DIGITAL DOCUMENTARY - THE REVOLUTION THAT IS NOT BEING TELEVISED
In the early 20th century, contemporary pundits did not see much potential in the
newly created motion picture medium. The legendary Thomas Edison had tied up the
American market with his harshly enforced patents, while the French Lumiere brothers
had introduced their version of the motion picture camera to many countries in the rest of the world. Nontheless, neither the business nor the artistic powers of the day regarded the new medium as anything more than a novelty, a vulgar diversion suitable for carnival sideshows and other plebian entertainments.
The rest, as they say, is history...
Perhaps these pundits, aside from being cultural protectors of the powers-that-be, were victims of the age-old human dislike for change and innovation. Or perhaps,like
legendary Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan might say, they felt threatened by the unknown cultural implications of the new medium..
Whatever their motivation, thanks to the creative efforts of the early German expressionists and others, as well as the impressive commercial success of the early Hollywood industry,these pundits were forced to radically revise their evaluations, or risk being left behind at the station by what quickly become The Dominant Medium of the Twentieth Century..
Now, a century later, we find ourselves in a similar situation. Over the past decade,
digital technology has invaded our lives on many fronts, and now is virtually omnipresent. In the process, old media definitions and categories are rapidly crumbling, and new ones are being invented almost daily in a desperate attempt to keep up with our new reality.
For slow-moving bureaucracies, this transformation has been a nightmare. For example,
my university in Sweden, the University of Lund, is a venerable institution founded in the 17th century, and has a fine Department of Literary History that just recently permitted the creation of a Department of Film History under its academic umbrella. Unfortunately, this excellent department may soon be examining the relics of an extinct medium, since the film medium as we know it arguably ended with the 20th century.
The effects on this technological transformation on both commerce and creativity have
been profound, and may well prove to be revolutionary. Time will tell.
Last year, in a moment of rare insight, the American publication TIME MAGAZINE
named the interactive consumers of YouTube and MySpace as People of the Year. The message was clear to anyone willing to pay attention, but many culture vultures, put off by anything targeting the youth market, still put down YouTube and MySpace as kid-stuff , a silly novelties in a league with dumb video games and Britney Spears.
Baby boomers like myself who had had extensive contact with the younger generation,
knew they were on to something; just as our generation experienced a generation gap with our parents due to new technology like television, the youth of today have been dramatically affected by exposure to cybernetic and digital technology from an early age. Personally, I experienced this first-hand when I was taught the fine points of digital film editing by my 19 year-old assistant Jade; as I struggled to master my new editing tools, I soon realized that my years of arduous professional expertise had given me all the wrong instincts for digital post-production, and that I would have to approach things very differently.
My grandfather's definition of an expert as someone who knows" more and more about less and less, until finally he knows everything about nothing" came to my mind, and I was duly humbled, to put it mildly.
Similarly, self-proclaimed "media experts" and pundits who had mocked YouTube and internet film distribution were forced to eat major crow in recent weeks when Burmese digital activists were able to capture digital images of anti-government demonstrations by priests and then up-load them to websites for subsequent re-distribution via internet to the world. The images were so powerful that the world was finally forced to take notice of conditions in a country which had been conveniently ignored since the military overturned the landslide victory of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi in the 1988 election.
" Cellphones vs. guns in Myanmar: Junta was unprepared for digital age's effect on repression" was the headline for an article by Seth Mydans in The International Herald Tribune of October 3, 2007.
And, in the same article , Frank Moretti, Executive Director of Columbia University's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning in New York, was quoted as saying:
" For those of us who study communications technology, this was of equal importance to the telegraph, which was the first medium that separated communications and transportation..."
The practical result?
According to Phillip Knightly, author of THE FIRST CASUALTY, a classic history of war reporting, " Today every citizen is a war correspondent... Mobile phones with
video of broadcast quality have made it possible for anyone to report a war. You just have to be there..."
To remind the younger generation of just how far the medium has come in
a very short time, a brief historical review might be useful.
