To all those who believe that a filmmaker’s end goal is not just to film the world but to make it a better place for future generations! A warm thank you from the bottom of my heart to all those who participated to this book project and supported me to do it.
Webdocs. A survival guide for online film-makers Matthieu Lietaert (ed.) Published by Not So Crazy! Productions Brussels, Belgium www.notsocrazy.eu Editor: Matthieu Lietaert Front Cover Design: Jamie Balliu & Pierre Lecrenier Book Layout, website & back cover: Pierre Lecrenier English proof-reading: Carol Broomhall Images from: Shutterstock Images LLC Copyright front cover image: Marc Dietrich Copyright rear cover image: Alberto Tirado
All Skype interviews were recorded with the Ecamm software Info: http://www.ecamm.com First Printing, September 2011 Copyrights - Creative Commons 2011 , Matthieu Lietaert This work is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Basically, you may copy and share the content but you always have to mention the original source, you may not modify the content and you may not use it in a commercial way. Please always remember that this is a independent production and that we need the support of our readers! To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
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Table of Contents Table of Contents > 6 Preface > Peter Wintonick 9 Introduction > 12 Who participated to this book?
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PART 1: A survival guide Where Are We Going to?
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The Age of Connected TV_
31
Ten key tips for your webdoc_
37
Interactive Storytelling
45
Building your audience
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Webdocs - Case 1 >
POV: James McQuivey (Forrester) POV : Tom Koch (PBS) POV: Alexander Knetig (ARTE)
Webdocs - Case 2 >
Storytelling Tips - Caspar Sonnen Webdocs - Case 3 > Webdocs - Case 4 > Transmedia Storytelling - Caitlin Burns Interaction Design - Vinay Venkatraman Webdocs - Case 5 > Tips from the Game Industry - Marc Meurisse
Webdocs - Case 6 > Webdocs - Case 7 > Using social media - Sheri Candler Webdocs - Case 8 > Think Outside the Box Office - Jon Reiss Webdocs - Case 9 >
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31 34 35
41
45 49 52 54 58 60 61
67 71 72 75 78 81
Funding your webdoc
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Webdocs - Case 10 Webdocs - Case 11 Be successful on IndieGoGo - Danae Ringelmann
85 88 89
Pitching Your Webdoc
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Commissioning Editors’ POV
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Webdocs - Case 12 Webdocs - Case 13 How to Pitch your Webdoc? - Anne Vierhout
POV: Tom Koch (PBS) Webdocs - Case 14 POV: Alexander Knetig (ARTE) POV : Mark Atkin (formerly SBS) Webdocs - Case 15 POV: Andrew DeVigal (New York Times)
Starting Your Own Webdoc Company FWA webTV - Rob Ford
95 98 99
103 105 106 107 109 111
115 118
PART 2: Webdocs in Depth Prison Valley (Alexandre Brachet) Out My Window (Katerina Cizek) Collapsus (Femke Wolting) Montréal en 12 Lieux (Nicolas Saint-Cyr) Gaza Sderot (Arik Bernstein) From Zero (Stefano Strocchi)
123 132 140 144 148 156
Useful Websites >
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« In the future, the film director will be seen as a project overseer.... a webdoc is a kind of symphony, or at least a chamber music concerto with composers and conductors, and artists and audiences all playing important roles. » Peter Wintonick
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Preface > Peter Wintonick Webdocs, Docmedia, and Doctopia_ (Peter Wintonick , cross-media consultant, producer @ Eyesteelfilm and co-director of Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media) In the beginning was the word and the word was documentary. The Documentary Form is a primordial language system. But the documentary dictionary is expanding. I have banished the word documentary from our lexicon. From now on, we will use docmedia. Docmedia reside in doctopia. Docmedia have many names, many faces, many incarnations. Here, we’ll use webdocs. Others call them cyberdocs or digidocs. Choose your own neologism: Transmedia, cross-docs, or cross-media. Multi-platform, 360 degree programs. Netcast, interactive docs. 3D-docs and mobiledocs. Docugames and animated documations. DoComedies and docOperas. Docmedia morphs non-fiction into ‘faction’ – fact-based fiction. Hyperdocs beget hybridocs. Factual TV transmutes into factivism. New platforms for docmedia are everywhere for everyone. In long form and short form. In any form. In any media and all media. Not broadcast but broadband-cast. New silicon and bio-based technologies are transforming documentary expression, allowing a full spectrum of possibilities. Our brave, new and complicated world is filled with change and choice. What was once called new media or next media, has trans-platformed into Now Media. Docmedia is hot like McLuhan. Docmakers are adapting to a media-
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scape moving as fast as you read this. Today, a digital generation lasts for six months. In this international zeitgeist, the definition of documentary morphs into something wider and more challenging. The old docworld priesthood order has retreated into a Plato’s cave of retirement homes and linear television offices. The webdoc meme replaces that impossible dream. In docollective image factories digital creatives re-imagine documentary. Today, making docmedia is about the synthesis of production tools, funding schemes, multiscreens, and virtual marketing systems. With an added dash of reality. The adventurous and curious within the traditional docommunity are re-branding themselves: docmakers, as new docitizens are becoming produsers, i.e. producer users. They take control of their own media, their own voices, their own visions, their own stories. By doing so, they extend Vertov’s dream by declaring that: I am a camera, I am a webdoc. I am my own platform. I am my own truth. A thousand forms of Docmedia are blooming now. Webdocs are web-intended reality-based mega-digital information bases. Or metalinear webnet experiences based on fact. Docmedia are online all the time. We no longer live in real geographical space, nor entirely in our own bodies. We live, as sentient beings, in an online space called docmedia. We are immersed in a pervasive, invasive, overwhelming docmedia culture. It is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. Docmedia is the language of the twenty-first century. The language of our future. Docmedia drag us into the future – to live on a new Pangaean super-continent as digital natives. Docmedia are ingested, replicated and passed on. Docmedia are global, accessible and instant. They project personal, public and poetic points-of-view - from multiple perspectives. They can be spontaneous, contrived, or interactive. But always infused with the ethical DNA of documentary. In a world where media is the electronic ether that envelops us, docecologies nurture docmedia literacies.
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We are learning how to ‘read’ and ‘write’ with digital light, where the pen is now a magic wand, where the writing’s on the wall – in the form of a touch screen. On any screen, any size, anywhere. In this new docworld, we make software and hardware work for us. We develop media-ware and mediawareness.
On new platForums, webdocs are a means of self-expression fashioned through a collaborative process. They are democratic. The words documentary and democracy have fused into – documocracy. Docmedia take the complexities of conventional documentary and fuse them to the best qualities of now media. The playing with time. The responsibility to audiences. The Documentary as Database. Interactivity. The One to One and Many to Many. Real Truth, a million page-hits a second. Webdocs are new informational art forms. As evidenced here, Nuplatform documentary is alive and well in every corner of the planet. With innovation and incubation, let’s build this docmedia community together. As a Docmedia International. A new generation of docmedia makers swims in a popdoc sea. They surf a universal wave of commitment, networked worlds, social enterprise, human justice, metamuses, global awareness and direct, democratic action. They immerse themselves in a sea of issues, digressions and celebrations. In these transpersonal times, a social multilogue bubbles up. New definitions of media production and consumption are brought forward. New thinking about the art of truth. Perhaps in a future nano-media world, we may lose control of our real selves. We may become human documentaries. We may become living, breathing media machines.
But whatever the future of docmedia and webdocs, two things are certain: what has always been important to documentary, always will be. And we will continue to look to real media as active agents and powers of persuasion, as a montage of passions and philosophies. As a way of understanding our real world.
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Introduction > Matthieu Lietaert, founder @ Not So Crazy! Productions
Dear guerilla webdocker ;) If you also believe that the 21st century is the century of audiovisual interactivity and that we have definitely moved away from a world of pure audiovisual passivity, this book is for you. Today, with the technologies which are out there, one can literally shoot messages to a responding audience and our cross-media projects can trigger a debate in society as never before!
There are indeed moments in history where everything seems quiet or boring, as if nothing is happening. Then there are times when history is shaken up by one great revolution. In this case, what is amazing is that we are all in the middle of a double revolution! This is just unprecedented: on the one hand, there was the digital revolution that affected the way we could collect, store and process data, and on the other hand, there is the internet revolution that is influencing the way we broadcast the content, network with each other, and now increasingly how we fund our projects. These two revolutions have had immediate implications on the speed and the scale of production. When we think about it, people started to use e-mails only 15 years ago and today 170 million e-mails are sent... every minute! Mobile phones became popular in the late 90s. Rare are those who, today, can work without one... The first digital camera for professional photographers was released in 1991 by Nikon, equipped by Kodak with a 1.3 megapixel sensor... in 2008, the Canon 5D made a revolution with its full-frame sensor. In 2005, the advent of Youtube made it clear that there was a huge audience consuming media online and, only three years later, millions of video are uploaded and watched on a daily basis!
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Then came the idea of social networks and the concept of sharing in real time over the internet. Blogger was launched in 1999 by the person who 7 years later would go on to create Twitter. Today, 100.000 tweets are posted per minute! Facebook was launched in 2004 and in 2011 about 10% of the world’s population is using it. Its Chinese counterpart Weibo is even growing faster! On the funding side, crowdfunding platforms started to emerge in 2008, like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter, with amazing results for successful campaigns. Finally, connected TV is increasingly out there and this will change many habits. So, yes, all this is creating profound changes in the relationship between filmmakers, their projects and their audience. It is then kind of normal that an increasing number of people want to develop the potentiality behind web documentaries. I am not a big fan of definitions (webdocs, crossmedia, transmedia, etc.) but what is sure is that things are moving: workshops and pitchings are being organised in most of the documentary film festivals. While developing The Brussels Business and We R Democracy, two sides of our new cross-media project, I needed to find the answers to some of my questions and I thought that a book could be useful for anyone who is producing their first webdoc!
What is fascinating is that our audience can interact with our content and with one another creating communities or even social movements. The tools are there, so let’s see what we can produce to make social change happen! Based on interviews with some of the key players who kindly shared their knowledge about webdocs and related fields, this book is designed as a tool box or a « survival guide » in the big online jungle. I hope that you will find relevant ideas and practical advice from webdoc authors, producers, from social media analysts, or commissioning editors. Let us know when your own webdoc is out, send us feedback or questions, and register to our newsletter to get free updates of this book! >> www.notsocrazy.eu Now, lay back, fasten your seatbelt and enjoy the reading! Hope this book will be of relevance to you as much as it was to me!
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How to use this book? This book has been designed for documentary filmmakers who are wondering how to start an online production. The information you’ll find in the following pages is intended for seasoned professionals and students alike. You can read this book from A to Z and see which ideas to incorporate into your current project, or you can pick up certain elements along the way as you need them. Often you will notice that the editor has only selected a few sentences or a small quote. We did that on purpose to give you food for thought without having to digest a long text. We are convinced that a few wise words can hold invaluable advice that will save you time, energy and money, and help your reach your goal. This book was designed to help you improve your webdoc in terms of interactive design, but also in terms of production and distribution.
Breakdown of chapters This book is divided in two parts. The first one is the survival guide and consists of practical advice as well as reflexions from key experts in the field of webdoc or cross-media productions. The second part is about webdoc case studies that got international attention in previous years. Chapter 1 offers a general reflection on where we have come from and where we are going to. Chapter 2 analyses how connected TVs are going to affect how we produce and watch films, and how we should prepare for this as film makers. Chapter 3 gathers some key advice from web pioneers on starting your own webdoc, and what you must think about if you want to increase your chance of success. Chapter 4 takes a more in-depth look at storytelling for web produc tion. What are the new tools and opportunities available? Chapter 5 deals with the audience. The web enables film makers to
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find and empower their audience in ways that are com pletely new. We have powerful tools at our disposal. But can we really use them efficiently? Chapter 6 tackles one of the core problems behind webdocs: the financial model. At a time when broadcasters are not yet online, and film funds are not yet funding web projects to the scale they should, how can we find a business model to make a living out of webdocs? Chapter 7 gives you some suggestions on how to pitch your webdoc project. Chapter 8 gives the floor to commissioning editors, who explain how the industry is changing and what they are looking for. Chapter 9 underlines ten core idea to think about if you want to create your webdoc production company
Case Studies In part two of this book, you will find information about the world’s most awarded webdoc authors and producers of projects such as Gaza Sderot, Prison Valley, Out My Window, Collapsus, From Zero and Montréal en 12 lieux. We also added a broad selection of about 20 relevant webdocs all through this book. This selection was made in association with Webdocu.fr
About the book editor Matthieu Lietaert is currently working on the cross-media project «We R Democracy» (with Jamie Balliu). It was awarded Best CrossMedia Project at SunnySide 2010 & selected at Power to the Pixel 2011. It is linked to The Brussels Business» (co-directed with Friedrich Moser), a docu-thriller about lobbying in Europe (co-production with ARTE/ZDF, RTBF and ORF). Matthieu holds a Ph.D. in Political Sciences and is the founder @ Not So Crazy! Productions. He is also a consultant to film schools about pitching techniques and crossmedia strategies. Info & contact : www.notsocrazy.eu
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Who participated to this book? Let me start with a BIG thank you to the participants who accepted to share their knowledge . Without them, this book wouldn´t be out! Alexandre Brachet is e-producer and CEO @ Upian, one of the world’s major players in the area of webdocs. Their projects include lacitedesmortes.net, Thanatorama.com , Gaza-Sderot (2008), and Prison Valley (2010) among others. http://www.upian.com/ Alexander Knetig has been a web editor @ ARTE since 2009 . He’s got a background in International Relations and Journalism, and worked for Upian on the project Gaza-Sderot . http://webdocs.arte.tv
Alexis Sarini is a multi-media journalist and co-founder of Webdocu http://webdocu.fr/ Andrew DeVigal is multimedia editor @ The New York Times , as well as from one can read on his website, a « husband, father, brother, son, friend, thinker, planner, visual explainer ». http://www.nytimes.com/pages/multimedia/
Anne Vierhout is the former coordinator of the FORUM @ IDFA. She currently works as a financing & pitching consultant for documentary film & for the Dutch distributor Cinema Delicatessen. Contact: annevierhout@gmail.com
Arik Bernstein is a Producer @ Alma-Alma-Films based in Israel. He is one of the producer of webdocs such as Gaza-Sderot and Editorial Advisor on Havana Miami. http://www.alma-films.com/ Brian Storm is the founder and executive producer @ MediaStorm, based in Brooklyn, New York. He previously worked as vice president of News & Multimedia for Corbis and he was the first director of multimedia at MSNBC. http://www.mediastorm.com/
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Caitlin Burns is a Transmedia Producer with Starlight Runner Entertainment. She has worked on projects such as Pirates of the Caribbean or James Cameron’s Avatar. http://www.starlightrunner.com/
Caspar Sonnen is the New Media Coordinator @ IDFA. He launched IDFA DocLab, a new festival program to showcase interactive webdocs and other forms of digital storytelling. http://twitter.com/casparsonnen
Danae Ringelmann is the co-founder & COO @ IndieGoGo, one of the world’s largest crowdfunding platforms. She previously worked at Cowen & Co. where she covered entertainment companies including Pixar, Lions Gate, Disney, and Electronic Arts. http://www.indiegogo.com/ Elizabeth Radshaw is the Marketing Director @ Hotdocs film festival. In 2011, 200 applications were received, 30 projects were selected for pitching and 4 were pure cross-media projects. http://www.hotdocs.ca/
Femke Wolting is co-founder and head @ Submarine. In the past, she was the programmer of Exploding Cinema and also worked at the digital department of VPRO. http://www.submarine.nl/ Heather Croall is the director @ Sheffield International Documentary Festival and a producer at Crossover labs. http://sheffdocfest.com/ Hugues Sweeney is Senior Producer for all interactive French projects @ the National Film Board of Canada since 2009. He previously worked as the head of Bandeapart.fm. http://www.nfb.ca/interactive/ James McQuivey (Ph.D.) is the Vice President @ Forrester Research, a technology and market research company. He is a specialist in the future of the moving image, including digital video recorders, HDTV, video on demand, and Internet-based video. http://www.forrester.com
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Jon Reiss, named one of “10 Digital Directors to Watch” by Daily Variety, is the director of the feature documentary ‘Bomb It’ and the author of Think Outside the Box Office: The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution in the Digital Era. http://twitter.com/jon_reiss Katerina Cizek is the author of Out My Window, winner of the 2010 inaugural IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling and 2011 Digital Emmy for best digital programme – non-fiction. She is also the codirector with Peter Wintonick of the feature documentary film Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News. http://twitter.com/katciz Laurence Bagot is co-founder @ narrative. She is a Nieman Fellow from Harvard University, and a current member of the multimedia committee at the CNC. Productions include Portraits d’un Nouveau Monde for France5, among others. http://www.narrative.info Louis Villers is a journalist and co-founder @ Webdocu. http://webdocu.fr/ Mathieu Détaint is cofounder @ Inflammable. Producer of Little Burma for LeMonde.fr and Mission Backstage for Nokia and Warner Music. http://www.inflammableproductions.com/ Marc Meurisse is CEO @ Belle Productions. a Belgium-based serious game company. http://www.belle.be/ Mark Atkin is the Head @ Documentary Campus Masterschool & Director @ Crossover lab. He has also worked as an independant producer and as a Commissioner for SBS Australia, online and T.V. http://www.documentary-campus.com Nicolas Sauret is cofounder @ Inflammable & projects executive officer at the Innovation and Research Institute. http://www.inflammableproductions.com/
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Nicolas Saint-Cyr is Director @ Nikosanto. He is the author of many projects such as MontrÊal en 12 lieux for TV5 or Ecologie Sonore for NFB of Canada. http://www.nikosanto.com Paul Pauwels is the Director @ the European Television and Media Management Academy (ETMA). www.etma-academy.eu Peter Wintonick is co-directed Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media and Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News. He is currently a producer @ Eyesteelfilm (Up the Yangtze; Last Train Home; Homeless Nation.org; China Heavyweight) http://www.eyesteelfilm.com Rob Ford is the Founder & Principal @ The Favorite Website Awards (FWA). Author of Guidelines for Online Success and The App and Mobile Case Study Book (Taschen) http://www.thefwa.net Sheri Candler is an inbound marketing strategist who helps independent filmmakers build identities for themselves and their films. She also assists filmmakers in building an engaged and robust online community for their work. http://www.shericandler.com/ Stefano Strocchi is director @ Move Productions. He is the author and producer of From Zero. http://www.moveproductions.it/ Tamara Krinsky is the Associate Editor @ the International Documentary Association’s magazine. In addition to writing about nonfiction film, she also covers narrative features, film festivals, new media and science/tech. http://www.documentary.org/magazine Tom Koch is Vice President @ PBS Distribution. He is responsible for managing and overseeing the licensing of PBS International content worldwide. http://www.pbs.org Vinay Venkatraman is one of the founding partners at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. He previously worked as a visual effects designer in the Indian film-making industry and as a product designer at Microsoft in Seattle. http://ciid.dk/
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PART #I >
A Survival Guide in the Webdoc Jungle_
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1> Where Are We Going to? In this first chapter, I wanted to highlight a few comments that were made during the interviews in order to understand a bit better the nature of the revolution(s) that the documentary film industry (among others) is going through. These are a few concepts and core ideas that are essential to keep in the back of our minds as filmmakers if we want to make webdocs in the digital and internet era. This chapters kicks off with “a very short history” of web documentaries.
