Partners behind the Living Docs project comprise web technologists, broadcasters, film curators, academics and community arts organisations: Mozilla, Independent Television Service (ITVS), Tribeca Film Institute, The Center for Social Media, and the Bay Area Video Collective (BAVC). They describe their mission as follows: [We] believe that the ethos of the web – collaboration, constant learning, and iteration – offers a fundamentally new way of producing documentary. We hold events, celebrate projects and share code to explore the unique possibilities that the web offers to documentary creators.
Living Docs readily acknowledges the web’s role in expanding distribution channels for filmmakers. But what they’re eager to explore is just how the web can change the nitty gritty of the storytelling process and produce a ‘new genre’ of documentary.
Can the web transform the documentary storytelling process? An interesting ambition, to be sure. And Living Doc’s notion of what the web offers is compelling: ‘transforming audiences into active participants’, opening the ‘door for documentaries to become living, changing, and constantly evolving worlds’, ‘putting the user at the centre of the experience’, the list goes on.
The developer meets documentary maker via dedicated ‘Hack Days’ enables prototyping of projects with additional tracking of funded web docs allied to a blog and access to a code library. Allowing interested filmmakers to test the digital waters, as one participant paradoxically puts it: sometimes subordinating technology to the narrative…and [understanding] that sometimes technology can be the narrative.
For One Stop Doc at Counterpoints Arts, where emphasis is on building a mentoring environment for the creation of documentary stories about migration using new and old media, the Living Docs experiment is intriguing. Whether this signals the pathway to a ‘new [documentary] aesthetic’ (we’re not immediately convinced); but the possibilities for utilising new sets of digital tools facilitating increased audience and community engagement in relation to stories about migration, is a direction we’re definitely open to exploring.
