The Future of Documentary
July 8, 2006 – 11:39 pm
This event at 01zero-one was moderated by Canadian film-maker Peter Wintonick who started the discussion by suggesting current changes in how people make, get access to and share information is driving social and political changes as significant as those caused by the Magna Carta. He quoted a recent speech of Rupert Murdoch’s:
“Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry - the editors, the chief executives and, let’s face it, the proprietors”
and Mark Thompson:
“The second wave of digital will be far more disruptive than the first and
the foundations of traditional media will be swept away, taking us beyond
broadcasting.”
Nick Fraser (Storyville) and Anthony Wall (Arena) are two of the most respected and influential commissioners and editors of documentary in television. The fact that they’d agreed to participate in this event at all was significant, I suppose, but while they both agreed that things were changing neither seemed to have any real sense of how to respond. There was much quoting of Marshall McLuhan which took me back to a panel at the ICA in 1992 with Douglas Adams and Max Whitby where one of them talked about entering ‘a digital galaxy’.
Nick and Anthony are typical of many linear programme makers who are finally being forced to pay attention to the collapse of broadcast media. They react with varying degrees of enthusiasm and scepticism and, as yet, don’t know what it means for them as editors or for the film-makers they commission.
Mark Jacobs and Marc Goodchild are two BBC producers who have embraced new media and begun to explore new ways of telling stories and encouraging participation or interaction with their material. Mark, who produced the mobile elements of Coast, was upbeat about the continuing role of the producer confronted by more and more user-generated content. In one of his early experiments in Bristol where the public had been encouraged to leave comments and stories as part of a location based service, users had found the material boring. In producing Coast, he had applied all the craft skills of an experienced professional team to creating material designed for hand-held devices.
Emily Renshaw Smith described the genesis of 4 Docs. After a slow start the project is now attracting a lot of material, some of high quality. 4 Docs is a continuation of a tradition which includes the BBC’s Video Nation and Capture Wales.
In the bar afterwards one independent film-maker wasn’t impressed: “It’s ok for these people in corporations to get excited but it’s not going to make it any easier for me to get a film made”.