A Very Short History of Webdocs
(By Louis Villers and Alexis Sarini, co-founders @ webdocu.fr) Initially, the web was composed solely of simple HTML pages (textonly), but in 1993, the «IMG» was invented, which opened up the possibility of inserting images. In the same year, forms were created, making user interaction a possibility. In 1994, with the advent of Netscape Navigator, the dominant browser in the mid-1990s, new elements of presentation were created (alignment, text attributes, flashing ...). From then on, the main goal of engineers was to improve the visual aspect of web pages to increase the impact of information on users. At the same time, companies such as Macromedia (later bought by Adobe) were creating animations and adding interactive objects to websites (streaming videos, slideshows, slideshows with sounds ...). The internet had become fully interactive. Along with these technical developments, internet access was becoming increasingly more available to the public. After the Modem and ADSL, cable, satellite and optical fiber technology were giving hope to journalists, fostering the technical aspirations of webdocumentary producers. In any discussion and article related to webdocumentaries, the ques-
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tion of narrative will always come up. Using web tools (multimedia, interactivity), the producers will attempt to give a playful character to the information that they are conveying. Many of these techniques have been inspired by creators of educational PC and video games. The idea is, while taking into account any technical, economic or time constraints, to imagine different narrative styles capable of providing the player with the pleasure they seek in games: the feeling of power, exploration and discovery, emotional involvement... Different narrative elements are then introduced to ensure the success of the games: for example the concept of the avatar (the player is a character), and levels of network games. Now that we have internet connection speeds sufficient to adapt these technologies to the Web, the webdocumentary has emerged. Key moments since 2002 In 2002, the « Cinéma du Réel Festival » organized by the « Centre Pompidou », used the term «web documentary» for the first time. In 2005, the production company UPIAN launched the first ‘webdocumentaire’ (closest to the kind of webdocs we have today) : La Cité des Mortes - Ciudad Juarez. The most interesting point about this web documentary is probably the way they have created a unique atmosphere: the television buzzing, a soundtrack worked in ... The year 2007 marked the creation of a great webdoc : Thanatorama. Four years later, this work is still being referenced. Its theme is perfectly adapted to the webdocumentary genre, in which the viewer can become an actor, and thus feel involved and a part of the action. And how can we not be affected when the webdoc begins: «You’re dead, do you want to know what happens now?” At the end of the year, Jean-Luc Marty founded Geo webreportage, an interesting and challenging way to present reports from famous magazines. In 2008, two other web documentaries made a lasting impression : Gaza Sderot, life in spite of everything and Voyage au bout du charbon The narrative of Voyage au bout du charbon is very similar to the narrative of a video game. Indeed, from the very beginning, you learn that «you’re the journalist.” Then, you can make the decision to
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go to this or that city, to meet a particular actor, or to choose which questions you want to ask. This proved to be an interesting way to involve the reader in what was a geographically distant subject. The year 2009 was also marked by the release of many interesting web documentaries such as Piraterie en Somalie (France24), Generation Tian’Anmen and, in the «low budget» range: La Maraude, à l’écoute des sans abris (DNA). For many experts, the year 2010 was definitely the year in which the webdoc became omnipresent. Arguably the most famous among them was Prison Valley, notable for its interactivity and diverse media forms (a 59 minute documentary, a book, an exhibition, iPhone app). Many other interesting projects have also emerged, such as Out My Window, Collapus, or Congo la Paix violée, a webdocumentary aired at first exclusively via iPad.
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A Post-Gutenberg Revolution I honestly do not think that the revolution that we are living through is about how we tell stories. Certainly there is room for more creativity there, but there are three things that have shifted the whole paradigm. The bottom line for me is that the tools are there, the platform is there, the audience is there, they are starving for great material, let’s step out and give it to them. Number one is the tools that we all have access to now. Today, with 20,000 dollars you are fully equipped to produce broadcast video content! The communication revolution is bigger than the industrial revolution. It is massive. The second thing, which seems trivial but is so epic, is that we all have distribution. There are no gate-keepers anymore. I do not need anymore to go to a large broadcaster and convince them that they have to fund our project on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Frankly I tried to do that and they were not interested.
Today « the power of the press belongs to those who own it », well the reality is that we all own a printing press now and we can all broadcast information. This is the biggest leap since Gutenberg! Then you can add a third element which is the social network, that has established itself as an important way of spreading information. (Brian Storm, Founder & Executive Producer @ MediaStorm )
Much more than just video... I am not so pleased with the word ‘webdoc’ because the term ‘documentary’ has about 70 years of history and we try to put it alongside the term ‘web’ that has only 15 years of history. Moreover, we often forget that ‘documentary’ can also mean radio or photo whereas the current definition of webdoc is very limited and it implies working mainly with video and the web. At the NFB, we call them interactive productions rather than webdocs because we work with filmmakers but also with photographers,
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graffiti artists, graphic novelists, web designers, web developers. We think in terms of team work. This is very important. (Hugues Sweeney, web producer @ NFB)
A clash of generations In my opinion we are going to see a kind of generation clash. Many people we consider to be the main producers of documentary today are still in the old system framework, very much linked to traditional broadcasting and financing or theatrical release, reluctantly looking at what web documentary could offer. The dividing line will be between, let’s say ironically the “old dinosaurs” like myself (but also those a little bit younger than me) and the new generations, those who are today 16 or 18 years old and who have a completely different view on filmmaking and distribution. So at a certain moment the dinosaurs will in a way disappear and innovative people will find an economical model for webdoc production. Quite frankly, I think that real innovation and new ideas will come from people we don’t even know yet (or maybe I hang out in the wrong places!) (Paul Pauwels, Director @ ETMA)
Be open-minded I think the idea of what a webdoc is has to change. The whole essence of the documentary is changing because it is not a line whereby you follow some characters from point A to point B. Projects like We Feel Fine or Face City tell us that filmmakers will have to really open up their way of thinking about what a documentary is, how to find the right people to collaborate with and the right sources of funding. For these reasons, I think that documentary films will be very different in coming years. (Arik Bernstein, producer @ Alma-Fims )
The potential of interactivity It is surprising to see the increasing number of big corporate websites that are being developed as cross-media platforms where they use their interactivity as a marketing tool, and they think of the audience in a completely different way than what we filmmak-
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ers do. For us, the audience sits down and watches, whereas in the marketing sector they see the audience member as a potential buyer and therefore they try to get them to be much more active. The users are the centre of the project. So their way of thinking will probably bring key ideas to the way we are developing webdocs. (Stefano Strocchi, producer @ Move Production)
Team up with interactive designers No one predicted that the gaming industry would experience such incredible growth. Serious games, those which are educational, are set to explode in the next ten years. A successful example of this is 1066 by Channel 4. One reason for this trend is that children are growing very bored with non-interactive ways to learn... This is why the serious gaming industry will need documentary filmmakers and storytellers to come together with interactive designers, in order to revolutionise how people learn. The documentary filmmakers who are prepared to embrace this will have a great opportunity to play a major role in this explosion. Filmmakers tend to focus on the narrative, the storytelling aspect, but they often think that technology is easy to use. So they make their films and put them online... but no one actually finds them on the web! They have to learn to understand how the audience uses technology and how to find their audience in the digital world. Interactive designers can help filmmakers because they understand how to generate successful online interaction.
(Heather Croall, Director @ Sheffield Doc/Fest & producer @ Crossoverlabs)
Film schools must adapt! Many schools are still focusing too much on cinema production. Too few have understood that there is something new here to teach their students. One problem is that it takes several years before you can change the course content of a state-funded school. We need a new kind of educational system that can adapt to new technologies in a practical way from one day to the next. Today’s film schools are not prepared to rapidly respond to changes related to new products and methods; the changing face of financing, production and distribution. (Paul Pauwels, Director @ ETMA)
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Webdocs - Case 1 > Brèves de Trottoirs_ Brèves de Trottoirs is a French webdocumentary project. The subject? Amazing stories about ordinary people. The papy dancer, the homeless trader, the woman of Montmartre...all kinds of portraits, always with their own personal touch. The idea was born one year ago between Olivier Lambert, spokesman at Radio France International, and Thomas Salva, a freelance photographer. Last year, they were joined by the Darjeeling production company, and spotted by the TV channel France 3 Ile-de-France, to create a transmedia program between TV and the internet.
Title: Brèves de Trottoirs By: Olivier Lambert & Thomas Salva Production: A Darjeeling/ France 3 Ile-de-France coproduction Link : http://paris-ile-defrance.france3.fr/brevesdetrottoirs/
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2> The Age of Connected TV_ In this second chapter, we start with an interview on the ‘connected TV’ phenomenon which is rapidly reaching homes. I thought it was necessary to get some clearer ideas about what tomorrow’s TV will be like. In fact, whereas people have been watching TV in a more or less similar way for the past 60 years, things are now changing fast, and interactivity among viewers as well as with the content itself is becoming a key element that webdoc makers should be aware of. This interview is then followed by the points of view of Tom Koch (PBS) and Alexander Knetig (ARTE).
POV: James McQuivey (Forrester) (James McQuivey, Vice-President @ Forrester Research) What are the core changes that connected TV brings? Once the video gets up to a high enough quality, people very quickly get used to the idea that they can be in control of what they watch and when they watch it. This is very different from the traditional world of TV that dictated to you what you can watch and when you can watch it. What the internet does not do is to put the content in the place where you want to watch it. People still prefer to watch video content on a TV set, this is why they buy a large TV screen, and arrange the rest of the room around it. That’s where connected TV comes in. Connected TV uses the internet to provide exactly the right show at exactly the right time on exactly the right device. This is very challenging to the traditional TV model. For documentary films, this creates opportunities that were not there before. For instance, a broadcaster can only buy a few of the documentaries that are on the
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market because they have limited budget and time slots: they do not really have the tools to let the viewers know that there are many other documentaries out there that could be of interest to them. Connected TV can use the tools of the internet such as social recommendation, and algorithm discovery engines such as those used by retail websites like Amazon, so the viewers can find the documentaries that are of interest for them and the producer can find their audience. I won’t say that we have reached the full potential of connected TV, but there is a huge potential there for documentary film makers.
How are broadcasters adapting to this? Or how should they adapt to these changes? One of the rare exceptions is the BBC, which has very actively made its content available through all kinds of connected TV. Of course the BBC is unique as it does not have to worry about the the loss of advertising that occurs when programs are watched via connected TV rather than the traditional TV screen. Most other broadcasters around the world do care about that. In the long run however, they cannot pretend that the customers will continue to be happy with the traditional way of accessing their content. They won’t be. The internet is too powerful! As it has done with music, newspapers and other forms of media, it is now doing the same thing to video, which is forcing the broadcasters to rethink their entire strategy for reaching consumers.
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What are the different companies competing in the market of connected TV? Right now, just as we saw in the computer business 30 years ago, there is a war over the operating system of the TV of the future. Microsoft won that war in the PC world. Now in the phone business, there is a war between RIM with its BlackBerry platform, Nokia, and of course Apple and Google’s Android. In the TV world, the same thing is happening. For instance Samsung, which is the world’s largest TV maker, has decided that it wants its own platform, because anytime someone was to make an App for their TV platform, they would have to pay Samsung for that App. But at the same time, companies developing operating systems like Google wanted to break into this business as well and created the backbone of Google TV. And I could go on and on. All of them will create different solutions for content providers. So for example, if documentary filmmakers want to make sure their film is available on Apple, Google, Samsung, Sony and LG devices, in some cases you might have to go to each company directly. Or you find a service, such as Netflix in the USA, that has made itself available on all of these devices, so you can distribute your documentary through Netflix. As an expert on Connected TV, do you have any suggestions for documentary filmmakers? What we are talking about is a change in the way content is distributed. But in the long run, it is not just the distribution of content that is going to change. It is also the production.
A lot of the assumptions that filmmakers have worked with for several decades are now disappearing. The historical assumption of how long a documentary had to be may not apply so much in the future.
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The length that used to work for broadcast TV may not work on connected TV. And the internet will allow you to distribute your production and match the actual story that you are trying to tell, rather than the format that has previously been given. We can see that for all types of media, they are changing the way they produce. The best examples of this are how newspapers or book sellers are adapting themselves.
POV : Tom Koch (PBS)
(Tom Koch, Vice President @ PBS Distribution) I think that TV will never fully disappear. There will always be a place for a branded aggregator of editorially created, that is to say executively produced, high quality television. Because the single biggest strength a broadcaster has is their brand. They can organise material in ways that cannot be done online. If a potential viewer is not even aware of the existence of a show, then evidently they are not going to be able to watch it. Google TV has so far not been a success; it gets remarkably bad reviews, and I do not believe that massive aggregators which are not branded, and do not provide easy access to material, are going to succeed. Public broadcasters have the greatest potential for success because they are not forced to rely on commercial pressure. They can actually create content that goes to multiple platforms, and thus tell effectively the whole story and the same story.
Look at Lemonde.fr or Newyorktimes.com or PBS.org. What kind of companies would you call these, as they all publish video, audio and text? So what is important is not so much what the content is, but how the content is packaged and delivered. It is the aim which you are trying to achieve that is going to make the difference. And at PBS, what we are trying to deliver ideas in as many different ways to as many audiences as possible, to try to tell that same story.
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POV: Alexander Knetig (ARTE) (Alexander Knetig, web editor @ ARTE )
When did the webdoc adventure start at ARTE? Things started to change at the beginning of 2008 when Joel Ronez came along. The whole infrastructure with web agencies and producers started to see online media would be a key venture in 2008. So, although we were among the first to broadcast original web programs, it is still pretty new for ARTE. Why is it important for a broadcaster to have a web strategy? I think that TV is still the biggest mass-media in the world. The internet is different, as a media massively used but not yet a mass media. Although the BBC has 100 million users on their website, this does not even equal 10% of their broadcast audience. My generation are in our late 20s, we were raised with TV, so in a sense it is part of a media culture which is only now beginning to change. What I really think is that with relatively small broadcasters such as ARTE - or France5 - you have more freedom to develop a strategy for the web. Because we only have a 3 to 5% share of the TV audience, we need to develop another strategy. A large private broadcaster like TF1 in France, that produces more entertainment and has a dominant position on TV with about 25 to 30% of the audience, does not need to develop a web strategy. Not yet anyway. Connected TV: what do you think about all this? This is a huge question. So we need to really think about it in our strategic department and also from an editorial point of view. We presume that we will soon have one single broadcast/website interface for a large TV device, and not a small internet screen. Maybe we will have this in three or four years’ time. We believe that our main objective as a broadcaster is to bring our content to the people; now if it exists on different devices (PC, mobile, connected TV‌) or if it is embedded on other platforms, like Google, Dailymotion, Vzaar or Vimeo, this is not a problem. These are only the first steps. In a few years, or even months from now, people will browse video content on Youtube from their TV screen.
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3> Ten key tips for your webdoc_ If you had to start developing a webdoc, and you could only remember ten pieces of advice from some of the top experts in the field, here is what I would strongly suggest for you to think about...
1 - Get inspired by people from other sectors With the documentary creators and the multimedia creators, often one group is completely unaware of what the other is doing. The role of a web producer is to create a kind of ‘marriage’ between these professionals and make them work as a bicephalous team so that they shape and influence each other. The internet, iPhone or iPad are not just static boxes to throw your content into. You wouldn’t write a book as you would a film, or a film as you would a book. If you do, we call this an adaptation and this means someone has to recreate each scenario to transform it into a film. If a book writer does a ‘save as’ into a film, it is not going to work... they will need to work with a good film scriptwriter, and even then there’s no guarantee it’s going to be a good film. For the webdoc it is exactly the same problem. Thinking that webdocs are documentaries is a conceptual mistake. The documentary genre still exists and will still exist in coming decades, but what we’re seeing now is something else entirely. When I go to events organised by documentary filmmakers, we talk a lot about the content and very little about the form. But when I go to events organised by interactive developers, we talk a lot about the form and almost never about the content. So these two universes complement each other well, and have a lot to share. (Hugues Sweeney, Web Producer @ NFB)
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2 - Find a good topic In the past two years, we’ve made 10 projects but we’ve had to turn down about 200. The main problem we see is that producers can have amazingly designed 40-page dossiers, telling us how everything is linked with social media and interactive flash interfaces. But in the end, we are not even sure what the project is about. So, what people need to think carefully about is choosing a good topic. The first question is what is it about, and then why should it be on the internet. 80% of a whole project is the topic. Once you have a good topic, we can all think together about how to make it work well on the internet. And this is the same for traditional documentaries: first comes the topic, then the design. (Alexander Knetig, web editor @ ARTE )
3 - Build your team Production plus distribution is much more work, but it is empowering. I do not think however that anyone should try to do it all by themselves. There are 12 of us here at Mediastorm. It is a very collaborative environment with a huge number of different talents. We have four producers that take raw material and turn it into a piece. Then we have two interactive designers who write codes and design pages, and they also do motion graphics. We have two interns, and then we have a business developer. She deals with clients and contracts. There is also a manager who sort of runs the office, leads the workshops, manages the archives, the blog and all the stuff that needs to get done. I spend most of my time in the editing suite working on pieces. (Brian Storm, Founder & Executive Producer @ MediaStorm )
4 - Focus on interactivity Looking around, we can see that there are indeed some initiatives out there to support webdoc production, for example ARTE, VPRO, CANAL+, but most have been linked to traditional documentaries shown on the TV or cinema screen. I fear that in the near future this will continue to be the situation.
