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The interactive documentary in a cross-platform,
community context
Julia Scott-Stevenson
PhD candidate, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
The cross-platform documentary is the latest evolution of the documentary form, and this
paper contributes to the discussion on cross-platform documentary by focusing on online
productions that emerge from partnerships with community organisations. Using case studies,
I will examine the aims and benefits of generating cross-platform documentaries in such
community contexts. Cross-platform documentary exists within a tradition of interactive
documentary as theorised by Nichols (1991), and the updating of this mode gives rise to new
forms of collaboration that in turn encourage a transformation in audience engagement and
participation.
“Interactivity” in documentary, and indeed all media, has become something of a buzzword.
In its current definition it refers to an online documentary film in which the viewer plays a role
in navigation; that is, there are multiple paths of progressing through the story presented and
the viewer selects the path taken. I would like to draw attention, though, to the origins of the
term ‘interactive documentary’ in Nichols’s modes of documentary. Nichols (1991, 2001)
outlined six modes of production, including the poetic, expository, observational, interactive,
reflexive and performative modes, each with identifying characteristics (although with fluid
boundaries between them and more than one mode able to be drawn from in a single
documentary). The expository form, for example, generally involved a particular viewpoint
presented by an omniscient narrator, with images and sound obediently reinforcing this
viewpoint.
The interactive form saw a shifting of “textual authority” away from the omniscient narrator
and towards the social actors presented in a film (Nichols, 1991). In the interactive mode,
authority is diffused between participants and multiple voices can be heard. Differing
viewpoints can be presented, even juxtaposed, and a variety of actors are able to speak for
themselves, albeit still subject to the direction and editing choices of the filmmaker (as with
any documentary). This textual authority is updated anew in the current incarnation of the
term ‘interactive’ as interactivity takes on a more contemporary and specific meaning,
encompassing the viewer who can now play some part in navigating the documentary.
This more recent usage of the term ‘interactive’, however, focuses most attention on the role
of the viewer in navigation, leaving aside the interaction that occurs between the multiple
subjects and also between the subjects and filmmaker. So while the term ‘interactive’ pays
regard to its genesis in the documentary field, I would like to argue instead for the use of the
terms ‘online’ and ‘cross-platform documentary’ while discussing current innovations, the
latter referring to documentaries that exist across more than one platform and where at least
one of these platforms is online. ‘Cross-platform’ has been gradually put to use in the
documentary literature (e.g. Hight, 2008; Luckman and de Roeper, 2008), but has been more
commonly used to refer to broader digital media concepts. I believe these terms more wholly
encapsulate the developments occurring in the field. This redefinition serves the additional
purpose of softening some of the hyperbole surrounding online documentary, variously also
referred to as interactive documentary, transmedia, multi-platform and webdocs.1 It resituates the new mode as an evolution of the documentary form, not a revolution that entirely
reshapes the field with little regard for what has come before.2
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In this redefinition, the role of the viewer is returned to a position that exists in partnership
with the other actors - the filmmaker and subjects, each with their input to the production.
Chanan (2000) notes that a documentary is “internally dialogical”, in that a filmmaker holds a
dialogue with her participants or subjects. With the online or cross-platform documentary,
this dialogue is expanded to become a conversation with the viewer as well.
Audience
The online environment, in particular its integration with social media platforms, can foster
greater user engagement, interaction and collaboration, yet there is also the potential for
audiences to become fragmented (Sorenssen, 2008), dividing into ever smaller niche interest
groups. Further, seemingly unlimited online space and the fact that more media makers are
moving into this space means that more and more content is competing for the same pool of
viewers. Consequently, a call for action can go unheard amongst a cacophony of other calls
and messages (Juhasz, 2008). Thus, identification and targeting of a specific audience is the
first step towards effectively using an online approach.
This is also where the shift in textual authority becomes important - not only do social actors
gain the power to tell their own stories, but viewers also gain the ability to participate in those
stories, allowing deeper engagement. There is a delicate balancing of participation, knowledge
and power in these new online and interactive forms - I do not subscribe to a view of
interactivity in which the viewer wields ultimate power over navigation. The social actors
bring their own knowledge and perspectives, and the filmmaker brings skills and experience in
filmmaking and storytelling. So, in fact, there is a three-way partnership in the production of
any engaging social issue-focused online documentary - between the subject community, the
filmmaker and the viewer. Indeed, the audience itself is being reconceptualised as a subject
position rather than an entity (Ardevol et al., 2010), and audience interaction takes on new
meanings to encompass even the creation and contribution of material (user-generated
content, or UGC).
Each role in the production of a documentary becomes fluid - a viewer can also be a creator,
and subjects of the film may also be the audience. This role fluidity is not new, but takes on a
new importance in this period of audience fragmentation when it is increasingly necessary to
target specific audiences. This targeting of an audience thus begins with the community that
relates to the documentary’s content, and then the focus can either narrow inwards to key
viewers or span more broadly outwards to a wider audience.