In the past, film making was always been an expensive proposition, and even bargain basement documentary films could run a few thousand dollars per minute of screen time, since documentary films always had a high shooting ratio of 20 or more to 1, and film stock and film processing and printing were always the largest items on the budget, since one could always negotiate professional fees.
When I was studying film directing in the State Film School in Sweden in the 1980s, we had everything - fully equipped studios with all the latest gadgets, professional cameras and sound equipment, and the best talent in the country, The only thing that was in short supply was film - because that was an external cost that could not be negotiated.
As our Eastern European instructors constantly reminded us, we could minimize the shooting ratio for dramatic films with careful planning and rehearsing, but the very nature of the documentary medium made such strategies impossible.
The advent of videotape around that time did not solve the problem Professional cameras and editing equipment were very expensive, and so-called "broadcast quality" productions were only possible with a big budget.
Duplication quality was another issue with film and tape. Any duplication meant serious quality loss, and each successive duplication meant more quality loss. Even a high quality third or fourth generation film dupe could look like it was shot in a snow storm of grain, and video dupes usually looked even worse.
Sound, of course, was another headache. It had to be done separately, and analog sound quality was a technical minefield full of potential disasters for the filmmaker trying to cut costs. Professional microphones and tape recorders were indispensable, because problems were amplified exponentially every step of the way through to motion picture screenings and television broadcast.
At that time, the legendary 2 and a half Rule applied to sound mixes: One synch track, one dialogue track, and half an effects track were the limit - the rest would be lost on the inferior optical sound of movie theatre, not to mention the dreadful
analog sound of television sets.
These factors meant that film and video tape were essentially exclusive media available only to wealthy corporations and countries.There were some exceptions, but very few, and those few did not last long - mere blips on the historic radar screen.
In other words, in the 2oth century, Hollywood and its allies has ruled the world of film, and the only alternatives have been some of the government sponsored movements in Europe, as well as the Indian film industry, which has many similarities to Hollywood in its products and practises, most notably in the way it suppresses the distribution of independent films.
This domination has extended to film exhibition. I experienced this first-hand teaching a film history course at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City for the past decade. Many old films -even widely recognized classics - were hard to get, and were certainly not readily available in DVD chains like Blockbusters. Much to my dismay, I discovered that many of my students had never even heard of great directors like Fellini or Kurosawa, much less see their films. When I had been a university student in Sweden in the 1970's, there were film societies devoted to showing the classics of world cinema, and, when I first arrived in New York in the 1980s. there were revival houses showing retrospectives of the work of great directors.
These phenomena were obliterated by the rise of vertical integration in corporate media. Fewer and fewer companies controlled more and more, until finally independent production companies,distributors and theatres were all but wiped out.
The last strongholds of independent film became the government sponsored foundations like the Film Institute in Sweden, which was created in the early 1960s to support
the films of Ingmar Bergman, a classic example of a great director who never could have survived in the commercial market place.
Commericial production in Sweden, for example, was a virtual monopoly situation, with one company, Svensk Filmindustri, contolling almost 80 % of film production,
distribution, and exhibition in the country. Since Svensk Filmindustri made most of its money on Hollywood blockbusters, it had little incentive to produce any Swedish films at all. What films it did produce generally targeted the lowest common
denominator, since a Swedish film had to be seen by 10 % of the entire population to break even in the 1980s.
This, needless to say, made it difficult to make interesting films, which I experienced first-hand.
In 1985 I wrote a Swedish comedy titled INSIDER TRADING that was intended as a witty satire on supply side economics, and Svensk Filmindustri bought the company that produced the film and then arranged for a premiere on same evening as RAMBO 2, which, to put it mildy, stole our thunder.
The nail in our coffin was provided by a cacophony of devastating reviews in the leading newspapers - most of which were owned by the same company that owned Svensk Filmindustri,( Incredibly enough, the film broke even at the box office, a remarkable turn of events I can only attribute to the brilliant screenplay!)
This kind of vertical integration transformed film from an exciting medium full fo surprises to depressingly predictable mass entertainment in the last decades of the
20 th century - at least in the Western world.