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I believe that people who want to make webdocs will have to prove that they can produce and find an audience: meaning people who are ready to watch their production and interact with it, even before it is made. The notion of interaction is in my opinion what makes the difference between a traditional documentary and a webdoc. Therefore I believe that if people manage to produce some good examples and make them work, they’ll create themselves the tools to put pressure on film funds and other institutions, in order to convince them that there should be a shift in funding from more traditional documentary production towards new media and web-based production. (Paul Pauwels, Director @ ETMA)
5 - Learn how to tell a story
Maybe it’s not the answer people want to hear, but my advice is: learn how to tell a story. Unless you can actually tell a story, I don’t care how great you are with CGI or with the technical side of things. I simply do not believe you’ll be able to work across multiple platforms. If you can tell a story, it can be crafted in many different ways , but if you cannot then you are doomed. So the bottom line of all this is great story telling and great narrative. And also, when you go to a website, you have to know that the website works like a book - I mean that as an analogy, as the website contains the story which is on the inside. If the links are all over the place, it makes no sense and it will be a very unsatisfying experience. You need to show that on your web platform content is still editorially managed, but that it is also driven by a narrative function. Some documentary film producers in Canada have had access to large amounts of funding to build massive websites, that exist somewhere on the internet but are not connected to any brand, any entry point, any portal for people to find and access it. So in other words, they have been building a website which is the equivalent of writing a book, but having the book available in only one store. How can people can find it? Or even know it is out there? And it is crazy that people are spending all this money and then very few people end up watching it. I read the other day that for each person living in the
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USA, there are around 400,000 new pages put on the internet every day... this is vast and inconceivable. But this means that someone will have to not simply aggregate all this content but administer it, create ways to sort of guide people through this stuff. I just do not believe that random searching is going to be the answer. (Tom Koch, Vice President @ PBS Distribution)
6 - Think Small
Many people come and see me with huge and costly projects, or they have long series that last many weeks. This is very engaging and might work on TV, but on the web people do not just zap channels, they hyper-zap. They spend less time on a website than they would a TV channel. So creators have to take this into account. The short format exists in literature, cinema and music but I almost never see short interactive pieces.
I always challenge the creator to offer us a very profound and engaging experience, but one that lasts only 5 minutes, one time, small stuff. (Hugues Sweeney, Web Producer @ NFB)
7 - Grab your audience’s attention When people commission something for television only, all the responsibility for contextualising and publicising the film is taken on by the broadcaster and the commissioner. So it is put in a slot, for history or the arts, for instance and then it is advertised through trailers on television, newspaper features and so on. Now that does not really happen on the internet! Web producers will definitely need a mixed team. They can find themselves in a situation where you put something together but nobody goes there... and when they do go there, the average dwell time for websites is so short, that you’ve got only a few seconds to convince them to stay. It has become much more difficult to grab people’s attention, and you need to get their attention in a very, very, very short space of time - and keep them there. (Mark Atkin, Head @ Doc Campus Masterschool )
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Webdocs - Case 2 > Little Burma_ The project is a mixture of photos, videos and drawings, which is the highlight of this web documentary. Little Burma tells the story of the mysterious country between Thailand and Burma, populated by those who have fled the military junta. From a map drawn, you can browse through various key locations. Navigation through the characters is also possible. Little Burma is also a blog on lemonde. fr, led by the author among others, denouncing the violent repression of the Burmese military junta.
Title: Little Birma By: Alain Devalpo Production: Inflammable Production Link: http://www.lemonde.fr/asie-pacifique/ visuel/2010/11/08/littleburma-le-pays-clandestin_1436930_3216.html
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8 - Put the user at the centre From Zero was my first experiment, so I did not really think of ways to interact with the audience. It is however crucial to realise that the internet works in a different way, and that one can develop many links between stories and protagonists, including a timing element, instead of producing a linear story.
On the internet, what matters is that the user has to be at the centre and not the film! But this is difficult because filmmakers are kind of egocentric and they will not do that easily (laughs). (Stefano Strocchi, Producer @ Move Production)
9 - Boost your management skills It is fundamental to stay open-minded, and take the necessary steps to prepare yourself. Good management skills are becoming increasingly important. This includes the ability to deal with artistic, economical and technological issues. When I started to make films 30 years ago, my level of technological knowledge was not very high, but then it was not needed. Today, technology is changing so rapidly that production decisions are not limited to storytelling or financing issues anymore, it’s all about accommodating the latest technological changes and developments. For instance, producers have to know which distribution channels are new on the market, and decide for themselves which ones they think might work, and which ones they think might fail and shortly disappear. And the most important thing is to know how to combine all the different distribution channels available out there... I do not believe in a product that is made only for TV or only for the web. The key is to understand how using multiple platforms can strengthen your production and support its distribution. This development is extremely important and will necessitate a completely different form of project management. (Paul Pauwels, Director @ ETMA)
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10 - Design an easy entry point It is very important to keep things accessible. Look at Gaza Sderot, the entry point is very clear and then people can explore the site through the people, the topics, the timeline. And so the most important lesson is that the simpler your website is, the greater an audience it will get. I also have a counterexample. We had an interesting webdoc about the World Cup in 2010, and we had brilliant personalities talking about previous World Cups at various points in time. There was a very nicely designed flash interface that looked a bit like the Panini’s stickers, but the problem was that it was so difficult to understand the logic that nobody really entered the website, as viewers did not understand the point. (Alexander Knetig, web editor @ ARTE )
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4> Interactive Storytelling Storytelling Tips
(Or how we should stop worrying and start loving digital documentary storytelling)
Caspar Sonnen (Caspar Sonnen is the New Media Coordinator @ IDFA) As we speak, the digital revolution is unfolding. It’s destroying ageold business models and ruthlessly blurring almost every existing boundary within society, media and the arts. The good news is that the need for great storytellers has become bigger than ever. And so have the opportunities for the ones who dare to explore and invent new forms of digital documentary storytelling. So, for what it’s worth, here are a few random tips for anyone considering to make a webdocumentary, based on my experiences as curator of IDFA DocLab and as someone who still thinks Pong is the best game ever invented. 1 - Create a ‘cinematic interface’, not a website with video Many of the webdocs that were selected for IDFA DocLab succeeded because of their ‘cinematic interface’. Besides being aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly (which helps), a truly cinematic interface becomes the story. It awakens peoples’ curiosity to explore, pulls them into the narrative(s) and surprises them once immersed (similar to how camerawork and editing function in traditional filmmaking). An innovative cinematic interface is why you’ll never forget projects like Thanatorama, We Feel Fine, Soul Patron, GazaSderot, Journey to the End of Coal, We Choose the Moon, Prison Valley, Welcome to Pine Point, The Wilderness Downtown or Highrise/OutMyWindow.
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2 - Don’t focus on technology The only technological asset you really need, is the ability to recognize a great website and a great interface when you see one. Taking a piece of paper and turning your webdoc idea into a wireframe sketch is a great way to develop this ability (and convey your idea to a web developer) 3- Find your dream team Probably your biggest challenge is finding the right web developer. Those who understand documentary storytelling well are scarce (and usually too busy). Find them through colleagues, conferences and websites specialized in webdocs. 4 - Interaction and narration are no match made in heaven Nobody wants to choose the punch line to a joke (think about it). Great storytelling is about exerting control, seducing and surprising your audience. The moment your audience feels they’re doing your job, they’re gone. So please, only add interactivity to a story when it’s the only way to tell your story/stories. That said, when it’s done right, an interactive story is an experience unlike any other. It can create a layered reality with enormous complexity and detail, while at the same time providing every single audience member with the pleasure (the illusion of) a story told to them individually. Done right, it can be performed live - creating new versions at every new performance. Great interactive stories (Thanatorama is a good benchmark) often limit the amount of story options, ensuring that every possible storypath is a great story in and of itself. Another approach is to create a more exploratory and playful storyspace, like data artist Jonathan Harris did with We Feel Fine. However, applying this approach to video often results in a database of clips, not a real story. A third way to add interactivity to a story is to create a flexible timeline, whereby the viewer can speed up or slow down a narrative. Great examples of this are Welcome to Pine Point and This Land. Different approaches can sometimes be combined into one.
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5 - Don’t be too innovative Avoid using a technology that is so new that it hasn’t been widely adopted or tested and only a few people in a research lab know how to use it (unless you’re Aaron Koblin, who had a whole team of Googlers create the awesome Wilderness Downtown project with). 6 - Don’t forget the past New types of storytelling present new types of dramatic problems. However, many solutions can be found by looking back to cinematic history. Compare for instance the many webdocs about a specific place with Dziga Vertovs Man With A Movie Camera or Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. 7 - Don’t outsource social media Unlike linear TV and cinema, webdocs are in a much better position to get to know and engage with their audience directly. Take control and realize that all the people who follow your current project on Twitter or Facebook represent an instant audience for your next project. 8 - Relax about definitions In a media landscape that’s evolving at such an incredible pace, hypes and buzz words are hard to distinguish from useful definitions (see www.whatthefuckismytransmediastrategy.com). With digital technology reducing everything to pixels, media are converging into every possible form of hybrid art. So just keep an open mind and also look for inspiration outside of the ‘traditional’ webdoc and film world. Here’s a few unusual suspects to start with: Ze Frank, Ira Glass (This American Life), Radiolab, The Moth, Jonathan Harris, 2D Boy, Mediastorm, etc.
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9 - Do whatever you want Nobody really knows what to make of webdocs or how to finance them exactly. Is it film? Is it journalism? Is it new media art? Is it web content? All this means is that you have a lot of extra doors to knock on and a lot of extra work trying to find the right people, funds, festivals, broadcasters and production companies to collaborate with. Luckily, they do exist and digital giants like Google and Facebook are becoming interested in webdocs too. Unlike existing media industries, the internet doesn’t care about 52 minute timeslots, language borders (always make an English version!) or fixed themes. So, once you’ve found the right partners to explore these uncharted digital territories with, all you have to do is this: Go out there and tell your great story/stories perfectly, make sure it looks awesome and that it feels like something nobody has ever seen before. And rest assured, if we select it for IDFA DocLab, you still get to premiere it on a big screen in front of a paying audience... Bon voyage!
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Webdocs - Case 3 > Voyage au bout du charbon _ One of the first examples of an interactive story line, this web documentary in which ‘you are the hero’ takes you behind the scenes in Chinese mines, described as the most dangerous in the world. The interface gives you the possibility of conducting your own investigation. The question is, where does the documentary stop and the video game begin? Thanks to Voyage au bout du Charbon, the photographer Samuel Bollendorf has also become a major player in the webdoc community.
Title: Voyage au bout du charbon By: Samuel Bollendorf & Abel Ségrétin Production: HonkyTonk Link: http://www.lemonde.fr/asie-pacifique/ visuel/2008/11/17/ voyage-au-bout-du-charbon_1118477_3216.html
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Keep in mind your intended audience So you need to think, what should I ask them to do there, and why? And how do they move from here to there? In some webdocs, the interactivity is derived from games.
If you are putting something on the web because you could not get it funded by TV, you are probably going to fail. What you’ve got to bear in mind is your intended audience. Take a game like 1066: a web-based game set on the most significant date in British history, in which you can play as a Viking, a Norman or as an Englishman and learn a little bit about warfare and this battle that changed the world order. The drama doc on TV The Battle for Middle Earth did OK, with about 1 million viewers, whereas the game has had something like 25 millions plays, achieving audiences that TV can only dream about. So the questions is, how can you bring the game players to watch the programme on TV? This is how you need to be thinking. (Mark Atkin, Head @ Doc Campus Masterschool)
Nothing is left to chance What is important for an author is to know why they chose a still picture vs video, why the edit is what it is, what role music plays in the piece, or how to think about composition. (Brian Storm, Founder & Executive Producer @ MediaStorm )
No radical change in web storytelling To get someone to watch a linear TV program for 60 minutes, from beginning to end, you have to create points which will keep the person engaged and curious. Somebody is making editorial decisions about where these points of engagement are. Even in a webdoc, I do not see any real difference. Is there a difference between how people view content on the web vs on TV? Well, first of all people
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use the web in many different ways. I for example stream a lot of traditional-form programmes; I have found hardly any interactive documentary material which really engaged me, unless there are click-throughs to get more information about a topic raised in the documentary. But basically, it is nothing more than reading a book. First you read from A to Z, and then you go back to find some specific information that you want. So I do not see any radical change. (Tom Koch, Vice President @ PBS Distribution)
Be innovative and plan ahead In this field, we are all learning and I think that innovation is very important. On the internet, people expect innovation, so you have to be creative and you cannot just repeat what you’ve seen somewhere else. Many transmedia companies specialise in a sort of franchise production; so there is a film to begin with, and then they make an online add-on to it. What we try to do is to look at what the internet can bring to your core idea. This means that you have to think what people might expect from your story and how could they interact with it. With transmedia production, one of the big problems is planning. When you work together with a film production crew, and then there is a game or online component, it is a big challenge to keep the two teams walking side by side.
My advice is to think of the intrinsic qualities of the internet from the very beginning rather than just trying to adapt something straight from the TV. For instance, documentary filmmakers are not used to scripting every scene, but for a transmedia project you have to do that. So the workload must be balanced, in order to prevent people from becoming frustrated. This can happen, for example when interactive people have to wait too long before the film is ready, or the film director might feel forced to produce in a format that they do not really like. (Femke Wolting, co-founder and head @ Submarine)
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Webdocs - Case 4 > Portraits d’un Nouveau Monde_ The first thing we do when we decide to produce a documentary is we sit at the table with the authors and ask them what the story they want to tell us, who are the protagonists and what is their point of view. When this is clear, we begin to draw functional sketches to see how it might work. The internet allows you to choose between many different paths, but simplicity is what works best.
The very first thing to establish, after the form of the webdoc, is the story. Even if there is some kind of interactive element in the story, there is still a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. We do not produce rigid time formatted webdocs. Of course, short stories are a priori more suitable for the internet. If the story has a great number of twists, it can be too long. For the collection Portraits d’un nouveau monde, we had many constraints: a linear format, a player who was always the same, and the challenge was to produce 24 multimedia documentaries in a year along 6 themes (China, migration, urbanization, economics, ecology, and living together), and put them online every two months. It was necessary to establish a formal and editorial consistency, a kind of common grammar that allowed us to meet budgets and schedules, and to provide a framework for the 40 authors with whom we collaborated. (Laurence Bagot, Director @ narrative) Producers: Laurence Bagot & CÊcile Cros Production: France Televisions and narrative, with CNC Link: http://www.france5. fr/portraits-d-un-nouveaumonde/
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Transmedia Storytelling Caitlin Burns Caitlin Burns is a Transmedia Producer with Starlight Runner Entertainment. She has worked on projects such as Pirates of the Caribbean or James Cameron’s Avatar. Could you tell us what is the job of a Transmedia Producer? What is key to bear in mind is that despite all of the rencent technological advances, the core of what filmmakers, documentarians and other creators are working on is still a story, whether it is fiction or non fiction.
Regardless on what technological platform it is on, the story component must come first! And you need to be able to think about your story as something that does not need a platform. It is a story first, and then you can see it as a film, as a web series, as a video game, etc. Believe me that if you have a robust story, you are in a very good place.
The second crucial point in transmedia storytelling strategy is to think about, what the experiences of those platforms are, and, on the second hand, to think about the ways that stories emerge most interestingly on these platforms. Take for instance a video game: it enables the audience to actively participate and engage with the ideas that are being presented. That is a very different experience than passively watching a film on TV or in a theater. It’s a totally different experiential context. It is very important to think about the way you are going to structure the storytelling of each platform, to make sure that they are complementing one another. There are a varieties of ways that you can go about creating the connections between the two, but you need to think about it carefully.
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In the context of a documentary film, you end up following a lot of stories before you come to the piece that you really want in the final film. There are many small stories that do not feel like they are right for the 52 or 90 minutes, but, in their own right, they could be an interesting sideline that you could explore on the web in short form. What are the main task you have to do on a project? The first thing we do is that we dive into the story and we look at it to find the core themes, the core messages, the archetypes, all the deep meaning underneath the things that really drives the story forward, motivate the characters, the greater complex of the world, and the tones that are established in the narrative. We make sure that the core message has to come through in all the other stories that will be told or they will not really make sense. The Transmedia Producer becomes the steward of the story across platforms. From there, we go into a lot of highly detailed research. If there is a scientific aspect to the story, we want to have a very strong understanding of what that aspect is and, if there are historical aspects, we want to do a deep dive into that. We then put all this together into a giant encyclopedic mythology of the story that we are telling. What is very important is that we do all this work in conversation with the authors and the experts. We, as transmedia producers, cannot work in a vacuum! Our work requires a lot of creative conversations. When we go into production, we look at the broadest story beats. That is true for both fiction and non-fiction. With that in mind, we create a strategy that takes those points and try to show places to tell stories that don’t exist yet.
We try to answer the questions that the audience is going to be asking at a certain point in time and we create stories that have these drivable points in them, places in a story where there is more narrative underneath what you see.
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The filmmaker might not want to explore a question, but knowing that a question is there will help them think about what their audience might like to see online, in a novel, or in a game. Take for example a documentary biography. Looking at the major points in a person’s life is like looking at different narrative story arcs of a person’s life. This is where you are going to look at to see how you can extend it to multiple platforms. You will be looking for what are the most compelling stories to be shown online, which one are better for a video game or for a mobile device.
It is extremely relevant to pay attention to the device on which you are going to tell the story. Advertising is a good example of that. If you think about the ways you are being sold things, the tone is different from one media to another. They know that the way you respond to a company contacting you on your cellphone to sell you a products is entirely different than the way you have accepted visual advertisement on the street or a commercial on TV. There are entirely different tones and different levels of intimacy. As you are telling a story, you have to think how that story is going to interact with a person, in a theater, on TV at home, on internet or on a mobile device. As the creator, if you are feeling uncomfortable with a story on a specific platform, do something about it because your audience will feel uncomfortable too. Finally, be willing to get have conversations with people around you who are experts in different fields. Film makers are very good at making films, but at some point you will need to talk to people who are experts in their field to help you do that. Being able to make a fantastic film does not mean you are going to make a fantastic game, or web application. The transmedia producer is the person that keep the eye on the story to make sure its application on different platforms is coherent.
