Beyond Participatory Production

Abstract

We conducted a study to explore the values and qualities of 'grassroots documentaries', framed around the production of two parallel documentary films with a London-based opera company. A team of professional filmmakers produced one film and the other was an exploratory form of grassroots documentary. We studied the different production activities through observations, interviews and a reflective workshop at the end of the study and evaluated the resulting films. Our analysis reveals critical insights that could inform the next generation of technological systems to support user-generated video content (UGVC) production, particularly in collaborative contexts such as grassroots communities.

Cinehacking Cape Town - Embracing Informality in Pursuit of High Quality Media

“…This was not due to a lack of creativity; rather it resulted from a lack of familiarity with specialist vocabulary, and a lack of specific technical skills. The fact that most of the highly motivated, genre-literate, creative artists we worked with required high levels of support to edit a short video in a highly conventional genre corroborates evidence in other studies [18,11] that have found untrained users disengage with video at the editing stage. Video editing is now a well-known barrier to high quality media making by non-professionals.…”

Videostrates

“…Eu-roPARC's RAVE [20] and WAVE [48] systems, and collaborative production practices, e.g. including collaborative viewing experiences [21], and documentary production within grassroots movements [23]. Together with methodological frameworks for collaborative authoring [40,9], they offer insights into the different video communication and production practices and further our understanding of video editing practice.…”

Enabling Polyvocality in Interactive Documentaries through "Structural Participation"

“…The argument follows that non-linear narratives are better suited to polyvocality, since they attenuate the distortions of single authors (whether they are outsiders or insiders) into a more balanced, overall impression. This argument is reflected in recent literature about i-Docs, which suggests they are well-suited to facilitating nuanced representations of heterogeneous communities and the diverse qualities of user-generated media [31]. However, most agree that enabling participation in i-Docs is challenging, and its potential is under-realized [26,1,49].…”

“…It is widely acknowledged that documentary can be a positive force for enabling public discourses and facilitating social change [43,46] and it is an area of burgeoning interest within HCI [4,17,31]. The documentary scholar Mandy Rose has recently suggested ways that documentary could be 'more like participatory design' [56], but there is a mutual value in bridging the disciplines of documentary scholarship and HCI.…”