Personally, I did my best to improve this situation by attempting to produce independent features in New York - both dramatic and documentary. I didn't get much off the ground, but I certainly learned a lot about the industry in the process.
Audio digital technology became available around this time, and I remember working as music editor on a film about the legendary Ornette Coleman on which all music
had been digitally recorded, and the quality was extraordinary.
Then I worked with an amazing New York character - a white composer named Floyd F. Fisher ( his middle name was short for " Fuckin', since he was a producer of rap music...)
Floyd had a new Sony DAT recorder, and he was able to record all the music for the film without a studio, and that certainly got my attention. And when he was able to
record all our voice-overs in our office on Lower Broadway - without a sound-proof booth or a studio of any kind, I decided I needed to learn a lot more about digita
My first real exposure to the possibilities of digital documentary technology was working as a television producer for the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor in 2000.
We were working with Sony TRV 900 Mini-DV cameras that were deceptively small and inconspicuous. After years of working with much larger 16 mm and , later, Betacam,
cameras, I was immediately impressed by both the ease of working with this camera, as well as by the relative impact of the process on the subject.
Rather than screaming to everyone that we were Important Electronic Journalists Broadcasting to the World, we looked like harmless and innocuous amateurs - fools making home movies...
However, after we edited the film, and it was projected on a motion picture screen in a theatre, it certainly didn't look - or sound -like a home movie. Quite to the contrary, it had the impact of a serious motion picture - and all the old barriers
of " broadcast quality" were dead and buried.
The first time I saw this phenomenon, I felt an epiphany of sorts, and I was glad to be alive...Now it was possible for an entire new generation of filmmakers to make their own very personal statements - instead of spending 90% of their time hustling for money, they could now be making movies.
However, one major barrier remained - distribution. We ran into in East Timor trying to help the Timorese set their own television station. While we were able to generate a lot of material, showing it was another matter. All we had was a very limited broadcast capability. An attempt was made to show material on VHS in rural areas,but there were so many problems it never got off the ground.
Now, if we had had access to a satellite, as the country
had had when it belonged to Indonesia, it might have been
another story.
I returned to New York and ended up making a feature documentary on East Timor titled EAST TIMOR;BETRAYAL AND RESURRECTION that told the recent history of East Timor as I saw it. Since I could not find any funding for the film, it was a very low-budget production; my staff consisted of former students working as un-paid interns.
Nontheless, I was able to able to finish the film, only to discover there was no interest in East Timor among the media buyers in the United States. I had to settle for a screening at the World Film Festival in Bangkok, where director Victor Kriengsiek called my film " the most important film of the year ( 2003). There were were also screenings at special events on behalf of the East Timorese, and the UN Correspondents Association's Ricardo Ortega Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. Along the way, I received an invitation from Prime Minister Xanana
Gusmao to return and make a sequel on the problems of the economic development in his country.
So I decided quality was definitely not the problem.
I then met Robert Greenwald, an American filmmaker specializing in political documentaries, including a scathing attack on Fox Television called OUTFOXED. Mr. Greenwald,fed up with being given a run-around by film festivals and American tv stations, decided to sell his films as DVDS through internet political action websites, and met with spectacular success. He was able to connect with his audience directly, without going through the filter of experts and middlemen, and was well rewarded.
Aha!
I have now spent the past year in Asia waiting for peace to break out in East Timor, or Timor-leste,as it is now known, and have been researching a doctoral thesis for Sweden's University of Lund titled DIGITAL DOCUMENTARY: THE REVOLUTION THAT IS NOT
BEING TELEVISED...
In the process, I have become more and more intrigued by the possibilities of digital film and internet distribution. In two months, I shall take up a position as a television producer for the United Nations Mission to the Congo, ( also known as MONUC), which I think will be a great opportunity to test some of my theories in practise.
The more I see, the more I am convinced we are on the verge of a very exciting technical revolution that will change the film power structure from vertical integration to one of horizontal distribution - and,just as the music industry has discovered, there is not much the powers- that- be can do to stop this phenomenon directly.