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What are the most common mistakes people attempting transmedia strategies tend to do? The very first thing is that no one can do this alone. Of course depending on the budget, not everybody can hire high price consultants but you’re not going to be a transmedia producer all by yourself in a living room. You need to be able to think realistically about the scope of your budget, and within this reality, you have to see where you will need some help. Don’t be afraid to reach out others and ask for their advice when you don’t know! Be willing to look outside your own network and if you want to work on a game, email a game designer and see if there is someone who would be willing to talk to you about it. It is helpful to have partners in those areas that you do not know very well. They will be interested in turn because you have expertise in the story and in your particular media that they do not have. Especially if you are working on social issues, don’t be afraid to contact people who are doing similar things. There are a lot of possibility for resource sharing and sharing insights that will help you all in your projects. Moreover, creating a coalition of interest groups may help you to find extra funding and support.
Do not attempt to create something for a new platform without really thinking about what it is. You have to identify what you want to do and figure out how to do that well.
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Interaction Design Vinay Venkatraman
Vinay Venkatraman is co-founding partners at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and worked in the Indian film industry In interaction design process, end-users and other stakeholders are part of the creation process. Such a way of designing has been going on for a long time. What is new however is the role and realm of the designer itself. Similar tasks used to be carried out by engineers or technical units but never given emphasis or recognition. Things changed with people like Bill Moggridge, author of the book Designing Interactions (www.designinginteractions.com) or Bill Verplank. They were among those pioneers who first sketched the paradigms for/of interacting with computers we know today back in the 80s. Since then, the interaction designer has become a key figure in the designing process for most digital products and services. I would like to highlight a few core principles that could be useful for webdoc film-makers while developing their project. The first thing is to put energy into understanding your audience. Interaction designers always put people first. It is about understanding not only the needs of people but also their aspirations. There is a difference between needs and wants. People do not only need things but they also want them, they want to feel proud and enjoy using them. So my first advice is to map both the needs and the aspirations of the viewers of your project so that you can address them better. Then the next level is to think about both usability and desirability. When you know what people want, you have to make sure it is usable for them, simple to use and easy to navigate. Desirability is important if you do not want to create a «one-time wonder», but you want your audience to keep coming back or spread awareness about it. This is not so easy however as focusing too much on usability can make your project too rational or in other words boring; whereas focusing too much on desirability can make it complex and unusable for many. So when you design your webdoc, try to find a balance between these two values.
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Another key value of our approach is the culture of prototyping, and the process of trial and error. So, in simple words, build your concept many times before your make it final. There is a difference between a sketch and a painting, and there is much work to move from one to the other.
This culture of prototyping is very important today and new generations of film makers will start with a small idea, broadcast it through internet to the world, get feedback and start building on it. So in a way, a director could shape their film based on how the audience responds to it. It is therefore not anymore a pre-scripted vision of someone; it is partly scripted and partly crowd-sourced. It is almost like live performance with a continuous feedback loop. However, there are not as yet the right kind of tools designed for this sort of film-making technique, that enable to take large scale feedback from lot’s of different people. Moreover, the culture of editing is not yet responsive in real time, and still very much pre-structured in advance. Then of course, as you cannot disjoin editing from production, production needs to be much more flexible too. So it is another paradigm and I think the right tools have yet to be invented. Making a documentary film is not anymore just about providing information. Ten years ago, you could produce a film that was purely informative. Today the audience wants more as they can find lots of information online! Your film needs to have a point of view, needs to have a sort of entertainment value in it, and it needs to have a viral factor to it. Creating a viral factor into your video is very hard! Interaction design tries to create the right kind of feedback loop, and the cycles which are important for things to spread. So it is very important to create empathy with the audience you try to address. But it is not just enough to be empathetic, engagement is the next step. Today engagement is much more than watching a film in a fixed medium, you need to exploit all the possible digital mediums possible and there are plenty of them that are two way communication channels.Â
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Webdocs - Case 5 > Congo, La Paix Violee_ This is the first documentary designed for the iPad. Congo, la paix violée tells the story of female rape victims in the province of Kinshasa in Congo. On the narrative side, this work is more akin to an interactive digital book. The pages turn with the advancing narrative, alternating between images, text, sound and video. An internet version was released after a few months. France 24 will be the first to take up this medium. With this achievement, France 24 will become a key player in the multimedia documentary world.
Title: Congo, la paix violée By: Zoé Lamazou & Sarah Leduc Production: France 24 Link: http://www.france24. com/static/infographies/webdocumentaire-congo-paixviol-rdc-nord-kivu-goma-onu/ index.html
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Tips from the Game Industry Marc Meurisse (Marc Meurisse is CEO @ Belle Productions, a serious game company)
What is a serious game in a nutshell? The basic definition of a serious game is a video game whose aim is not only entertaining. It can aim at educating, but it could also be used for marketing purposes. The idea is to use emotions in order to convey a few big messages than to teach precise information. The player can indeed get under the skin of a character and feel rather than learn something. To give you an example, we were recently asked to educate children about persons with a disability in our society. So we created an a priori absurd city in which players face a whole series of obstacles such as stairs which are too high forcing them to find elevators, or forcing them to find thick glasses because information in the street is written in too small print. By playing, the child realises that this city is really badly designed and he understood this by acting and feeling what a person with a disability feels on a daily basis when a public space is badly designed. What is key to bear in mind when one designs a video game? People often think that what matters is the interactivity. Sure it is but what should always be at the centre of a project are the emotions created for the players. Creating a game or a webdoc online is not just developing a path where the audience has to click here and there! This is a common mistake.
The player must feel he or she is the main driver of the story. This emotional immersion created by the game is fundamental and it’s not just a matter of making them click.
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Are there some partnerships between film-makers and game developers? These partnerships can emerge, but frankly so far it is a niche market. You frequently see scriptwriters and directors in very large game productions. However, I think that what is happening today is the opposite: the movie studios are increasingly looking for professionals in the field of video games. The reason is quite clear in a way because today’s youth spend such a considerable amount of time playing video games, that game developers have become a key source of information for anyone who wants to get their attention and need to speak their language. These partnerships could grow in the future because small video game companies face the competition of large corporations. Teenagers are often accustomed to very large production-style video game that I could compare to a «made in Hollywood» movie. We are making «cinema d’auteur» in the video game sector and we need to be very creative to develop games with smaller budget that however still capture the attention of our audience.
It is therefore possible that partnerships with professional film-makers will emerge in the near future to develop new ways to play. What video game professionals would be important in creating a webdoc? I think first of all that we find some very similar kinds of job both in the game sector than in the cinema sector. For instance a game’s artistic director who oversees the entire project is the director on a movie set. But I want to stress the fundamental role of game designer. They are able to give the right balance, the emotions and a growing interest all through the game. For example, they have to dose the difficulty of the obstacles one must overcome to reach the next level. At the beginning of the game, these obstacles are easy and slowly things get more complicated. This is a very precise
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alchemy as the passage of level must neither be too easy nor too complicated or one risks losing the audience. It could be the same for the development of a webdoc.
It is an illusion to believe that one can create a game-like webdoc without hiring a game designer. It’s a bit like if someone decided to make a documentary film because he made some family celebration video...they would soon realize they lack some critical skills of a professional film director so that his story holds water.
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5> Building your audience Chapter five is about what I consider to be the most fundamental element of a webdoc. In my view, what is amazing about the internet is that it brings the filmmaker much closer to his audience. And what is crucial to understand is that on the net, your audience is in fact much more significant than it used to be with TV. Your audience is probably one of the most valuable resources you have in terms of feedback, in terms of distribution strategy, and even in terms of funding strategy. The dictatorship of the audience is not just a faraway idea... my point is that if a filmmaker learns to establish a two-way communication with their audience, it opens up possibilities never thought of before! Think about it, your audience is just there, ready to know more about you and your projects...
Focus on the timing and the public’s POV Classic marketing strategy is a basis that we still use. But the emphasis now is on choosing projects and positioning them in relation to public dialogue. For example, we had a project about suicide, and we decided to release it on a day dedicated to raising public awareness about this issue in order to contribute to the dialogue. The notion of timing is very important, both in the editorial process and for the film’s release. The second thing is that we try to start from the public’s point of view, not our point of view. Interactive projects are viewed and played mostly by people in their 20s and 30s, because they are much more connected, often through social media, and they are more willing to engage in dialogue around a project. Then we try to carry on with this audience to our next project, instead of starting again from scratch with each new project. This way you build a relationship with your audience for the long-term. (Hugues Sweeney, Web Producer @ NFB)
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Do not protect your stuff online We are going through an absolutely epic revolution in this area right now. We recently redesigned our website, and a lot of that was about allowing people to embed our projects.
So we decided to give it away for free. It’s now branding Mediastorm, and it pays off because it is driving serious promotion. It’s been a great success for us. Then of course, the spreading of viral information through Twitter and Facebook has been nothing short of phenomenal for us. It’s not just that we are reaching a lot more people, but the right people. It’s terrific to see that happen. (Brian Storm, Founder & Executive Producer @ MediaStorm )
Know your audience! A Webdoc creator is also a designer of an interactive experience, and should understand how people are going to behave once they get to the website. You definitely should know who your audience will be! Otherwise, how on earth are you going to design something for them and let them know that you have done so? You then have to make sure that once they are there, they will not quickly leave and go somewhere else. If you don’t understand that, what you are going to do will most probably fail, no matter how good it is. At Crossover, we focus a lot on designing the user experience and putting the user at the centre of everything. (Mark Atkin, Head @ Doc Campus Masterschool )
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Webdocs - Case 6 > La vie à sac_ “La vie à sac” is comprised of four portraits of poverty-stricken people who have benefited from the actions of Médecins du Monde. The concept: just pick one of the characters’ bags. The experiment is then to select individual objects from it to discover a part of the owner’s history. The first images were aired on TV Toute l’Histoire (AB Group) as part of the special event «at the heart of Humanitarian History» dedicated to 30 years of Médecins du Monde.
By: Andrea Rawlins & Charles Henry Frizon Film directors : Solveig Anspach & Karima Hamzaoui Photographer : Diane Grimonet Production: CAPA Entreprises (for Medecins du Monde) http://www.lavieasac.com/
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Partnerships to drive traffic Right now the key question is: how do you bring webdocs to audiences, how do you drive flow to the site? My background is in distribution and of course one of the problems is, how do you justify the sale of a webdoc to an audience the way you would justify a film sold to CBC, who know that they will have 2 million people watching? Other ways to commodify a webdoc are now emerging, and this is where I talk about partnering with brands and foundations, and other forms of support. But not every project lends itself to that, not every story has an appropriate product for it, not every one is going to work that way.
Social media is another major tool to increase your audience, but you need a campaign, you need a strategy. One problem with social media is that sometimes the window is short lived, it is like one second of fame and then it’s over. It can die the minute it was born with a viral campaign. So you have to think carefully about how to make your social campaign last. (Elizabeth Radshaw, Market Director @ Hotdocs film festival)
Build a team and be consistent Although most of the tools on the web are free, filmmakers often forget that it takes time, energy and work to complete a project, and you have to account for that. So what is key here is to build a team, look at your budget and set aside a tiny slice of the budget to hire someone to do your social media. This has to be done from the very beginning of the production phase. For instance, it could be done by the production assistant, who may be very interested in managing the twitter, blog or Facebook campaign, as they will feel more involved in the project and it will be a richer experience for them as well. The other thing is that you need to be very consistent with the communication strategy you are building. The production process is very hard, and whether you are doing short webdoc pieces or a long documentary film, the work is just as intense. So it is important to tell your audience that you will add a new ‘behind the scenes’ blog post
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every week, every two weeks, or once a month. Do it on time and be consistent about it so that your audience will know what to expect. And they will be OK with it. (Tamara Krinsky, Web Editor @ Int. Documentary Association)
Get news media onboard From the very first project in 2008 onwards we’ve been making partnerships, and we always think at the genesis of a program about what partnerships we should develop. For instance, we had partnerships with Liberation, France Inter and Yahoo.fr for Prison Valley. We also had a partnership with Lemonde.fr for Havana-Miami, and 30% of our audience came from them. With 40 million visits per month, they are the biggest online media source in France. And we have had a very interesting partnership with Italy. For Havana-Miami, Internazionale.it brought us about 40% of the total audience, when the program was not even in Italian! So yes, this is fundamental. (Alexander Knetig, web editor @ ARTE )
Find the right bloggers A year after the launch, «Portrait d’un nouveau monde» reached 1 million views. Every time a new documentary launches, there is a subsequent peak in audience numbers, particularly after a trailer has aired on TV or an advert is released in the press. But after the first few days, the audience numbers begin to stabilise.
A documentary only needs to be posted on one blog somewhere for a buzz to develop, and then we see the comments start to flow about this documentary. So when choosing your partnerships, you need to keep some measure of editorial consistency and credibility. The internet audience is very scattered. With TV, even with an increasing number of channels, we always have 6 or 7 channels that we’re used to. On the internet, finding your audience can be a complex task. (Laurence Bagot, Director @ narrative)
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Webdocs - Case 7 > Intended Consequences_ How did this project start? Intended Consequences was made by photographer Jonathan Torgovnik. He had incredible portraits and he told me these horrific stories from these women who are ostracized from their communities. It was shocking, but it was a deeply universal message with lots of challenges. For example, how do you begin to love a child that you have had as a result of being raped? In 1994 there were 800,000 people slaughtered with machetes in the space of 100 days, the world let that happen. So Jonathan ended up going back to do more extensive video interviews and we spent one year of production on it. Jonathan then ended up creating Foundation Rwanda to help put these kids through secondary school and to provide counselling for these women.
We are not working with the paparazzi, but with deeply dedicated photographers trying to make the world a better place. What broadcaster did you sell it to? In this case, it was interesting because we couldn’t find another publication to pick it up. And no one actually licensed Unintended Consequences from us, even although it was nominated for an Emmy, it won the DuPont award, it was highly celebrated and was watched by about 3 million people worldwide. How did you spread it then? We have a great online newsletter at Mediastorm. When we post an update on our blog and when we put something out, it just starts to explode because we only post productions which are as good as we can possibly make them. And then it goes viral. So it grows and then it levels off, but what is amazing is that there are 5000 people watching this piece on our site right now. This is why I think quality has been our key to success. So Mediastorm is a destination.
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What What is is your your advice advice to to filmmakers filmmakers who who want want to to self-publish? self-publish? You You need need to to have have aa strategy. strategy. You You want want to to either either be be really really funny, funny, short and youor want be at other the of spectrum; the most shortsilly andorsilly youto want to the be at the end otherofend the spectrum; interesting, compelling, quality-focused piece thatpiece has ever the most interesting, compelling, quality-focused thatbeen has done on whatever yousubject chooseyou to tackle. you don’t ever been done onsubject whatever chooseWhat to tackle. Whatwant to bedon’t is thewant background noise in the middle. your you to be is the background noiseIf in thecontent middle.isIf medioyour cre, no one is going tonobother it bother on Tweet or Facebook. Our content is mediocre, one isposting going to posting it on Tweet strategy is to be asstrategy great asiswe begreat with as ourwe product. doour not or Facebook. Our to can be as can beWe with spend anyWe money onspend advertising or marketing. Our product does that product. do not any money on advertising or marketing. work for us, and our audience every Our product does that work forgrows us, and ourmonth. audience grows every month. (Brian Storm, Founder & Executive Producer @ MediaStorm) (Brian Storm, Director @ Mediastorm)
Using social media Sheri Candler ( Sheri Candler is an inbound marketing strategist working with independent filmmakers. http://www.shericandler.com/) What are social media? To me the entire online world is a form of social media, not just Facebook and Twitter. Any time people can voice their opinions they are being social, and you can do that on blogs, on publication websites, on forums, during live streams and via chat rooms. Why is authenticity so important in social media? My job is to come up with a strategy for the production team to carry out, or I may take on the job myself if they do not have anybody else, and if the project is interesting to me.
You can only be successful with social media on a project if you actually love that project, and if you are already rooted in a community that will respond to that project.
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The internet is all about authenticity and honest expression, and you cannot have this if you are not truly involved in the project. Social media agencies often turn it into a one-way communication, because a third-party company cannot speak for you. Let’s imagine this company has 20 other projects; they won’t have the time nor the in-depth knowledge about this project to communicate properly with the audience. Studios often get it wrong because they post about the new trailer, the behind the scenes material, but they do not really encourage discussion. They simply use it a form of free advertising. Are training sessions and workshops useful? Yes, they can be but if you decide to go for social media training, you first have to ask yourself if you’re prepared to spend a lot of time on this and if you want to share your knowledge and expertise with other people. That is the only way it’s going to work.
People often want to be trained, but they don’t want to spend the time or share knowledge. If that’s the case, then social media is not the tool for you. What would be your first piece of advice? First of all, you should create your own account. You really have to start with that. It’s important that you do that yourself to see how the process really works. This doesn’t mean you have to have thousands of friends, but you have to be committed to do it personally. It is then very important to maintain a separation between your personal life and your professional life. A lot of your friends may not be interested in hearing news about your work and your colleagues probably won’t want to know all about your personal life; your vacations, your family photos etc. But either way, it still needs to be your voice speaking and not that of an outside company.
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How important is it to post fresh content? On Facebook and Twitter, it’s useful to post updates on a daily basis, even if it’s only a few short links. Your social media pages should not just be about you and your projects. They can be about any topic that you are interested in and that your audience is likely to be interested in. Blog posts are longer, and I would say to update them a couple of times a week, and you could post shorter content on the other days. At a seminar I attended recently on newsletter marketing, they found that newsletters which came out daily had a higher retention rate than those that came out once a month. The reason is that with a monthly newsletter people simply forget about it or set it aside, and then eventually unsubscribe as they’re not getting enough updates.
You can send something every day: as long as it is valuable content, you will keep their attention and they will be less likely to unsubscribe. How do you work with the different kinds of platforms available? Everybody likes to go where everyone is; that’s why Twitter and Facebook are so popular. At the moment I don’t see any new sites emerging that are popular enough for you to say, “I should move my account there”. On Twitter, the name of the game is that you post links that are valuable, but somebody needs to be there to communicate. You often have a conversation there, a back and forth dialogue. That’s easy to do on Twitter because the pace is so fast. It is important to spend some time on there at least once a day to answer people’s questions and requests for information. Facebook is not as instantaneous as Twitter is. There you can post something, come back two days later and Facebook will tell you who has commented on it. (interview follow on next page)
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Webdocs - Case 8 > Le corps incarcéré_ It took five months to make this web documentary. Winner of France24-RFI’s webdocumentry award in 2009, Le corps emprisonné describes the lives of French prisoners and their relationship with their bodies. In term of navigation, a drive section allows the reader to select any passages which interest them. To go further, the authors met three experts who explain recurring themes in prison: sex, bodybuilding and self-mutilation.