Implications of new forms for community organisations
Media practices are increasingly migrating online as are many social and other interactions,
and the conception of the public sphere is simultaneously being transformed (Chanan, 2000).
Community organisations with a social issue or cause at their centre have benefited greatly
from these developments in digital and social media, as these media allow them to explore
new ways of reaching and engaging with participants. A long history of activist documentary
collaborating with communities provides a foundation for these new online approaches.
This expansion of documentary into online platforms creates new possibilities for form beyond
just the interaction of viewers. Birchall (2008) identifies characteristics of audio-visual media
that are fostered by the Internet, including “brevity, community, seriality and personal
connectedness” (p. 282). Community organisations are beginning to test out these
characteristics as they experiment in the digital media space. Shorter form documentaries are
well suited to online delivery given the aforementioned sea of content, as viewers can dip in
and out and access a range of content at once rather than committing to viewing a long form
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piece. Seriality in particular is an approach yet to be widely tested in the community context,
but it has the potential to lead to ongoing engagement and connection with an issue,
something of great importance to community organisations committed to raising awareness
and perhaps encouraging action. Finally, the creation of community online, around a
particular issue for example, is central to viewer engagement and the ‘personal
connectedness’ of which Birchall speaks. The incorporation of social media platforms into
online documentary can enhance this engagement and understanding, an example of which
may be the drip-feeding of clips from a documentary onto Facebook, leading viewers to return
to a home website to watch more content.
While independent filmmakers may be more tied to outcomes such as film festival screenings
or television broadcasts for their documentaries, community organisations tend to have
different imperatives informing their content creation. As such it is in their interests to
produce online work that exists for a longer period of time and may potentially reach wider
audiences. They may also be less tied to deriving an ongoing income stream from such
productions. While a traditional documentary may be purchased by a broadcaster or screened
at a cinema with box office returns, online content is generally free and this can be a barrier to
independent filmmakers experimenting with the medium. However, the different imperatives
informing community organisations also include different measures of success, and their goals
are more often around raising awareness and encouraging action than turning a profit. They
may not have large amounts of funding to dedicate to online documentary work, but they may
be able to include such productions within a particular campaign or issue budget for which
they have core funding. The flip side of this is the potential for community organisationsponsored documentaries to become promotional pieces, with little to attract an audience
beyond an already involved core group. This will be discussed further below.
All of these internet-based characteristics, perhaps most the integration of social media
platforms, are of particular interest to community organisations given their desires to motivate
people to care about and act on a range of issues. Thus, many organisations have been
dipping their toes into the online pool, and there has been something of an evolution in the
work produced. Earlier attempts often involved the creation of a broadcast-form
documentary with extra content available separately online, such as The Oasis (2008), a
documentary about a Salvation Army centre for homeless youth in Sydney. More recent
productions have experimented more with form, such as Starved for Attention, a 2011 online
multimedia project about hunger made for Médicins Sans Frontières.
Following are two case studies examining such examples, the second of which is my own
ongoing research project.
CrowdTV
CrowdTV is one such experiment aiming to reach different communities with a cross-platform
documentary. More accurately described as a crowd-sourced documentary, CrowdTV evolved
out of a partnership between Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils, the Institute
for Sustainable Futures and production company Australian Documentaries. The funding was
given on the basis that a documentary about water issues in Western Sydney would be
created, but the content beyond that was left up to the crowd-sourcing approach as directed
by the producer and director. Any member of the public was invited to get involved through
suggesting ideas for themes, content and potential interviewees for example, and voting on
others’ suggestions. While anyone with access to the website was able to participate,
workshops were held with relevant communities in Western Sydney to encourage their
involvement.
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The resultant documentary, Thirst, is a linear documentary that screened for a physically
present community audience, but it is very much an online production. Much of the
interaction occurred through the CrowdTV website, and updates were also communicated on
the project’s Facebook page and Twitter feed. As each new interview was filmed, clips were
loaded on Facebook and the website to keep the interested community abreast of the
production. A timeline on the website also shows how the production evolved.
CrowdTV has taken a different approach from many other collaborative community
documentaries in that it is less focused on UGC, and offers a wider range of methods for
participants to become involved. Putting cameras in the hands of community members
became a popular approach in the first flush of community video in the 1970s following the
development of easily portable cameras, yet Boyle (1992) states that, “once the novelty wore
off, many community members had little interest in becoming video producers” (p. 74). The
use of participatory video or UGC can become a conceit, yet CrowdTV avoids this problem by
incorporating a range of other possible activities and involvements. Users can discuss content
on the website forum, offer ideas, and vote on aspects such as the documentary title and
graphics, all of which require little specific skill. If participants do have a specific skill set that
they can contribute, they can do so, for example offering music composition or graphic design.