All they can do is follow the example of old-time moguls like Michael Eisner and climb aboard and enjoy the ride..
newly created motion picture medium. The legendary Thomas Edison had tied up the
American market with his harshly enforced patents, while the French Lumiere brothers
had introduced their version of the motion picture camera to many countries in the rest of the world. Nontheless, neither the business nor the artistic powers of the day regarded the new medium as anything more than a novelty, a vulgar diversion suitable for carnival sideshows and other plebian entertainments.
The rest, as they say, is history...
Perhaps these pundits, aside from being cultural protectors of the powers-that-be, were victims of the age-old human dislike for change and innovation. Or perhaps,like
legendary Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan might say, they felt threatened by the unknown cultural implications of the new medium..
Whatever their motivation, thanks to the creative efforts of the early German expressionists and others, as well as the impressive commercial success of the early Hollywood industry,these pundits were forced to radically revise their evaluations, or risk being left behind at the station by what quickly become The Dominant Medium of the Twentieth Century..
Now, a century later, we find ourselves in a similar situation. Over the past decade,
digital technology has invaded our lives on many fronts, and now is virtually omnipresent. In the process, old media definitions and categories are rapidly crumbling, and new ones are being invented almost daily in a desperate attempt to keep up with our new reality.
For slow-moving bureaucracies, this transformation has been a nightmare. For example,
my university in Sweden, the University of Lund, is a venerable institution founded in the 17th century, and has a fine Department of Literary History that just recently permitted the creation of a Department of Film History under its academic umbrella. Unfortunately, this excellent department may soon be examining the relics of an extinct medium, since the film medium as we know it arguably ended with the 20th century.
The effects on this technological transformation on both commerce and creativity have
been profound, and may well prove to be revolutionary. Time will tell.
Last year, in a moment of rare insight, the American publication TIME MAGAZINE
named the interactive consumers of YouTube and MySpace as People of the Year. The message was clear to anyone willing to pay attention, but many culture vultures, put off by anything targeting the youth market, still put down YouTube and MySpace as kid-stuff , a silly novelties in a league with dumb video games and Britney Spears.
Baby boomers like myself who had had extensive contact with the younger generation,
knew they were on to something; just as our generation experienced a generation gap with our parents due to new technology like television, the youth of today have been dramatically affected by exposure to cybernetic and digital technology from an early age. Personally, I experienced this first-hand when I was taught the fine points of digital film editing by my 19 year-old assistant Jade; as I struggled to master my new editing tools, I soon realized that my years of arduous professional expertise had given me all the wrong instincts for digital post-production, and that I would have to approach things very differently.
My grandfather's definition of an expert as someone who knows" more and more about less and less, until finally he knows everything about nothing" came to my mind, and I was duly humbled, to put it mildly.
Similarly, self-proclaimed "media experts" and pundits who had mocked YouTube and internet film distribution were forced to eat major crow in recent weeks when Burmese digital activists were able to capture digital images of anti-government demonstrations by priests and then up-load them to websites for subsequent re-distribution via internet to the world. The images were so powerful that the world was finally forced to take notice of conditions in a country which had been conveniently ignored since the military overturned the landslide victory of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi in the 1988 election.
" Cellphones vs. guns in Myanmar: Junta was unprepared for digital age's effect on repression" was the headline for an article by Seth Mydans in The International Herald Tribune of October 3, 2007.
And, in the same article , Frank Moretti, Executive Director of Columbia University's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning in New York, was quoted as saying:
" For those of us who study communications technology, this was of equal importance to the telegraph, which was the first medium that separated communications and transportation..."
The practical result?
According to Phillip Knightly, author of THE FIRST CASUALTY, a classic history of war reporting, " Today every citizen is a war correspondent... Mobile phones with
video of broadcast quality have made it possible for anyone to report a war. You just have to be there..."
To remind the younger generation of just how far the medium has come in
a very short time, a brief historical review might be useful.
In the past, film making was always been an expensive proposition, and even bargain basement documentary films could run a few thousand dollars per minute of screen time, since documentary films always had a high shooting ratio of 20 or more to 1, and film stock and film processing and printing were always the largest items on the budget, since one could always negotiate professional fees.