Title: Le corps incarcéré By: Soren Seelow & Léo Ridet Production: LeMonde Interactive Link: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/visuel/2009/06/22/le-corps-incarcere_1209087_3224.html
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I always suggest that people really study social media for a while. Take the time to listen, and do not rush in to start promoting right away. This is intrusive and nobody will appreciate it. See who the very active people are, as they are often the people who have the most influence on that site. You should start slowly, by commenting on something that somebody has posted but do not start by promoting yourself or your project. Would you say about timing and social rules on the internet? Social media is not something you can do in a hurry, once you have released your film. It’s going to take way longer than you think! So you should start doing it... now! (laughs) You do not have to be working on a specific project. Start building up your presence in a community that you’re interested in. You are a member of the audience you want to attract, and so you shouldn’t have to try too hard when it comes to connecting with them. I really think that self-promotion is about helping other people. For many it sounds counter-intuitive but do offer advice that’s valuable to what is going on, offer your knowledge or tell people about a resource that you really like and that you think would help them. Believe me, they will remember who has helped them. It may not happen immediately but they will tell other people to have a look at what you’re doing. This helps you slowly gain trust and build an audience.
The social rules on the internet are the same as they are in real life! You wouldn’t barge into somebody’s backyard barbecue, hand out your business card and then leave... (laughs) What would you say about the audience? What makes Twitter and Facebook work is the niche audience, not the mass audience. If you try to reach everybody with your project, you will probably reach no one. You have to catch fire somewhere. The spark of your project has to start a small fire with a small group of people before it can spread.
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The biggest mistake that filmmakers make is to say, “every one would love my story”. Yes, but everyone is not your audience! You have to figure out who exactly are you going to start with. Studios make a big push and they buy it with millions of dollars. They have access to all the major media, but I do not deal with anybody who has that kind of budget... so if you do not have that budget and you use social media as your primary tool, you’ve got to start well in advance and pinpoint exactly where you are going to start. You cannot start with the mass audience. The Guild by Felicia Day is a very good example as it is probably the most successful web comedy to date in the USA. It took her some time to build up her audience. She was mostly reaching gamers at first; those who go to conventions and dress up in costumes. And she was one of these people herself so it was very genuine and she started finding them online. A major production company has offered to buy her show, but she refused because she simply does not need them! So be happy about starting with a small audience, an audience who, like you, are really passionate, and they will bring other people into your circle. How important are partners in running a campaign? The good news is that social media are very useful for documentary filmmakers, because every project has some kind of a cause and an interest group that filmmakers can contact immediately. It is actually easier to identify the audience characteristics than it is for a comedy! So you have to do a lot of online research to find groups or influential people that could become your partners.
When you approach them it should be from the standpoint of what you can offer them, not what they can offer you! So try to figure out what you can do for their cause. And if you do not have any answer to that, you’d better think of something because that’s what they want to hear! For some it is money, but for others it can be prestige, exclusivity, knowledge, or something else.
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Think Outside the Box Office Jon Reiss ( Jon Reiss is a filmmaker and author of Think Outside the Box Office: The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution in the Digital Era. www. thinkoutsidetheboxoffice.com )
This is a modified manifesto from my book, which is a nuts-andbolts guide for filmmakers who want to take control of their own destiny and create a distribution strategy that works for their specific film. The new ways of storytelling will not only help filmmakers get their work out to new audiences, but will expand their creative horizons as well. Web documentaries such as the ones discussed in this book and the one I completed last year, Bomb It 2 are some of the exciting new forms emerging to transform perceptions about what “film” is. 1. Know your film/know yourself every film is different and should be treated as such It is best to determine what distribution and marketing path makes sense for your particular film and to do so as early in the process as possible. This plan/strategy will change over time and will evolve organically as your film evolves, but you need a starting place. Depending on how you release your film, it could cost a lot of time and money. Look yourself in the eye, take a cold hard look at the film and determine how much time and money you are willing to spend on it’s release. The point is to balance the time you spend releasing a film with the time needed to create new work. 2. Change your attitude toward marketing It’s not a matter of changing your work to suit a certain market, but you should consider what kinds of audiences might be interested in your work and seek to cultivate them.
The biggest problem facing independent film is not one of distribution – it is one of marketing. It’s one thing to put your film out into the world; it’s another to get people to know about it, and want to watch it.
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3. Determine your audiences and how to reach them from inception Audience identification should be a constant process of discovery during the production (and prep, post and distribution) of your film. It is difficult to market to your audience if you don’t know who that audience is. Your fans exist. You just need to find them. The way you do that is through distribution and marketing. 4. When you have finished your film, you are half done Distribution and marketing can take as long and cost as much, or more than you spent on your film. The new 50/50 is not a revenue split but the mental shift that filmmakers must make concerning the filmmaking process.
Too many filmmakers have no resources left for the second half of the process once they’ve finished their film. It is a shame. Why make a brilliant, wonderful film if you don’t then have the resources to get it to its audience. This is not a hard and fast rule: remember, all films are unique. But it is a good guideline to follow when embarking on a project. 5. Take back the theatrical experience It is time for filmmakers to reclaim the meaning of a theatrical release, so that it is inclusive of a multitude of live-screening event scenarios. Something special is conveyed by going to a screening at a specific time at a specific place. The more specific that time and place is, the more it will take on the qualities of an event. Even web documentaries could have live events to help launch the project and engage with the audience. Alternative venues such as galleries, coffee shops, community centres and museums could provide an outlet for non-traditional storytelling techniques. Live and online components of the project could work in tandem and supplement each other.
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6. Create products people want to buy Consider items that your fans and audience will want to purchase. It will be different for every film. Consider books of photographs that document the project, video games, social games, apps, vinyl. Your imagination is your only constraint. 7. Digital rights are a minefield – be careful Companies buying your rights, whether digital, cable, home video, or domestic or foreign, will try to get as many of your rights as they can, whether or not they have the ability to exploit those rights. But, if a company does not have the ability to sell your rights and is not willing to offer you something for those rights, you should push hard not to give them up. 8. Embrace the producer of marketing and distribution I would argue that from now on, every film needs one person devoted to the distribution and marketing of the film from inception, just as they have a line producer, assistant director, or DP. I give this crew position an official title of Producer of Marketing and Distribution (PMD) because without an official position, this work will continue to not get done. The need for a PMD results from the recognition that audience engagement is a lot of work (perhaps as much or more work than actually making a film) and that traditional filmmakers (writers, directors, producers etc) are already busy with the task of making a great film. These traditional members of a filmmaking team rarely have the extra time to devote to distribution and marketing (so it often falls by the wayside). In addition, many traditional filmmakers are not suited to or interested in the kinds of tasks that audience engagement requires. I look forward to a near future in which filmmakers/directors will be able to put out calls for PMDs just as they do for DPs and Editors – and that they will get an equal volume of applications. Directors will develop long term relationships with PMDs that “get them” just as they do with DPs, Editors, and Producers etc.
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Webdocs - Case 9 > Les communes de Paris_ A student project, Les communes de Paris made a lot of noise when it was published in Summer 2010. Based on a map, the author offers a visit to Paris, his suburb and the local population. With a very high production quality, an interesting subject, and a refreshing simplicity, this is a good example of the use of a webdocumentary as a promotion tool for the author. After this, Simon Buisson was spotted by Capa to work with them.
Title: Les communes de Paris By: Simon Buisson Director/Producer: MarcBenoit CrĂŠancier Production: La FĂŠmis Link: http://www.lescommunesdeparis.fr/
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6> Funding your webdoc One of the biggest problems for many filmmakers is that there is no clear business model in the webdoc industry. Large experiments have so far only been possible thanks to help from film funds like the CNC in France or NFB in Canada, or broadcasters like ARTE, France5 and VPRO. Yet, there are also many smaller webdocs that have been created using very innovative financial strategies. Today’s webdockers have to be open-minded and look for new partners and create new funding strategies. But remember that others made it and there are lessons to be learned from that...
Think in terms of new funding sources More and more projects are now being supported by foundations and charities or third sector organisations, while others have support from brands and agencies. We will see more online partnerships emerging with brands that share the filmmaker’s values, and respect their editorial independence. These brands will want to support this particular story and reach their customers, while filmmakers want to reach their audience. And they happen to be the same people. So the question is how can they work together so that they can create a progressive piece. (Elizabeth Radshaw, Market Director @ Hotdocs film festival)
Look at what publishers do... We need to start thinking not only in terms of broadcasting but in terms of publishing. This means having non-traditional partners in the music, sport, and book editing industries. It seems to me that the publishing industry is moving faster than the TV industry. Book publishers are all thinking about how the iPad is changing their industry, and they are open to new projects. Producers have to be creative and look in new directions. (Hugues Sweeney, Web Producer @ NFB)
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Do not rely on one single business line! I can tell you that there is a demand for this kind of work. At Mediastrom, we have to refuse about 70% of opportunities that come in our direction. My core advice is not to rely on one person you know or one idea to pay the bills. You have to have multiple clients. If you look at our model, it is pretty diverse, and we generate revenue from four different lines of business: 1 - One is from our publications. We have made 28 and we largely funded these ourselves, or licenced them from other people. We have sponsorship support, and we have an advertising model which we have not really put into practice yet, but we will at some point. We have agreements where we receive a certain percentage out of transactions that we drive to Amazon or B&H. 2 - Two would be syndication, where we license our project to other web producers or broadcasters. And we split the revenue 5050 with the artist who we worked with on the project.
3 - Then our third line of business is as a production company, and this is where we make the bulk of our income. Among our clients we have a lot of NGOs, not-for-profits, some editorial clients, and a couple of corporate clients, and basically we help them to tell their stories. This has been very successful for us as a line of business and as a way to create the kind of collaborative partnerships that we seek. 4 - The fourth line of business is what I like to to call ‘Evangelism’ (laughs). It is what you would call our workshops. I have been working on the same idea since 1993, so for many many years I have been trying to get photographers to gather sound. It sounds like an odd concept, but the basic idea is don’t just take someone’s picture but give them a voice. For our productions we try to be more cinematic and bring that narrative element to our stories, so that it can bring some context to still photography and really elevate a project. (Brian Storm, Director @ Mediastorm)
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Webdocs - Case 10 Soul_Patron
Title: Soul Patron By: Frederik Rieckher Production: Water Moon Link: http://www.soul-patron. com/
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Be flexible and imaginative Filmmakers first need to set a budget, and then decide, “OK, this can be funded by the broadcaster; this bit can be funded from another partner, etc.” This means that the shape of the project can change depending on where you get the money from, and for what elements. This work can be quite exhausting and you need to be prepared to be really imaginative and invest a hell of a lot of time into it. That’s why the ideal scenario is that you walk into a TV station, you have a conversation with one person, and this person will then help follow up with the web and TV content, the apps etc. (Mark Atkin, Head @ Doc Campus Masterschool)
Point of view : Laurence Bagot (Laurence Bagot is co-founder @ narrative and producer of Portraits d’un Nouveau Monde) Start-up funding is a problem for many. How did it go for you? In 2008, there were some pioneers in the industry, like Mediastorm in the USA or Upian in France, who had already produced projects. However on the whole, there was neither the market nor the demand for this type of work. Everything was still very much in the experimental stage. Now, we are operating on a much more mature level. When we produced our first documentary, L’enfant de Verdun by Jacques Grison, we found the photography aspect of the work really fascinating. It was broadcast by lemonde.fr and Spiegel.de, and had a fair amount of success with the audience. Then we produced Génération Tiananmen, by Patrick Zachmann, which was also broadcast through the same media channels, as well as by the Doha Center for Media Freedom. Is it easy to do low-budget webdocs? People often say that producing for the web is cheaper; actually, it’s even more expensive than producing a traditional documentary! For Portraits d’un nouveau monde, we had to create a website right away, then for each of the documentaries we needed flash development, html integration, text, and a lot of graphics. As far as the content itself was concerned, good presentation definitely costs money!
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Graphic designers also have a fundamental role to play online. If our documentaries were simply uploaded onto Youtube or DailyMotion, they would take on a whole different aspect, much less valuable in my opinion, as they would not be part of an overall interface. They way in which we choose to broadcast the documentary is key: the interactive experience and audiovisual interface mean that the documentary itself isn’t the only way to get our message across. The reason why webdoc production can sometimes cost a bit less, is that producers are fairly independent and work in smaller teams, closer to their subject, like the way photographers do. What advice would you give to webdoc producers making their financial plan? Where you find the funding will depend on the project; you wouldn’t go knocking on the same doors for every subject or every author. Today, there is not really a market for webdocs yet. In a way it’s a bit like community radio was in the 80s, which has now found a financial model after many years. I think that for the moment nothing’s structured, everything’s happening in an ad hoc way, so you have to be just as creative with the financing and distribution of your project as you do with the content. When we first created narrative, France Télévision told us that they were already producing so many hours of programming for TV that they couldn’t produce anything specifically for the internet... and then six months later, we had signed a contract with them!
Its a media form where things are always moving so fast, that you can’t wait until every last detail of something is planned before doing it... you just have to do it! With each one of our projects, we needed to be creative with our funding, and we always went in different directions. Furthermore, this creativity makes things really interesting! And if you haven’t met your budget yet, I don’t think you should be asking yourself how to cut costs; you should be telling yourself that you have a good idea here, and you just need to find partners who your idea will resonate with. If the idea is really great, someone will end up taking an interest. Economic creativity is also one of the key elements of this new narrative format.
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Webdocs - Case 11 Vieillir en France_ Vieillir en France (Getting Old in France) is a wonderful webdoc made by two reporter working at Le Monde. Full of poetry and tenderness this webdoc explores several topics such as health, solitude, death and love among others, from the point of view of people who are over 80 years old. The structure of the webdoc is relatively simple and yet the viewer feels almost in an intimate relationship with the protagonists and the photography is just beautiful.
Title: Vieillir en France By: Benoit Vitkine & Celia Heron Production: Le Monde Interactive Link: http://www.lemonde.fr/ societe/visuel/2011/02/25/ vieillir-en-france-80-ans-etapres_1461412_3224.html
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Be successful on IndieGoGo Danae Ringelmann (Danae Ringelmann is the co-founder & COO @ IndieGoGo) What is the story behind IndieGoGO? I was working in finance on Wall Street and I decided to quit my job, and went back to business school at Berkeley to figure all about how to democratize funding. With my co-founders, we came up with this idea of perks, so that you get something in exchange for your contributions and we launched the company in 2008. Today we have about 18,000 campaigns, and each one can run for 0 to 120 days. The key thing is that we are very global in nature and we have members from 150 countries around the world. Around 35% of our campaigns are outside the USA and the growth has happened organically. All you need is a bank account and we offer the tools to anyone wanting to start their campaign. How is it going with fund-raising for film projects? We’re seeing a lot of success for both documentaries and fiction films. A great example of a doc was called Anyone Can Play Guitar, a film about the Oxford music scene, which raised about 30,000 dollars in only a few weeks. And a great example of a feature film is My Sucky Teen Romance, which is a film by a young filmmaker in Texas who has actually organized two campaigns. The first one made 9,000 dollars for the pre-production phase, and the second one 6,000 dollars for the post-production costs.
The reasons for this campaign’s success were twofold. Firstly the filmmaker went directly to her core customers, people who like vampire films. And secondly, she also reached out to key influencers, who then reached their trusted followers and a lot of them ended up as funders for her movie.
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What is key in terms of developing a successful campaign? 1 - One is a great pitch. This means a lot of personalisation. So don’t just pitch your log line and show your trailer, but create a clip that includes you in it, talking about why your documentary film needs to be made and why you are the right person to do it. Because we know that people contribute to people. Not just ideas, but people. So yes you need to have both a great idea and an emotional hook. So show your story, or the story behind the story; that goes a lot further. 2 - The second key to success is great perks. On the one hand, be very specific about the use of funds and tell people where their money is going. They will be more confident if they know what you are doing with their money. On the other hand, try to be unique with the perks you offer. Rather than just a presale of the DVD or a credit, you could offer a chance to visit the set, consulting services etc. 3 - The third factor is creating great outreach. So that means communication on Facebook, Twitter and keeping your followers informed with interesting content. Out of every 10 updates you do, 9 of them should be informing or entertaining your funders and only one should be calling for action or funding.
The biggest mistake that I see filmmakers making is that they just put out their log line and trailer and they walk away from their pitch, then they expect money to show up out of nowhere. So this brings us to the importance of partnerships, right? What is very important is to build a real relationship with your funders and ask them for feedback. That is fundamental. Then we always encourage people to think of who their influencers are. The directors of «100 Yen» about the Japanese video arcade scene, needed 9,000 dollars to finish their film. So they went to two online magazines focused primarily on video arcades. And within a few weeks they had raised 14,000 dollars.
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Successful Case study: $25,000 crowdfunding campaign Ryan and Mandy have raised 25.000 $ for the post-production phase of their film Within Reach, thanks to 650 backers on Kickstarter 40 days long campaign. What was the starting point of your crowdfunding campaign? We actually started our Kickstarter campaign with an pre-existing mailing list of 7000 people. Then, we built this email addresses list largely through giving public presentations during our production phase. An important point also is that in the production phase we filmed about 600 people, so this played an important part in the networking. Documentary filmmakers all have a subject so it is useful to include the subject matter in helping spread your message. So your network was then made up of many other networks? Sure. Once that mailing list grew, it began to contain not only individuals, who we were already friends with or had met at a presentation, but it also contained a lot of organisations, who then spread our message through their network. And that was key for us. Our network grew exponentially as the Kickstarter campaign progressed. You had about 600 backers. Could you tell us more about this? We kept track of our relationship with each backer. Just to give you an idea, about 30% of our backers, about 200 people, were people we had never met before, nor were they friends of friends. But we did a lot of marketing. We even decided to pay an organisation to send a mass email to their 10,000 members. And all of a sudden we were exponentially networking with people we had never met! What is your advice for the pitch on a crowdfunding site? The video trailer was very important and this is when things started to change. People do not really take time to read a long proposal. In this video you should engage people, not only by telling them who we were, but by showing the essence of your project and how it can affect their own lives. We were advised later on to take out the personal intro and just have a personal ending. Another very clever video is the one from I AM I, they raised about $110,000.
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7> Pitching Your Webdoc Presenting your project during film festivals or film markets to broadcasters, NGOs, foundations, firms and other potential partners has become a skill that every filmmaker has to master. If this is a trend in the film industry, it is relevant to ask how we should pitch a crossmedia or webdoc project... You’ll find some of the answers in this section. Be assured that making your pitch at an international documentary film festival does make a difference, even funding doesn’t seem to come forward straight away. A pitch not only increases your visibility as a filmmaker, it also increases the scope of your network in the industry, and this can be worth much more than money...
