the United States since 2003, using Tableau.
The swine flu data came from Wolfram-Alpha[vi] that generated a rather reliable (after cross checking with other official websites) amount of data, with the number of cases and deaths per country. I had to make an option about which would be highlighted, but discrepancies in the logical amount of cases between countries made me go just for the death numbers. The conclusion that I got from the map is that swine flu was either more serious or reported in the developed countries. Traditionally considered Third World countries do not have many reports, which reflect the lack of structures to deal with the problem or how overhyped it was in the Western world. But France on its own had almost 3 million cases reported against 57 thousand in the United States, which led me to verify closely other sources. It seems Wolfram Alpha had the number wrong, there were only about 5000 reports, which proves that outliers in data are either new stories or just input errors.
For the credit crunch[vii], I researched the FDIC – Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation[viii] database. They have a considerable amount of statistical data available for download. My idea was to chart the evolution of loans in the United States in the last years, and the main idea was that overall loans slowed down since 2009 but individual credits rose, meaning an increase in personal debt to cope with overall difficulties caused by the crunch.I selected the items that seemed more relevant and went for a simple line chart. My purpose was served.
Production
The timeline had to be embedded in a website, so I used WordPress as a platform. The timeline would provide links to the posts about each topic, and each post would have developed content besides the one already present in the timeline items.
I tried to crowdsource some of the work, using Google Wave and my own network of contacts, but it didn’t work. I also tried to use HARO[ix] network, but they don’t call themselves HASO for a reason (they don’t help students out). Taking all the responsibility for the reporting made me narrow down the content for this assignment to just a few events. I asked permission to use some works already created by other users, like the chart in the 2012 post and some pictures from Flickr. An issue stood out immediately: my idea was not to aggregate content, but to create new content from what I had found. But eventually I realized there are many works out there that fit the needs for contextualization that are so much better than what I could try to create.
So I focused more on the concept, and that’s why I have so many empty posts, like I said, it is a prototype that needs further development. That’s also why I didn’t use social networks, although their importance would be paramount in the future, to engage users into debating the subjects of the timeline.
Copyright and ethics
Using Public Domain material is not an issue, but we always need to read the small print in some of the Creative Commons available content. Not all allow transforming the original, so I had to make some options. Overall, it was quite easy to find audio and visual content to work with, and I have a long list of links to videos to assess. I asked for permission to use some visual elements, namely the 2012 chart, which was what I was looking for, kindly granted by its author.
The disclosure of the Paranoia Timeline as a non-conspiracy theory website also allows me to avoid one sided views and the usual partisanship that we find in other websites that address these subjects.
Innovation
What makes me look at my project as an innovative narrative for journalism is my idea that retrospective journalism should be made, especially now that we have easy access to so much archived content. The perennial quality of web content makes it easily available and thanks to the efforts of Google, even non digital content – old newspapers – is available, which makes it, in my perspective, an interesting and valuable journalistic narrative. Context is the keyword here, and I believe this is the most important objective of new narratives in a world of fragmented torrents of information. This could be also a premium feature for news companies.
This is yet far from finished, but I’ll be working on the project in the near future, and hopefully not as a one man band.
[i] TPT website http://www.theparanoiatimeline.com/
[ii] My blog post about timeline tools http://tinyurl.com/28erszn
[iii] Dipity timeline http://tinyurl.com/38zk5ug
[iv] http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/
[v] Swine flu post http://tinyurl.com/39c282w
[vi] Wolfram-Alpha swine flu data http://tinyurl.com/39urc6d
[vii] Credit Crunch post http://tinyurl.com/24xb7ok
[viii] FDIC – Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation http://www2.fdic.gov/SDI/SOB/
[ix] Help A Reporter Out – http://www.helpareporter.com/
May/105
Portuguese deputy doesn’t like the questions and takes reporter’s recorders
click on image to see the video
Ricardo Rodrigues, a Portuguese parliament deputy, was being interviewed by two journalists from Sábado magazine, and after being questioned about its connection (or lack of) to a pedophilia case in Azores and a financial scam – his name was involved in rumours, but was never charged – he decided enough was enough and got up and left the room, taking the journalist’s audio recorders on its way out. Fortunately he forgot about the camera.
The journalists filed a complaint for theft and menace to freedom of press, while the deputy asked for a court order, based on the argument that he was under “unbearable psychological violence” caused by the “harassment and false assumptions” on the part of the journalists. In a press conference he admitted that his actions were “rash”.
Rodrigues is a deputy for the majority party (Portuguese Socialist Party) and was an attorney, being also one of the party’s voices in Justice issues. This is just another in a string of incidents involving the majority party and the press. The Prime Minister has been accused of meddling in the management of a private station, a matter that is currently under investigation by a hearing commission.
Portuguese public television report
Apr/100
Adam Westbrook on video and soundslides
video editing 101
Adam Westbrook came to BCU to give us a quick lecture about visual narratives, focusing on video and soundslides. He showed us a few examples of visual storytelling and shared with us the basics, like story arcs, sequences, editing. It’s not something we can learn instantly but it’s easy to find references in our video drowned culture. Main ideas: web is not television, though video has a fundamental language that crosses over all types of moving image narratives, from news to cinema, from documentary to animation. And to make it work, keep it simple, and avoid the technical gimmicks, make it personal and intimate. Other advices include get lots of ambient sound, find color in the character’s surroundings and story.
One of the examples he brought us was this great story.
And the secret to become a good visual storyteller? Practice, practice, practice. Get a camera and just do it.