Users earned points for participation that in turn could lead to producer credits in the film.
The key point, though, is that lack of a particular skill, such as ability with a camera, does not
preclude participation - thus opening involvement to a greater potential range of community
members. As such, while still resulting in a traditional documentary, CrowdTV more deeply
inhabits the online space with its accompanying hazy boundaries between roles. The audience
is the subject community and also the creators, and thus textual authority rests across all the
makers and participants. While participatory media is not a new phenomenon, this online
approach intensifies and provides new space for such practices.
There were some difficulties in developing the project (K. Ingram, personal communication,
October 10, 2011), for example the website design was not initially optimised for interaction,
and encouraging people to participate beyond those with very specific interests in the subject
area also proved difficult. At the completion of the production there were a few key highly
involved participants, but the project did not spread to the numbers initially envisaged
(Ingram, 2011). The post-production phase did, though, elicit from community members
contributions of original music and graphics that they designed. The physical screening of the
final film for the Western Sydney community and participants assisted in further promoting
the project and documentary, and acted as a thank you to those who did participate. The
CrowdTV approach may also be adapted to other future community documentary projects,
and the production company involved is now planning a second iteration.
Giving Time
As part of my research, I am creating a cross-platform documentary called Giving Time about
volunteers with a particular community organisation. The approach to the documentary is
informed by the research discussed here as well as existing online documentaries. Barbash
and Taylor (1997) describe film as a “quintessentially phenomenological medium”,
demonstrating its particular suitability for representing experience due to its audio-visual
nature. Thus, while there are many academic studies on volunteer motivations and
demographics for instance, this study will use audio-visual methods to present the experience
of volunteering.
The documentary’s main form will be online, incorporating a range of video elements that can
be watched in an order determined by the viewer. Each video is either a personal portrait of a
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volunteer or a compilation of smaller volunteer portraits, based on filmed interviews in which
the volunteers tell stories about themselves and their volunteering activities. It goes beyond
an advertisement or call to volunteer as it more deeply examines the complexity of the
experience of volunteering, attempting to demonstrate that volunteers cover a range of
demographics and undertake a large variety of activities. However, while the purpose is to
examine experience, it is also hoped that viewers may be encouraged to consider volunteering
after discovering that there is a range of opportunities available to suit different schedules,
skill types and interests.
The initial aim of the project was to create a long-form broadcast documentary film on
volunteers. However, it was determined that there were several advantages in creating an
online project instead. A traditional documentary on DVD could be used internally by the
organisation, but to reach wider audiences it was at the mercy of broadcasters that may not
look favourably on an institutionally sponsored documentary. As discussed earlier, an online
production can hypothetically be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection, and can
exist online for a much greater time span to allow more attempts to connect with relevant
audiences.
There is plenty of evidence to show that the biggest reason people volunteer is because
someone asks them to (e.g. Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006). Through hearing specific
stories of volunteering, the act becomes more real and achievable, and listeners become more
likely to participate. This documentary acts to amplify those stories through use of the online
platform, using them as a way of reducing the barriers to getting involved. Targeting of
specific audiences is a central approach, so as discussed previously, this will begin with the
existing relevant community - in this case volunteers - and spread outwards. Examples of such
targeting may include promotion via social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter,
through existing pages of the organisation as a starting point.
While the organisation with which my project is partnered hopes to reach a range of
demographic groups, one on which it has a particular focus is youth. Volunteers with this
organisation come from all age groups but the majority are older volunteers, and new
methods are needed to attract younger participants. It is hoped that both the content of the
documentary and the promotion of it through social media channels will work to attract youth
as viewers. While many of our social interactions now take place online, this is particularly
true for the youth demographic (Lenhart et al., 2010), and so it is hoped that the online
environment may engage potential young volunteers more so than other more traditional
outreach methods. These may have included, for example, local newspaper or radio
advertisements.
This approach to audiences is not unidirectional; it is hoped that given the capabilities of social
media platforms, conversations may grow around the content and sharing with others may
also occur. An example of an online documentary in which this has occurred is Goa Hippy
Tribe (2011), a project that began with the gradual release of videos onto an already existing
Facebook page for former Goa residents. Later, a separate interactive website was created by
broadcaster SBS where all the videos could be viewed, and a viewer could also learn other
information about the Goa hippy trail by collecting fact sheets and extra video content. The
videos created were largely made up of interviews with former residents of Goa, and so this
was indeed an interactive documentary in all senses. Those who had been there presented a
multitude of perspectives on the experience of Goa. Further, these subjects of the videos,
along with their peers about whom they spoke, made up a core part of the audience. The
filmmaker was the son of one of the original Goa hippies and subjects of the film and thus was
already a part of the community. So, social media platforms were harnessed, and the roles of
filmmaker, subjects and audience merged and shifted.