Pitching @ The National Film Board of Canada (Hugues Sweeney is Web Producer @ NFB) The NFB has been around for more than 70 years now, and has always been an institution that put the focus on innovation and avant-gardism. A lot of animation techniques, the cinema realité, the IMAX, and 3D techniques were born at NFB, and now there was a chance to lead innovation on the web and engaging the public with new tools and creators. Three years ago, the senior management at NFB decided to make some strategic changes, to encourage accessibility and creation. Accessibility means putting the stuff out there, with apps for iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, and one for Android is coming soon. We uploaded about 2000 films to view for free, and we have about 70 million views, we’re getting the stuff out there. We also want to create in a digital and interactive way, so we decided to invest 20% of our resources in interactive projects.
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What are your criteria when it comes to selecting a project? The first thing is that we are producers and not funders. So we take part in the creative process at an early stage and we do not give money to finish a project. Then for me what is important is that the project creates an experience, and that the audience is at the centre of this experience.
So the question is how a subject has to be treated in order to fit an interactive form. Not everything is suitable for an interactive format. There are films, books, public installations and there are web or phone projects. In short, form and content have to be presented as two sides of the same coin.
You notice straight away when it is a good interactive project. It is a bit like in a game, when you start a level, you know what you have to do. A good project has to be clear on what the audience has to do. So it can be be very simple. Take a look at Gaza Sderot, just crossing the line with the mouse is very engaging and totally interactive, and yet it is extremely simple. For other projects, people have to enter a word, upload a film, take a picture or record a sound.
So for me, it is very important during the presentation of a project to find out how the audience will be involved in the process.
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Webdocs - Case 12 GDP - The human side of the Canadian crisis The objective of this project was to create a documentary recounting the tale of several Canadian families during the financial crisis of 2009. Is role is also to stay online for future generations, so that they can inform themselves about this situation. Fifteen people have produced 4-5 media pieces per week for one year. The team from the National Film Board and the producer of the documentary have faced many challenges, including the salary and the launch of many videos using flash infrastructure.
Title: GDP, Human indice of canadian crisis Director Coordinator: Helene Choquette Production: Turbulent & NFB Art Direction: Toxa Link: http://gdp.nfb.ca/intro
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Pitching @ Hotdocs Film festival (Elizabeth Radshaw is Market Director @ Hotdocs film festival) What are the criteria for selection for cross-media projects? I am not looking for the purest, and my intention is to be as encompassing as possible. We really look for projects that have truly thought about the innovation that they are trying to drive, the user experience and the audience experience. Then it must make sense with the story they are telling. And it does not have to be complicated.
Sometimes, the most simple sites are the best: the ones that are pure in their form and that drive storytelling in a way that fits in naturally with our online interaction, with what it means to be on the internet. So a webdoc does not have to be as complicated as we sometimes think. At times the simplest interactivity can be the most profound, when you use the nature of the internet to drive the storytelling. And this way you bring in more people, whereas when it gets complicated and there is too much going on, you can lose your audience. They want to feel immersed in the action because we have evolved in two very different ways. With TV and films, we are are leaned-back and passive, while with the internet we are very leaned-in and active. With webdocs we ask the audience to be both at the same time, passive and active. That is really hard!
We are still very open because we have not gotten very many cross-media projects yet but the international appeal of a project is a very important criterion. We’ve had about 20 projects, of which 10% were truly cross-media, and then another 30% of projects that have the intention to introduce interactive expression in addition to their linear piece. Some other projects simply do not need any form of interactivity.
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I think what is important is to study other genres like fiction, children’s film etc. to see what is working and what is not, and see how we can make it work for the documentary. What do you think is the strongest way to pitch a webdoc at a festival?
The key thing is to illustrate the user experience. This is difficult to do, so you need to really demonstrate it. You do not need a flash prototype, you could take screen grabs and stills of your website, and then you simply explain how you are going to use this. A prototype is very expensive, but you can work with a designer and create a mini teaser to give people a taste. Whatever you would do for a film, you do for a webdoc. Maybe do a screen shot, just to show the look of the site or the app. Just give them an idea of what the user will experience. As this is such a visual medium, you need to incorporate visual elements, in a non-expensive way, so that people will get it. What are commissioning editors looking for at such a forum? It’s a difficult question. Part of me thinks that I know what they want; but part of me thinks that in a way even they do not always know what they want, because they don’t know what has been successful in the market place yet. They do not want to take risks. Some, public broadcasters or the National Film Board of Canada are being really innovative, so people are making a real effort there. But if you look at commercial broadcasting, for example if you were at the Science Congress this year in Dresden, to be blunt (without being rude) they are quite simply behind. The audience is not going there. If they were, then commercial broadcasters would follow the trend. We are still at the beginner-stage, but it will grow and it will grow quickly, and I think it will find itself in four or five years.
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Webdocs - Case 13 Planet Galata - A Bridge in Istanbul_ Planet Galata is one of webdocs that is based on the Korsakov software, developed by Florian Thalhofer. Korsakov is interesting for those who want to create non-linear storytelling, where the viewer can discover parts of the documentary film by selecting people, themes or spaces. On the image below, one can see the main frame (with the roses) and the related frames around it, that will lead the viewer to different parts of the story when they click on it.
By: Florian Thalhofer & Berke Bas Production: Kloos & Co. Medien GmbH Link: http://www.planetgalata.com/
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How to Pitch your Webdoc? Anne Vierhout
(Anne Vierhout - Financing Consultant for documentary film) A pitching forum is usually a gathering of filmmakers, television commissioning editors, and independent documentary producers. Over the course of a forum, producers pitch their projects in various setups to the gathered commissioning editors. A pitching forum as an event in general has distinct advantages for filmmakers and producers wishing to put a new project on the market. Most major forums have 3 central elements in common which make them attractive and beneficial to filmmakers: 1. Securing development and production finance through broadcasters, film funds or distributors. It is also useful if you are interested in finding co-production partners from different countries.
2. Networking possibilities. With so many industry people gathered at one event you publicise not only your project but also yourself. 3. They play an educational role. They function as a platform to gain up-to-date industry knowledge. Pitching is important in turning your project into a film; so ‘selling’ your project is vital. A good pitch consists of three elements: 1. The written pitch – Consisting of synopsis, logline & treatment. 2. Public pitch - 7 or 8 minutes of “talk time” to sell your project. Present an outline and some background, provide an insight into the filmmaker’s character and an explanation for why you want to create this film. 3. Visual pitch - The trailer shown during your public pitch. This is your most important selling point. It demonstrates your visual style and clearly shows that your characters ‘work’ on camera.
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What differs from pitching a traditional TV format documentary film? - Define your webdoc. An important aspect of pitching your webdoc is to fully describe your web based, transmedia, cross media and/or interactive content. And note that, for instance, a traditional 1 hour TV documentary accompanied by a project website, Twitter and Facebook accounts does not necessarily constitute a “webdoc”. Research which pitching forums are open to webdoc pitches and discuss with the forum staff whether your project qualifies as a webdoc. - Who are you pitching to? Pitching a web based or a cross media documentary to financiers works differently than for regular projects. For example, web documentaries attract a different audience so the broadcasters who are ‘catching’ your pitch are different from traditional broadcasters, and the elements they look for will differ from traditional TV documentary. Whereas regular broadcasters will look for films that suit a particular slot in terms of subject and style, a commissioning editor for a web documentary will be more interested in potential user aspects and marketing strategies. - What do you pitch? As with a traditional TV documentary you pitch both the subject and visual style. However, your focus for a webdoc must be on your website and how it allows users to explore your subject. Incorporate the following elements: 1. Visual Presentation and Design. The visual presentation during the pitch for your webdoc is essential. You are selling not just an idea but a functional design and a marketing concept. Make certain you have a working prototype good enough to give an accurate idea of what your website will look like and how it will function. Pay attention to highlighting website design, its content management system, your budget and finance. Also document how and why you made these design choices. 2. Information on your visitors / Users: What is your demographic? Why? How many visitors will you attract? How long will they stay
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on the site? Financiers will want to know about your relationship with the audience, your access to them and most importantly, how your idea is interactive and how exactly your audience will interact with your content and why they will want to. 3. Business and marketing planning. Present a short but focused marketing plan to demonstrate how you will gain publicity and attract visitors. 4. Present the results of content testing. State the length of your test phase and name those who completed the testing.
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8> Commissioning Editors’ POV POV: Tom Koch (PBS) Is there a big debate within PBS about how the web affects documentary production ? No. And let me back up. I think the question is not whether there is a debate on how we create documentary, but the debate has to do with the delivery technology of the web and the impact it can have on the information that we distribute, not necessarily what we produce. In other words, PBS has a very very rich, elaborate and advanced web presence, ranging from activities for children, to adult education, to teacher training and other activities. Remember that PBS in the USA is not a state broadcaster in the sense that RTBF, ARTE or France2 are . We are actually a conglomerate of companies that are all educational, non-profit organisations who do very well at programming like ARTE. We simply look at the web as one of many distribution methods. Not necessarily distributing the same kind of content, but another distribution method that we have to deal with. What is your point of view about a project like Prison Valley, which new format empowers the viewers to interact not only with the content of the film but also with other viewers?
Let me try to answer in a kind of a bizarre way. I am trying to think of media and what this means. In my mind, the only difference between an interactive and a social interactively enabled documentary or film is merely the speed at which you can contact somebody about what you are watching, or go further into the material in order to understand it more deeply.
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In the old analog world, before the internet, let’s say for example that I watch a documentary: if I want more information, I might look at the closing credits of the show or I might go to the library or the bookstore and get a book. That is already interactivity. But the speed there was pretty slow. Now let’s talk about the social side of interactivity. In the analog world, if I wanted to tell someone about a documentary film I was watching, I would have picked up the phone and called them.
It seems to me that what’s happening is not changing anything fundamental about what a documentary is, how we think, or make films. We are simply changing the speed with which you can get more information or contact other viewers. It is much faster now. What are the key differences between Europe and the USA? There are two important points to stress in order to understand how broadcasters and users approach the internet. The first thing is that there is a very big gap between the way Americans and Europeans approach the internet. The issue of who gets to produce for the internet in the USA is decided by the market, as there is no public film fund, whereas in Europe, there are so many protections for filmmakers that the internet suddenly created a new sort of threat regarding how they are going to be paid, who is going to pay for it. Secondly, in the USA, broadcasters see the internet primarily as a secondary broadcasting window. In Europe, it is nothing more than a video-on-demand internet, and we do much more with our online content by creating huge web portals.
European broadcasters still think of themselves as TV broadcasters. Long ago, PBS started to consider itself as an «information disseminator», looking for many different ways to spread information.
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Webdocs - Case 14 The Empty House_ An investigation in Kosovo: 10 years after the war, 10 “non-Albanian people” are still missing. A track: the yellow house. Selected for a prize by France 24-RFI , this program has a simple interface for easy and instinctive immersion in another world. It was produced by an Italian agency, Peacereporter, which campaigns for better information processing in wartime.
Title: The Empty House By: Nicola Sessa & Christian Elia Production: Gag Web Agency & Peace Reporter Link: http://www.theemptyhousewebdoc.com/
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POV: Alexander Knetig (ARTE) How does the web affect the way documentaries are produced? I definitely think that producers will have to be more creative and innovative. Historically producers used to think in the same patterns for 30 years, but today when you present an idea for a webdoc, you need to adapt your storytelling to the way in which stories are told on the web - which is not the same way they were told 3 or 5 years ago. Producers have to pay attention to this dualism between content and form, but also how this dualism will be broadcast on the internet and how to reach a maximum of people, using social networks, using semantic devices. Even Prison Valley, which is topical today, will no longer be so in a few years time.
It has become very difficult to define what we want because it will change for every webdoc. But there are more of an opportunity for younger producers to collaborate with us than there was 10 years ago. How do you deal with the lack of webdoc companies? What could be done about this? I think it is very important to teach webdoc production at school. When I used to study journalism, producing webdocs was considered very experimental. Today it is one of the many job possibilities open to journalists. But there is still a structural problem, because structure takes some time to form in the market, and it is normal that the market takes time to adapt. Furthermore, there is no economical structure for how producers can earn their living exclusively creating webdocs. Upian does it for the experimentation, and they earn their income mainly through advertisement. So the problem is by no means a lack of creativity, but a financial problem.
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So we need to reinvent the webdocs model. One solution could be to concentrate on smaller projects, as the budget for a webdoc can range between $20,000 and $300,000, and to build new partnerships with other media such as newspapers, and with organisations like the French CNC. In addition to that, I think web agencies have to become much more editorial. Upian for instance risked some money but in the end they also secured their reputation with it... There is also the possibility of creating a market and giving the producer some money back on their investment. ARTE is currently looking for productions in English or Spanish, that we would translate into French and therefore open up a market that does not exist at the moment.
POV : Mark Atkin (formerly SPS) The barriers to approaching broadcasters are massive because it is a nascent industry, but I see two main problems. The first problem is that it is hard enough to get normal television co-productions together: it involves getting the various partners together to agree enough on how that film will end up. So you have a domestic commissioner, a significant international commissioner such as ARTE, and then a number of pre-sales, and depending on how much people have invested they have a say on how the film is shaped in the production phase. Now if you go to one single network with a cross-platform idea, you will find that with most broadcasters cross-platform commissioning is separate from television commissioning, and it is hard to get those two people to agree... now you try to make an international one... and those difficulties are multiplied exponentially! And this is the reason why so far there has been no international co-production on a cross-platform project of scale. The other problem is also that film institutes probably should be investing more in cross-platform projects, but they are so oldfashioned. And they have all evolved with different responses to it. Even within Scandinavian countries, they have massively differing approaches. So whereas TV collaboration in these countries is easy,
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when it comes to online production, it’s completely different. Do you see any solutions? First of all online commissioners should get out more, there should be some kind of forum where they can actually meet each other, share positive experiences and learn from each other how to create a better structure.
All the commissioning should be much more integrated. TV and online commissioning should not be separated from each other. Through our Crossover labs, we have been working mostly on creating the producers of tomorrow, but when they pitch new ideas for interactive media to their local broadcaster they will probably be talking to someone that does not necessarily fully grasp what they are talking about, or know how to green-light it across departments. So we decided to run a series of labs for commissioning editors and funders so that they can respond to new projects that are pitched to them. In which direction is the webdoc industry going to? Where we come from is a scenario where television did not really know how to deal with the internet. Most TV networks have set themselves up so that TV commissioning is in a different department from online commissioning. That means that most people in television felt that the internet was just for PR: that the content you put on the web was simply advertising whatever programmes were broadcast on TV. They did not think that the web could become something more sophisticated or something that could significantly enhance what happens on TV. And, maybe, web commissioners, in frustration, started to think, ‘well, what can we do that’s a bit more meaningful?’ and so they started to develop purely online projects without much relationship to television. (follow up on page 110)
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Webdocs - Case 15 Africascopie Africascopie tells the story of the digital revolution in Africa, focusing on two countries: Mali and Senegal. It began with an interactive blog on lemonde.fr. The audience was quickly captivated by the project, and in fact helped to create the final web documentary. However, be careful with this idea. Several large projects like Havana-Miami (a webdocumentary from ARTE), have relied heavily on audience participation, but it has not worked out.
Title: Africascopie By: Antonin Sabot and Jean Abiatecci, Production: Le Monde Interactive Link: http://www.lemonde. fr/a-la-une/visuel/2010/04/01/ africascopie_1327582_3208. html
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Channel 4 and the BBC experienced this to some degree and are now moving away from it. ARTE is definitely there. And there are reasons for that as well. ARTE is very experimental, as is Channel 4, and the BBC has been to a degree, but ARTE has a very different mandate. It’s an international broadcaster, and France and the Germany have different regulations on what you can and can’t do online, so this has informed the choices they have made. What is happening at the BBC now is that they are retreating from this space. They are taking down the websites that nobody ever went to.
They used to have a mantra of 360 degree commissioning a few years ago; everybody pitching for television needed to also have some sort of cross-platform element. I think they now realise that this was not always necessary, and actually you need to think very carefully about what you want to put online. So it all goes back to anticipating what the audience wants and how they are going to move between different platforms. But in the early days, people did not really know about this, and it’s only through experience that they have begun to understand. Another element is that Sky TV and the Murdochs have been lobbying very heavily for the BBC to be cut back. They claim the BBC is far too big, and with the economic downturn this has meant that the commercial operations have been reduced while the BBC has stayed the same size, as the license fee hasn’t been cut. So now they are being forced to downsize some of their operations and the internet is one of the areas where they can easily make cuts. Where they are concentrating their innovation now is in distribution. They have developed the iPlayer, which has transformed people’s viewing habits. And this is something they could do on an international scale. However Channel 4 may not be interested in webdocs, since what a webdoc asks you to do is to turn away from your television completely and do something else, which is a bit of a weird thing for a TV network to ask their viewers to do. Channel 4
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is thinking much more in terms of convergence culture. Can you use the internet to bring attention back to TV, and use TV to drive people to the internet? This can generate a very interesting feedback loop that keeps your attention on both of those screens, or on what in the near future may be just one TV screen connected to the internet. So this is where we have come from: un-joined up commissioning, with the internet as a bit of an add-on, or simply used as marketing; then creating things online with no links to television. However, we’ve got to look towards convergence, because connected TVs are already on sale.
People who are not designing for connected TV are going to miss a trick. And again, what you’ll be designing will be an interactive experience, so it becomes really important to understand who you are addressing and how you want them to react. I just think that webdocs are an interim format. It is an interesting moment in the evolution of documentary but it’s going to be relatively short-lived. There have been very interesting experiments in the field but I am not sure if they have really captured the public’s imagination yet.