When I was studying film directing in the State Film School in Sweden in the 1980s, we had everything - fully equipped studios with all the latest gadgets, professional cameras and sound equipment, and the best talent in the country, The only thing that was in short supply was film - because that was an external cost that could not be negotiated.
As our Eastern European instructors constantly reminded us, we could minimize the shooting ratio for dramatic films with careful planning and rehearsing, but the very nature of the documentary medium made such strategies impossible.
The advent of videotape around that time did not solve the problem Professional cameras and editing equipment were very expensive, and so-called "broadcast quality" productions were only possible with a big budget.
Duplication quality was another issue with film and tape. Any duplication meant serious quality loss, and each successive duplication meant more quality loss. Even a high quality third or fourth generation film dupe could look like it was shot in a snow storm of grain, and video dupes usually looked even worse.
Sound, of course, was another headache. It had to be done separately, and analog sound quality was a technical minefield full of potential disasters for the filmmaker trying to cut costs. Professional microphones and tape recorders were indispensable, because problems were amplified exponentially every step of the way through to motion picture screenings and television broadcast.
At that time, the legendary 2 and a half Rule applied to sound mixes: One synch track, one dialogue track, and half an effects track were the limit - the rest would be lost on the inferior optical sound of movie theatre, not to mention the dreadful
analog sound of television sets.
These factors meant that film and video tape were essentially exclusive media available only to wealthy corporations and countries.There were some exceptions, but very few, and those few did not last long - mere blips on the historic radar screen.
In other words, in the 2oth century, Hollywood and its allies has ruled the world of film, and the only alternatives have been some of the government sponsored movements in Europe, as well as the Indian film industry, which has many similarities to Hollywood in its products and practises, most notably in the way it suppresses the distribution of independent films.
This domination has extended to film exhibition. I experienced this first-hand teaching a film history course at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City for the past decade. Many old films -even widely recognized classics - were hard to get, and were certainly not readily available in DVD chains like Blockbusters. Much to my dismay, I discovered that many of my students had never even heard of great directors like Fellini or Kurosawa, much less see their films. When I had been a university student in Sweden in the 1970's, there were film societies devoted to showing the classics of world cinema, and, when I first arrived in New York in the 1980s. there were revival houses showing retrospectives of the work of great directors.
These phenomena were obliterated by the rise of vertical integration in corporate media. Fewer and fewer companies controlled more and more, until finally independent production companies,distributors and theatres were all but wiped out.
The last strongholds of independent film became the government sponsored foundations like the Film Institute in Sweden, which was created in the early 1960s to support
the films of Ingmar Bergman, a classic example of a great director who never could have survived in the commercial market place.
Commericial production in Sweden, for example, was a virtual monopoly situation, with one company, Svensk Filmindustri, contolling almost 80 % of film production,
distribution, and exhibition in the country. Since Svensk Filmindustri made most of its money on Hollywood blockbusters, it had little incentive to produce any Swedish films at all. What films it did produce generally targeted the lowest common
denominator, since a Swedish film had to be seen by 10 % of the entire population to break even in the 1980s.
This, needless to say, made it difficult to make interesting films, which I experienced first-hand.
In 1985 I wrote a Swedish comedy titled INSIDER TRADING that was intended as a witty satire on supply side economics, and Svensk Filmindustri bought the company that produced the film and then arranged for a premiere on same evening as RAMBO 2, which, to put it mildy, stole our thunder.
The nail in our coffin was provided by a cacophony of devastating reviews in the leading newspapers - most of which were owned by the same company that owned Svensk Filmindustri,( Incredibly enough, the film broke even at the box office, a remarkable turn of events I can only attribute to the brilliant screenplay!)
This kind of vertical integration transformed film from an exciting medium full fo surprises to depressingly predictable mass entertainment in the last decades of the
20 th century - at least in the Western world.
Personally, I did my best to improve this situation by attempting to produce independent features in New York - both dramatic and documentary. I didn't get much off the ground, but I certainly learned a lot about the industry in the process.