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Giving Time differs from CrowdTV in that the production process is more traditional, however,
the interactivity (in the viewing sense) begins when the project is placed online. Clips from the
documentary will be gradually loaded online, such as on a blog or Facebook, as a way of
gauging and building interest before a full launch. The online mode will not only enable the
representation of these experiences to a wider audience, but will also enable the discussion
and sharing of the content within existing social media exchanges. Thus, hopefully, audiences
will understand, be engaged, and perhaps even choose to emulate and participate.
Multiple voices as the diffusion of authority
The diffusion of authority across multiple voices is a key aspect of any documentary produced
in partnership with a community organisation. One single authoritative voice speaking,
particularly if it is a corporate or organisational voice, gives a piece a promotional or even
advertising feel which has the potential to alienate viewers. Hirsch (2007) notes that greater
impact can be had with social documentaries that engage well with the relevant communities,
as well as with different perspectives on an issue. Hirsch’s study supports the role of diffusing
authority; his key suggestions include using multiple characters to tell their own stories (from a
range of perspectives), and involving a diverse range of demographics. Hirsch also notes that
there is a useful separation in being a filmmaker not specifically employed by an organisation,
as it gives some professional distance and helps in being seen as non-partisan - reducing the
potential for the work to be seen as promotional. To build on Chanan’s (2000) earlier point,
for the film’s message to have resonance with an audience it must remain ‘internally
dialogical’. For the documentary on volunteers, it is hoped that this diffusion of voice across
multiple subjects, presented in interactive form, will assist in broadening the potential
audiences. The knowledge and experience to be communicated is held within the range of
subjects, not within the organisation supporting the production, and as such the aim is for
audiences to connect with a shared interest in human experience. The connection occurs
through the amplification of these individuals’ stories.
In the online space, assuming this diffusion of authority across a multiplicity of voices
is adopted, the very purpose of social documentary fits neatly with online productions and
their interactive possibilities. As Aufderheide (1998) points out, “Social issue documentaries
emerge from behind the shiny surface of our daily media experience and treat us not just as
passive viewers but as social actors who can affect our world.” The purpose of sharing a link
on a social media platform, for example, is not just to increase viewership of the work but to
increase ongoing engagement - to raise awareness of an issue and perhaps to encourage
action among the audience. While there is a long history of activist and social documentary
that has worked to achieve this engagement and action, a reframing in the online world allows
this interaction to take new forms, including within the very documentary itself.
The updated interactive mode of documentary in an online environment is a mode of
communication well suited to community organisations with a message or idea to spread. The
true interactive documentary with its incorporation of a range of voices can create a more
complex story that is more engaging than a corporate, single-voiced presentation. Further,
this shift in textual authority is enhanced by the online space as the participant roles become
yet more interchangeable; viewer, creator and community all shift back and forth.
The aims of creating cross-platform documentaries in community organisations are many: the
potential for deeper audience engagement, wider reach, interaction leading to follow up and
ongoing involvement. By inhabiting the online social media space within which targeted
audiences already exist, community organisations can further enhance the potential
engagement with their documentaries and thus their chosen social issues. The documentary
form is evolving, and this is giving rise to new modes of collaboration between filmmakers and
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community organisations. New forms and new approaches are being developed, but as
always, the focus remains on telling stories that engage an audience.
Notes
1. While often used interchangeably, some of these terms have slightly different meanings.
Transmedia and multi-platform, for example, can also be used in fiction productions.
Transmedia in particular covers a range of content production, such as audio-visual work that
online or on multiple platforms and can incorporate fiction, non-fiction, animation and other
multimedia.
2. The description of new media and documentary as ‘evolution, not revolution’ has been
used by a number of authors including Livingstone (1999) and Jones (2011).
Notes on presenter
Julia Scott-Stevenson is a PhD Candidate at Macquarie University, investigating how
community organisations are using developments in cross-platform documentary. Her PhD
involves the production of an online documentary about the experience of volunteering. Julia
also writes about documentary for Australian broadcaster, SBS.
Email: [email protected]
References
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Bibliographic Reference
Title: Expanding Documentary 2011: Proceedings of the VIIIth Biennial Conference, Auckland:
Vol. 1, No. 2, December 2011: Editorial and Peer-Reviewed Papers
Organised by Auckland University of Technology, Faculty of Design and Creative
Technologies in association with University of Auckland, Faculty of Arts.
Editor: Dr Geraldene Peters
Publisher: Auckland University of Technology, the School of Communication Studies, Faculty of
Design & Creative Technologies, 2011
ISSN: 2253-1475 (digital)
© Written text is copyright of the authors. All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of
short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, and for the online conference
proceedings, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without prior permission.
All details correct at the time of publication, December 2011
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