POV: Andrew DeVigal
(Multimedia editor @ The New York Times) As Multimedia Editor, one part of my day to day job is to manage a team of multimedia journalists. Right now we have about 10 people on the desk. They range in terms of skills and assets. There are interactive developers and journalists with a background in programming who know to present interactive stories. Others have a great grasp on how to tell narrative stories using video, photos and audio in a multimedia presentation set. The other part of my job is to collaborate with the visual presenters
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of the newsroom. I mean the interactive graphics desk, photo or video desk. So my job is to coordinate these projects. You can see online some of the projects that we’ve made on our own or in collaboration with other people. How is the internet revolutionizing the way the NYT communicates its news? In a way we did our share to create innovative ways to tell stories but I think a unique perspective that we offer, at least when I focus on projects, is to ask how can we get the most of the Internet for the core of what we do at the NYT, basically to tell stories through the journalistic lens. To give you an example, in the last few months, the video unit has been working hard to make what we call ‘TimesCast’, to be a sort of a daily routine for our users. We launched a cross-media project called A Year at War. It is not pro-war or anything like that, but the idea is that a reporter and photo journalist went over to follow this battalion in Afghanistan for a full year. The core of the story is about these American soldiers, men and women, through a combination of still photography and video. The interactive content is presented with media features that you can really immerse yourself in. If you click on the top tab ‘Going to War’, you notice it is actually divided into three different sections: features, shorts and moments. The features are basically the longer video clips, they range from 4 to 7 minutes in length. The shorts are not feature clips but short clips focusing on a specific topic. And the moments are even shorter than the shorts. One of the things we really wanted to experiment with is what an image would look like if it was actually in video. And then we have two other tabs.
We are trying to create a brand awareness, that the NYT is something more than just text. And we want to remind our users daily that we do have video content on our website and that we can express the news in different formats.
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What is going to be the next big move for the NYT in terms of multimedia? The key question to be asked is how do we engage the users. What we do as a newspaper is to report a story, digest it, edit it, write it and express that in a single way through many forms of distribution.
Today our reader base is changing, so we need to work out how to engage the people more effectively. That could be done with social media tools, or with the ‘game-ification’ of news, so that they understand our stories better. The case of Prison Valley is interesting as it shows how we are going to engage with our users in the future, that sort of immersive experience. What are the criteria that are relevant to select a project? We have been working more and more with free-lancers, but we do not make long format videos. We are looking for footage which is unique enough. Moreover, it is important to know with the freelancer whether they are willing to work with us in terms of the editing process. Something we definitely don’t allow is for them to make the final edit, it is very important for us to be on top of the editing process. Title: A Year at War Production: The New York Times Link: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ world/battalion.html#/ NYT
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9> Starting a Webdoc Company (Mathieu Détaint and Nicolas Sauret @ Inflammable Productions) ‘Inflammable Productions’ started with the meeting of 3 complementary personalities with diverse professional histories. Rooted in a collective of journalists, filmmakers, photographers and artists, the company strives to stay true to the vision of author. We believe in social entrepreneurship, and our projects promote certain values, which we share with our authors. Very early on in the project, we decided to use the internet as for us it represented the new ‘El Dorado’ of media and content. Innovative storytelling and new production processes prompted us to rethink our ideas about the role of the producer. We are lead by passion, innovation and creativity; the essential ingredients for competitive startup. 1 - Know the new media content, know the new media usage a) Keep yourself updated : get to know and experiment with the latest online tools, interfaces, story concepts and ideas. Major webdoc platforms have already emerged, and new ones are coming along. But inspiration will also come from web TV, video games, museums, artwork, blogs, etc. b) Learn the web : you need a good knowledge of social networking and online media. Try to decipher where the people are and how they relate to new media. 2 - Convergence Webdocs, webfictions and more widely web projects are where many different worlds meet: writing and storytelling, production, photography, journalism, interface design, art direction, web development, community management, etc. Your job is to bring them
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together for rich and creative collaboration. Who you choose to put in the production will give a particular flavour to the project. That’s why there is so much diversity, and still so much to explore. 3 - Don’t forget the older brothers Just as you may have your own solid experience as a film director and producer, some people have a solid experience in the digital world, multimedia creation, interactivity, game design, graphic design... and they have a lot to teach you about the new media! Have a look at what is going on in the video games industry or in digital art projects for example. 4 - Introduce new skills and challenge the author Production for the web and new platforms requires graphic design and web development input from the very beginning of the writing process. Find the balance between the author’s intentions and his possible need to be driven into an interactive architecture. Most authors, whether photographer, filmmaker or journalist, already come to a project with their own vision for online mise-en-scene. They will need to balance their desires and intentions with the requirements and the opportunities offered by new media. 5 - Build the story: navigate! It’s not just watching a video anymore; nowadays the viewer browses freely, and his navigation reflects his own narrative. In that sense, storytelling is transformed, you need a designer to handle the numerous devices and tools available to tell the story. Think beyond the story; it is an interactive interface, it must be an immersive experience, it must be playful, it must be beautiful. For that, each media choice must be thought through thoroughly. And in filmmaking, it is simply not an option to neglect the sound: the soundtrack is your best friend for creating a truly immersive experience. 6 - Find the audience Just because it’s ‘worldwide’, doesn’t mean that the web automatically ensure that everyone watches your web project. People on the internet gather in several main areas: Facebook, Youtube, web portals, news sites and general media websites... Make sure that you reach them: it’s not only about promoting your project!
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7 - Business model innovation Funding must be innovative; your business model should borrow elements from different models, and be open to experimentation. Brands are becoming the next content producers and broadcasters. Inspire them with new contents, new concepts that they will be proud to fund. Check for business synergy between the internet, new devices (smartphone, iPad etc.), TV and cinema and so on. 8 - Foresee the future! ...and try to reach what you foresee : Research & Development is essential in order to keep ahead of the game. You must understand, web narrative is still young, with emerging standards and designs, but it is critical to keep inventing new ways to tell your story. There is a lot more to imagine and to create. 9 - Become a data provider Collecting, aggregating, arranging and editing available data is the latest way of producing valuable content. Metadata is key, it links the data and generates unexpected content associations, just like editing. Creative production will make use of creative platforms in order to collect and display the data. The mise-en-scene of the content should provide innovative processes for users to participate in, to enrich the data, to compose and to create. 10 - The age of collaboration Just like the narrative, participation needs to be orchestrated within the story. The content won’t exist if it is not driven by participative content. There should be room for collective writing, production, remix, mash-up, but also data enrichment, critical space. As a collaborative world, online media must host critical spaces within the content, for social debate to exist and bottom-up creativity to flourish. You are the producer and the audience is its own author.
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FWA webTV Rob Ford Rob Ford is the Founder & Principal @ The Favorite Website Awards (FWA). Author of Guidelines for Online Success and The App and Mobile Case Study Book. http://www.thefwa.net
FWA (Favourite Website Awards) is the world’s most visited website award recognition. Established in May 2000 in England, the site has served over 150 million visits since launch and is widely recognised as the number one recognition for innovative design online. FWAwebTV was a natural development from an idea to start an internet radio show, using the huge network of web designers and developers we know. Due to the complexities of royalties when streaming music online, we shifted our focus to live action, thus we shall be broadcasting 24/7, one hour slots from some of the world’s top award-winning agencies. By allowing each participating agency a one hour slot, we will guarantee our global audience a different experience every single hour of the day. Now, the power of the web, streaming facilities and increased bandwidth and broadband speeds, makes a project like this actually quite simple to set up.
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FWAwebTV will encourage users to stay on our site for even longer and this will benefit our advertisers and increase awareness for our brand globally. We have a number of production studios, like B-Reel, Stopp and 2Advanced Studios on FWAwebTV. They see this platform as a way to engage with our audience via live streaming and also the option to pre-record video, film and motion graphics and broadcast that to our audience. Using the webTV platform, production companies and film makers can show the world their latest capabilities, they can show off by broadcasting their latest work or demos and all of this will be free of charge as our platform will run advertising for 1 minute/hour. Using software like Flash and now even HTML5, companies can create interactive movies with relative ease, example RO.ME. Here, users are sucked into an interactive music video where the direction and outcome is tailored to their own direction of travel through the experience. One of the biggest growth areas now is mobile and we shall also be broadcasting live to mobile devices as well. What I would say about designing and developing for mobile is that you should create a mobile website, rather than a device dependent app. We shall be creating FWAwebTV mobile and it will work across all smartphones, tablets etc as it will be using the device’s native browser. If we created an app for the mobile version of FWAwebTV, we would have to create multiple apps to handle the many different devices out there right now. This would also mean we would have to follow the rules and regulations of the app stores, something we do not have to do when creating a mobile website. Costs are vastly reduced as well here. One of the benefits we have at FWA is a large, well established and loyal niche audience. Therefore, we are able to stream live video 24 hours of the day and can be assured that we will have users watching as we have users from every part of the globe.
If you are thinking of creating anything for online, mobile etc, you must engage your audience who love anything that is happening right now. Newspapers are slowly dying and that’s no surprise in this new age of «now».
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PART #2 >
Webdocs In Depth_
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Prison Valley (Alexandre Brachet) * Alexandre Brachet is e-producer and CEO @ Upian, one of the world’s major players in the area of webdocs. They have produced projects such as Lacitedesmortes.net, Thanatorama.com , GazaSderot, and Prison Valley. Http://www.upian.com What does it take to make a good webdoc? Firstly you have to be able to define what a good subject is. This is far from easy. There are two elements which are difficult to separate but each is extremely important: on the one hand, the relationship between the producer and the subject, and on the other hand, the ability of the subject itself to be a suitable subject for the webdoc. What makes a good web topic? I do not have precise criteria; it has a lot to do with intuition. Does the subject meet the expectations of the internet users and my own expectations?
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What will be decisive at an early stage is the team’s ability to involve themselves in the interactivity of the project, to understand that the subject is good and that the treatment by the producer will make it suitable for the internet. One of the best examples of this is Gaza Sderot. The web designer considered the idea of synchronicity for a few minutes and, all of a sudden, the project made sense. We must also realize that not all subjects lend themselves to involvement. Sometimes a subject will inspire rather more passive contemplation and therefore it is more suitable for TV. It’s an extremely delicate balance. A good topic also results from a good writer and a good team. For a good webdoc, it is as much the team as it is the subject which makes it come alive. In addition, there is no doubt that the more these people understand how the internet works, the more they will be successful. Finally, there is the ability of a subject to affect both producers and broadcasters. As a producer, what really called out to me in Prison Valley is the way in which it addresses the issue of an ultra-violent capitalism that makes profit through the exploitation of prisoners.
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It was not so easy to convince the broadcasters at first! They were questioning whether such a topic could succeed in capturing European internet users, besides the fact that there are already many productions out there about prisons. For me, there are certain subjects that must be regularly dealt with on TV and on the internet. The aggressiveness of capitalism is one of them. What can you do with interactivity that can not be done via other means? It is crucial to know what space will be given to the internet user and how we are going to allow them to experience the interaction. For the moment I work a lot on the notion of ‘feeling’.
The interaction is not just going «click click click» on a mouse; it can be very much a sensory and emotional experience. What will really count in the end is the story we will tell and how we are going to tell it. It is a false idea to think that all projects must be frantic with interactivity. In Gaza Sderot, the user creates their own path and the ‘click’ is a very soft one, actually sometimes it’s just the movement of the mouse. This is a new sensation. What makes a good web format? In Thanatorama, we explored an arborescent system with several options to choose from. What worked very well was that there was no hero, or rather it was the user themselves who was exploring the idea of their own death. With Gaza Sderot, we developed another format based on a series of short programs that make up a long story, and it was shot and uploaded almost in real time. Finally, with Prison Valley, we explored a longer, very linear program. These are three examples showing that there is definitely room for experimentation when it comes to formats, but in any case, this is a feature that you must work on from the outset.
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And what is the role of the interface in a webdoc?
For me, the interface is an integral part of the story! It carries the narrative and supports the main message. This is again very clear in Gaza Sderot with the two screens, and the line in the middle that can be perceived as a border or wall. The users can move from one side to the other with their mouse, which they most certainly cannot do in the real world. This alone tells us a lot about the program. In Prison Valley, the producers wanted a mix between a cinematic documentary film, with strong interactivity. So the images are very high quality and we developed many discussion tools. Can you clarify what you mean by discussion tools�? Prison Valley is most definitely not in real time so the question was how to shake off this notion of real time from the project. The answer can be found in the seven different discussion tools we created.
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Offering several tools is useful because it is a well known fact that out of 100 Internet users, 90 will remain pretty much passive, 9 will press the «like» button and only 1 will contribute with text or video. From the very beginning, when the users arrive at the hotel, they are asked to fill in the registration form. Their name appears in the program, and they see that there are other people connected to this journey which they are about to start. All throughout the programme, they are able to connect with other users but they are never obliged to. It remains their choice. Then comes the “like” button that gives the user the chance to express themselves in a more subtle way without writing. This has been very successful. One step further is the discussion forum where users can go much more in-depth about topics. The forum has also worked extremely well. Everything went very smoothly actually, until the rednecks from Colorado invaded the space! (laughs). Then we had to moderate the forum. Among more advanced forms of interactivity, users were given the opportunity to interact with the protagonists of the story. Yet, I must admit that due to language and cultural differences, this did not really work. In comparison, the live chats have been very successful with about 1300 people connecting regularly. Finally, at the very end of the program, we also asked the users to answer the same question that was asked to the protagonists in the film «What do you fear most?». Users could then send in their answers via webcam and we had some amazing responses!
All of these ways of participating are directly related to the story itself. This is what interactive writing is all about!
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What obstacles did you encounter in creating a TV documentary from a webdoc? Of course it is always tempting for a producer to turn to TV as it gives the opportunity to reach another audience. But there are lots of obstacles! First, they have to make sure that the grammar of editing and storytelling are appropriate. Then, there are technical problems that need to be solved: the quality of image, sound mixing, calibration, etc. All this leads to considerable costs and therefore it creates financing problems. In our case, TV broadcasting has not provided a great financial windfall, quite the contrary! Hence all these costs need to be anticipated at an early phase of the project and this is not easy.
We know that telling a story on one single medium is difficult, so when there are 2 or 3 media to consider, it gets harder.
How the audience interacts with your projects? The first thing to realise is that the internet is a niche media, and not yet a place where we can reach a massive audience. The second point is that I refuse to do user testing before or after a project, and this would be even more true for a program like ‘Prison Valley’ which
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is about freedom... Having said that, there are some clear statistics that I can show you. For instance, we have seen that the highest rate of participation is in the early phase modules of the program. 25% of all users reached the end of the program and 60% of those went on to respond with a video to the final question. For me this is a huge success! In terms of the audience, it is interesting to compare the online with the TV audience. About 400,000 people visited the website and millions of videos were viewed. We still continue to have between 10,000 and 15,000 visitors per month. You can also add the 100,000 visitors who have accessed the program through one of our partners such as the French newspaper Liberation, Yahoo or France Inter. A 59 minutes documentary film was then edited and broadcasted on ARTE and we had 500,000 people watching it. Not bad as it had to compete with the World Cup semi-final... (laughs). But we can almost say that the number of viewers is identical, except that it keeps growing online. What do you suggest to attract and keep an audience? A big difference between the internet and TV is that when a program is launched online, it doubles the work for the production team. For instance, it can lead to considerable time spent on animation, especially when the webdoc in question also carries discussion tools for users. The relationship with the internet users is what is most magical! I send to every blogger the same media package I would send to a large broadcaster. What’s great is that building a personal relationship with internet users is much more achievable than it seems at first. The better the program, the more the participation itself will be a success.
Just like the interface, the distribution must carry the story and must be in the minds of the creative team from the beginning. A program without a safe web delivery mechanisms as part of its DNA is doomed to remain unseen.
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‘Gaza Sderot’, for example, was made at the advent of “embedding» tools. It enabled mini-discussions between 4 or 5 people to take place on thousands of small blogs . That’s the magic of the internet! A few years later, for ‘Prison Valley’, we could benefit from extremely advanced sharing tools through social networks. This, as well as our partnerships with France Inter (radio), Yahoo, and Liberation (news), helped to spread awareness of our projects. More recently, we used enriched video and HTML 5 for «Notre poison quotidien”. With metadata within the video, we could show contextual information and link it to the data that the user enters into the site. This is extremely interesting. We are now working on a project called «Happy World» about Burma, and online newspapers can use this program to link their archives to the subject, as long as the project goes ahead. What are the main professional tasks necessary in the production of a webdoc? The web designer is also going to play a crucial role.
In a way, the web designer is the equivalent of a set designer on a feature film set. To give you an idea, you could have the person who worked on ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ or the person who worked on a cheap soap opera... Their job is to design the best interface to get the story across. When there are Flash animators, they will also add their important contribution. Their relationship with the film director is a bit like that of a chief operator. Then, there is the team working on HTML, PHP and databases. Their role is also essential because they provide tremendous added value, including a great deal of design. For us at Upian, everything must be beyond reproach as far as HTML is concerned. There is also the back office team, including developers. The hosting of the website should not be overlooked either. It is very important to keep control of the web hosting in order to work in real time before and after the launch of the webdoc. A website is like a
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car, maintenance is very important. Fortunately I don’t maintain my websites like I do my car... (laughs) There are also plenty of the people that you would find in a traditional audio-visual project. It is actually pretty similar to the production of a feature film. It is a matter of teamwork, involving many people, split into different teams. The team leaders make suggestions, then the film director has to make the decisions. My role is that of a producer. I am not the only one; there are several other people involved in the production team. There are different production styles but I personally like working in a close relationship with the design teams. I enjoy the launching phase the most. What is your last piece of advice for some who wants to produce a first webdoc? Try to be creative, and as consistent as possible. Think about every detail of your project, but try to rid yourself of the formats you have seen used before. Instead try to draw your inspiration from other people, people working in completely different spheres from your own, and push the boundaries of tomorrow’s internet. Above all, do not forget that the magic of the web is also to produce small and simple webdocs; so a good project does not have to be big like ‘Prison Valley’. “You’re dead. Do you want to know more?” The authors invite you to follow the path of a dead body from the funeral to the cemetery, by taking the place of the dead person. Even now, Thanatorama, produced by Upian, is widely regarded as one of the most successful webdocs ever. http:// thanatorama.net/
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Out My Window (Katerina Cizek) * Katerina Cizek is the director of Out My Window, winner of the 2010 inaugural IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling and 2011 Digital Emmy for best digital program – non-fiction. She is also the codirector with Peter Wintonick of the feature documentary film Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News. http://twitter.com/katciz What is the story behind Highrise? Highrise is really the continuation of some experimental work that I have been doing at the National Film Board of Canada since 2004. That is the year when I began a project called Filmmaker in Residence. For this project, I was challenged by the NFB to imagine and envision how documentary filming could be a part of social change and social innovation, rather than just documenting it. At the time, I had just co-directed the film Seeing is Believing, and the NFB was interested in seeing how Challenge for Change could be reinvented in the context of the digital revolution.