Audio digital technology became available around this time, and I remember working as music editor on a film about the legendary Ornette Coleman on which all music
had been digitally recorded, and the quality was extraordinary.
Then I worked with an amazing New York character - a white composer named Floyd F. Fisher ( his middle name was short for " Fuckin', since he was a producer of rap music...)
Floyd had a new Sony DAT recorder, and he was able to record all the music for the film without a studio, and that certainly got my attention. And when he was able to
record all our voice-overs in our office on Lower Broadway - without a sound-proof booth or a studio of any kind, I decided I needed to learn a lot more about digita
My first real exposure to the possibilities of digital documentary technology was working as a television producer for the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor in 2000.
We were working with Sony TRV 900 Mini-DV cameras that were deceptively small and inconspicuous. After years of working with much larger 16 mm and , later, Betacam,
cameras, I was immediately impressed by both the ease of working with this camera, as well as by the relative impact of the process on the subject.
Rather than screaming to everyone that we were Important Electronic Journalists Broadcasting to the World, we looked like harmless and innocuous amateurs - fools making home movies...
However, after we edited the film, and it was projected on a motion picture screen in a theatre, it certainly didn't look - or sound -like a home movie. Quite to the contrary, it had the impact of a serious motion picture - and all the old barriers
of " broadcast quality" were dead and buried.
The first time I saw this phenomenon, I felt an epiphany of sorts, and I was glad to be alive...Now it was possible for an entire new generation of filmmakers to make their own very personal statements - instead of spending 90% of their time hustling for money, they could now be making movies.
However, one major barrier remained - distribution. We ran into in East Timor trying to help the Timorese set their own television station. While we were able to generate a lot of material, showing it was another matter. All we had was a very limited broadcast capability. An attempt was made to show material on VHS in rural areas,but there were so many problems it never got off the ground.
Now, if we had had access to a satellite, as the country
had had when it belonged to Indonesia, it might have been
another story.
I returned to New York and ended up making a feature documentary on East Timor titled EAST TIMOR;BETRAYAL AND RESURRECTION that told the recent history of East Timor as I saw it. Since I could not find any funding for the film, it was a very low-budget production; my staff consisted of former students working as un-paid interns.
Nontheless, I was able to able to finish the film, only to discover there was no interest in East Timor among the media buyers in the United States. I had to settle for a screening at the World Film Festival in Bangkok, where director Victor Kriengsiek called my film " the most important film of the year ( 2003). There were were also screenings at special events on behalf of the East Timorese, and the UN Correspondents Association's Ricardo Ortega Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. Along the way, I received an invitation from Prime Minister Xanana
Gusmao to return and make a sequel on the problems of the economic development in his country.
So I decided quality was definitely not the problem.
I then met Robert Greenwald, an American filmmaker specializing in political documentaries, including a scathing attack on Fox Television called OUTFOXED. Mr. Greenwald,fed up with being given a run-around by film festivals and American tv stations, decided to sell his films as DVDS through internet political action websites, and met with spectacular success. He was able to connect with his audience directly, without going through the filter of experts and middlemen, and was well rewarded.
Aha!
I have now spent the past year in Asia waiting for peace to break out in East Timor, or Timor-leste,as it is now known, and have been researching a doctoral thesis for Sweden's University of Lund titled DIGITAL DOCUMENTARY: THE REVOLUTION THAT IS NOT
BEING TELEVISED...
In the process, I have become more and more intrigued by the possibilities of digital film and internet distribution. In two months, I shall take up a position as a television producer for the United Nations Mission to the Congo, ( also known as MONUC), which I think will be a great opportunity to test some of my theories in practise.
The more I see, the more I am convinced we are on the verge of a very exciting technical revolution that will change the film power structure from vertical integration to one of horizontal distribution - and,just as the music industry has discovered, there is not much the powers- that- be can do to stop this phenomenon directly.
All they can do is follow the example of old-time moguls like Michael Eisner and climb aboard and enjoy the ride..
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