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Highrise is based on the philosophies and ideas that we constructed during the Filmmaker in Residence project, where I was at a downtown hospital in Toronto for four years. The NFB approached me once more in order to bring these ideas to a bigger scale, another level. So now we define Highrise as a multi-year, multi-media documentary experiment which explores the human experience in vertical suburbs. It essentially deals with global urbanization, population density, and our individual as well as collective responsibilities in the societies and structures we create. Highrise is a huge project. How big was the team involved? I would say that there were hundreds of collaborators and people who brought their expertise, talent and abilities to the project, but actually it was a very small team. I am the only full-time person on the team and I am supported very strongly by Gerry Flahive, a producer at the NFB. There is a group of people who are working parttime here in Toronto and, when we need to, we build partnerships with architects, activists, advocates, and all sorts of people both locally and around the world. It is not a massive team but a network of many like-minded people, all involved in different kinds of projects that somehow relate to the vision of Highrise. What is the difference in the production process between a web project and a traditional documentary film? What is important to underline is that every project is going to have its own production process, and you have to be extremely organised and forward-thinking in understanding the different requirements of your different partners. Many parts of the project may have a very traditional video production process, while others are really reliant on a different kind of work flow.
Think about web design for instance. It’s a databased structure so you have to make a lot of major decisions very early on, unlike linear documentary editing where a lot of your most important decisions happen at the end.
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So it is almost like an inverted structure, as the huge structural questions have to be resolved at the beginning of a web project. Another thing about web projects is that they are very iterative. Once you finish a film, it’s finished. Whereas when you are working on online and interactive pieces, you never really finish. You are constantly making changes; beta-testing, user testing, adapting, updating, rebooting, redesigning... it’s a whole different kind of environment.
It can be very frustrating for filmmakers to be in constant dialogue with their audience because they tend to work very hard for several months in a very small room, and then they are done and distribute the film. The digital world we’re living in doesn’t really work that way at all. People often say that webdocs cost more than the traditional documentary. Do you agree with that? I have a lot of problems with that statement because, number one, what is the cost of a ‘normal’ documentary film? We have seen incredibly low-budget films that have done very well, or TV documentaries, which are a very specific format, whose budget ranges around half a million dollars, even up to huge 1.5 or 2 million dollar films. And the same can be said for the web. Some are great projects and they have been made with no money at all, while others are developing very expensive large transmedia components to their documentary work on the web. The spectrum of cost and scale is as diverse in the webdoc world as it is in the documentary film world. What do you think about the webdoc business model problem? First of all, I think it’s becoming increasingly hard to sell documentary films... If you go to any documentary film festival, much of it is spent discussing days gone by where you could actually sell and recoup costs from sales after you finished your film. Realistically, that is just not the case anymore for one-off POV documentaries. So I think it is like comparing apples and oranges. The economy and the industry are just changing dramatically.
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Of course, I completely agree that there is no obvious business model that is emerging for webdocs, and it’s by no means certain that webdocs are going to be a standard recognised genre in years to come. I have no idea and this is all experimental. It’s possible that technology will develop in so many different ways, that we cannot even begin to imagine what will be happening in five years from now. When we started on Filmmaker in Residence there was no YouTube! You need to really go beyond the documentary industry to understand the workings of internet, and how commerce and economy, content production, content consumption, and the digital revolution are transforming every aspect of our lives. Those are the discussions we need to be having in terms of creating a sustainable financial structure for people who want to create things online.
A debate based around an outdated documentary model, which was relying on TV and which can no longer sustain itself, doesn’t do anything to further the conversation.
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What is the step-by-step process behind Out My Window? It was organised on a 17 month schedule. The idea was created in August 2009. In September, I developed a 25-page style guide brief, that I used with the over 100 collaborators that worked on the project with us. Then until April 2010, we were mainly focusing on video production. Pre-production, assets production, assets post-production and the animation had to be finished before we even began the production with the design firm. Then came the architecture and design of the website. We then had many months for approval and quality assurance. Finally, the launch took place in October 2010. As you can see, this shows that it is a very different kind of structure than for film production. Moreover, there is a huge amount of work to be done once the website is launched! We did not have much marketing behind the project, it was really just a viral pick-up. So we had a lot of press interest, and discussion on blogs, and references via Facebook. Twitter was important too, not so much to drive traffic to the site as just to follow the conversation about the project.
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What is your advice for someone producing their first webdoc? The very first question is, why are you making a webdoc? As we have so many tools and possibilities available to us for creating and sharing content, why are you choosing this specific form? And this leads to a central question, which is how to marry form with content. You have to understand why your story is being told in this particular way, and what is the possibility of the form itself merging and fusing with the content. How does the audience behave when viewing your webdocs? For me the most interesting thing is the average length of stay. For Out My Window, it’s actually pretty high for internet standards, between 10 and 12 minutes on average. And those who stay longer can reach up to 45 minutes or even 70 minutes per visit. What I have been most surprised by is the many different ways in which users are exploring the site. It is definitely not a one way system. How do you keep the audience interested in a web project? People can get lost in long discussions solely about visitor numbers, but I do not think this should be the only way of evaluating the success of a project online. What is exciting is that every project can create its own parameters for what constitutes a successful interaction with the project. In Out My Window, I was aiming to address the very important issues around highrise living in the style of a documentary featurelength film, but delivering it through very small non-linear short pieces. So how can a user move through these pieces, making selections every few minutes, and how could each choice add to the last one and create a meta-narrative? That was my specific interest as a filmmaker. Now, there are projects which are only 3 to 5 minutes long, but it’s a 3 to 5 minute long experience! Others probably have completely different parameters.
There is no one way to evaluate all webdocs. You have to know what you are hoping to do, and then find the tools to evaluate it.
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Where do you think we are heading to as far as webdocs are concerned? I think it is relevant to look at where consumer technology is heading. Some innovations are definitely going to change the way people interact with the internet. An obvious example is the growth and development of web devices, moving away from desktop computers towards mobile technologies. Cloud computing is becoming a very important aspect of our lives, and that is going to change the way we relate to and share our data. We are also going to move away from keyboards, and the way we interact with screens is going to change dramatically. We are going towards more gestural and physical interaction with computing. We are also moving towards screen ecology, so that we’ll have devices which communicate with different kinds of screens around us. These things are coming and they will have a major influence, not just on documentary films but on everything that we do. The gaming industry is also very important, and it makes more money than movies and music combined! There’s no doubt that the language of gaming has had a huge cultural and political influence on the way that we communicate. (Below : http://filmmakerinresidence.nfb.ca/)
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This means that film makers wanting to take their work online need to learn new skills... I do not understand the resistance in the documentary community to the digital world we are living in. It is not just a digital revolution any more, it is a digital world! It’s just like when photography first came along, visual artists needed to become aware of photography, it does not mean they had to become photographers. The process of photography became useful to spread awareness about their work. Today the internet is a tool that can be useful for documentary film makers to advertise their linear films, and communicate with their audience in a new way. As far as I understand, documentary film is the creative interpretation of reality. So the medium in which we are working is contemporary life, all around us. Be a citizen of this world and understand how profoundly this digital landscape is affecting our lives politically, economically, socially, and psychologically. What are the main obstacles you have come across, and what solutions have you found? In terms of process, you have to take a very different approach. It is a process rather than a product. This could become overwhelming because you are working in an area that is always shifting and changing. So it is important to embrace the fact that the waters are always shifting, but then stay close to the values and the reasons why you are doing the work in the first place. Make sure that this does not change. Work collaboratively and make learning a part of the process along the way. It’s not the case that you take such and such a course and then you’re set for life. At SXSW, I am seeing some comments about obsolescence in skills. In computer programming, if you do not keep up your skills, you can become obsolete within just 18 months! I am not saying that we should just rush blindly ahead towards the latest trend in technology, but you need to be clear about the fact we are living in very fast-paced times. Learning is actually 90 percent of the process, on a daily basis, no matter how old you are or how long you have been doing it for. So be flexible.
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Collapsus (Femke Wolting) Femke Wolting is co-founder and head @ Submarine. In the past, she was the programmer of Exploding Cinema and also worked at the digital department of VPRO. http://www.submarine.nl/ Submarine was created in 2000. It is split into two separate entities: Submarine produces mainly films, games and animations, and the Submarine channel. We now have more than 3 million visitors per year. And social media has played a key role.
When a TV program or a newspaper does a report on us, we notice hardly any increase in the number of visitors to our site, whereas we can see a big difference when it goes viral on Facebook or Twitter.
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What is the story behind Collapsus? We worked together with VPRO, a broadcaster in the Netherlands, on a documentary about the energy crisis. TV documentaries have a problem because their audience is mainly very old, in the 50+ age range, and they wanted to reach a younger audience. So VPRO asked us to come up with a game or transmedia project to treat the story in a different way. That’s how it first started. Collapsus is a very innovative project. How did you find the creative people behind it? We have most of the team in-house. At Submarine, we have 25 permanent staff: a mix of producers, writers, animators, programmers and designers. For a project like Collapsus, we hired a lot of freelancers like DOP, camera or sound people. We also hired animators from the USA. For the 45-minute fiction film we had to hire actors, so all together there were about 60 people working on it. We wanted to make it a cinematic experience, and not just an online project where you have to do stuff all the time. We wanted to make it a fluid experience, and if some viewers want to go deeper and interact with the content, it’s all there.
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What were the core steps in the production process? This was a very ambitious project because there was a film element and a transmedia element. So it was important to have a plan for both productions from the beginning. 1. Brainstorming - We usually start with a couple of brainstorming sessions and then we write the first draft. This is the initial idea of what the interactive story or film experience will be like. 2. Development funding - Once that was in place, then we used this as a basis to look for development funding. There are specific funds for interactive media, or you can go to a sponsor or a broadcaster. 3. Storylines & Design document - Writing the script and the backbone of the narrative. Basically you end up writing a ‘design document’. For a film, you write a script and for a project like this you need to show the storyline and also describe in detail all the games and interactive elements. This document gives an idea of how the website will look, with the visual styles ready, and how you would walk through it. So you have to design the user experience. For instance, this is when we came up with the idea of the ‘3 screens’ and all this was explained in the design document. 4. Budgeting & Financing Plan - You can start budgeting your project and basically find ways to finance it. The budget was about €450,000 so we went to sponsors, broadcasters, and we tried to find pre-sales from foreign broadcasters. I think we pitched it at IDFA, and we also have quite a good network of commissioning editors. Together the design document and the financing take a lot of time. For Collapsus I think we worked on it for almost 16 months. First, it takes time to find the right team. For instance, it took some time to find the right writer, and then there are not many directors that can do this kind of stuff. 5. Production phase - We started building the interface, and at the same time the 45 minute film footage was shot and edited, and partially animated. Others were looking for archived material to put the story in the context. In the end, when the animation was finished and the live action shoot was done, we had to implement everything in the interface. So we beta-tested and did a lot of user-testing until
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we felt ready to launch it. 6 The Launch - We made sure that the viewers would find information before they even started the game. We felt that this helped a lot, because most people haven’t done this hundreds of times so it was important to tell them how to navigate. For instance, the walkthrough was downloaded many many times, and basically the director explains what the project is and how the interface works. First the documentary was broadcast on VPRO, and then the game went online.
Traffic was not really generated after the broadcast, but when bloggers, NGOs and other web channels wrote about it things really took off. People watched on average for 25 minutes, which is very long by internet standards. The audience came from different parts of the world; mainly from the Netherlands, France, and the USA.
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Montréal en 12 Lieux (Nicolas Saint-Cyr) Nicolas Saint-Cyr is creative director @ Nikosanto. He concieves digital storytelling projects, such as projects with TOXA: ‘’Montréal en 12 lieux’’ for TV5 and Sound Ecology for the NFB of Canada. http://www.nikosanto.com I’ve been invited by Philippe Lamarre and Vianney Tremblay, Producers at Toxa, to join the team as a creative director leading the production of mtl12.com, the ‘’Montréal en 12 lieux’’ web adaptation of the tv documentary series. The development phase was completed when I jumped on the boat. The Production phase was financed by several new media funds, the broadcaster TV5 and some private funds. Tons of inspiring ideas were on the table, but not a clear path to take to make it happen. A great opportunity for me to test the skills of the design and programming team and create with them an engaging interactive storytelling experience. We wanted the users to meet these vibrant characters and rediscover these forgotten places in Montreal from multiple new angles, from a bold new way. To make them travel in these stories, we developed all kinds of content driven micro experiences around one strong
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element: An interactive & stop motion photographic 360 degree sequence device created by Franck Desvernes, the web director on the project. At this time, we didn’t know we were producing what we call today a ‘’web documentary’’. During the creative process and production, my goal was in a way to get the best out of all programmers and designers in the team. I would think to myself, “Ok this guy is good at doing this, how can we take his creative experiment, bring it to the next level and integrate it to the project conceptually?” So everybody was really satisfied because they were all part of the process. A great and intense teamwork consisted of what I liked to call the ‘’French Connection’’ because many were from France. In this webdoc, there is a reward element. How did this work? The reward strategy was a very good. However, it wasn’t at the heart of our concept. It was more of a complementary component to the webdoc experience. We had two games. One was a hilarious viral microsite allowing users to place their face over 3 different male dancers performing on the stage of a famous local gogo boy club. The idea for the other game was to create a city chase. The winning team would get a helicopter flight over Montreal. In the end, we developed an interactive trivia game based on the contents of the webdoc. The partnership with TV5 worked very well. The website and TV series were both very successful. When we won at the FWA’s - favourite website awards, the number of visits jumped drastically. It was pretty amazing. This award gave us great visibility. We won numerous awards for this project.
Since we
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It is a very heavy website with a lot of interesting technology. Many told us it was too heavy, but we were also producing in order to innovate in highly immersive experiences. Creatively, we wanted to offer new ways to explore content and we thought that the industry should follow. Loading the site for the first time can be slow, but the programmers did an amazing job in terms of loading strategy. It’s very fast once you’re in the website; There is always a sound element, and an environment being built around the graphics text and video. It’s very well done I think. We involved a lot of creative and research process to the production. One programmer was experiencing Papervision3D, so we decided to push this technology to have interactive flying elements around our main characters. Very well integrated. Did the project have any weaknesses? For me, even though the contents were completely different, we still produced12 original places to visit. We could have simplified the amount of content on the site to get to the same result.
The participative aspect could have been better. Social media wasn’t that strong at that time. I remember we also had this crazy idea to create an interactive game for each of the 12 districts of the city. This would have been completely crazy.And then you created Ecologie Sonore. How did this start? Ecologie Sonore is a project that was initiated by l’Office National du Film du Canada, the French division of the National Film Board of Canada. The NFB has made a huge switch towards webdocumentaries in the last years. Écologie sonore is part of the first webdocs produced by ONF. At first, the project was a game based on classifying sound banks. Toxa was approached by Hugues Sweeney, Producer at ONF to conceive, design and direct this project. I was then invited to jump on the concept and creative direction of this project. I wanted to take a web documentary approach and create something more content driven and 360° than what was proposed initially.
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Then we met people who have a very particular relationship with sound: blind people, modified car drivers, Yoga teachers, national park ranger, musicians, workers who became deaf because of industrial purposes, etc. We also thought of rich soundscapes. From suburb to nature, from city to complete silence. The result: An amazing sound and visual interactive 3d experience diving users into the world of Sound Ecology. Travelling through different soundscapes, short documentary films make realize the users how we’re surrounded by this reality in our day to day lives. The working process was a bit long. One problem with this project is that it spent too much time in the creative process, so then the production had to go too fast and it was squeezed. Never the less, a great experimental project supporting a discreet, but rich topic.
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Gaza Sderot (Arik Bernstein) Arik Bernstein is a Producer @ Alma-Films based in Israel. He is one of the producers of webdocs such as Gaza-Sderot and editorial advisor on Havana-Miami. http://www.alma-films.com/ How did Gaza Sderot get started? It was in 2008 that I first talked to Alex Szalat from ARTE about Gaza Sderot. The basic idea was to have characters from each side; to shoot stories over a period of time and upload them on the internet every day. At first my idea was to both broadcast a few minutes of the daily episodes on TV and upload it on the internet as well. But this didn’t work out because there was no TV slot available anymore.
What we tried to do was a ‘web as first platform’, this was
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a new concept, and it’s like learning to speak a different language. When you are dealing with two places where there is a conflict (be it political, sport or whatever) you can create something that viewers can follow every day over a long period of time. So we decided from the very beginning not to shoot for 3 months and then put it on the air, like a docu-soap, but to air it on the same day. This is only possible if you make short pieces. So all this led to this project being perfect for the internet, because we could add a 3 to 4 minute episode on a daily basis. The other thing was the fact that people could watch it from anywhere in the world. When it is broadcast on TV, it is on in France in January, then Israel in February and each broadcaster puts it on the air at a different time.
The great thing about the internet is that it goes online worldwide at the same time. We wanted Gaza Sderot to be fully open to the whole world, and we had it in Arabic, Hebrew, German, French and English. This is really where the internet has a huge advantage. This is very important as there is a huge difference between a webdrama or a webdoc created especially for the web, and something from TV which has been adapted for the web. For me the web enables interactivity, what is your point of view on that? Yes indeed, above everything, interactivity is crucial. I think there are two sides to it. On the one hand there is the interactivity with the actual content, the fact that you can watch back stories, stories about places, by characters etc. On the other hand, a huge part of the interactivity has to do with people’s reactions. And this is even more true with political projects like Gaza Sderot. This makes a huge difference from a film that you watch passively on your TV screen.
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Can you elaborate a bit on the second type of interactivity, and in particular the management of the blog? I must admit that with Gaza Sderot we were still at a stage where we needed to learn how to do this. We asked people to write in English, but it was not mandatory. However, we asked ourselves if we would have to moderate the blog. And we decided to make one single rule: say whatever you like but be polite and do not leave racist comments. And it worked amazingly well! People said tough things but it was part of a dialogue. But you had a management team to follow the blog? Yes we had some people to do it, and definitely we, as producers, wanted to keep the job of management in our hands. Not because we did not trust ARTE, but because as any broadcaster knows it involves a lot of bureaucracy, and it takes time. When you know that the internet is about speed and real time, it’s better to keep it free from bureaucracy.
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If I remember well, your programme started a few days before the Israelis started to bomb Gaza, how did that affect the blog? The project finished on December 23rd 2008, which was an excellent date because it was in the middle of Hanukkah, Ramadan and Christmas. But 4 days later, the Israelis attacked Gaza without any warning, so they took everybody by surprise. There was much more participation, it was 300% percent up. Suddenly we were on CNN, Time Magazine and we got much more publicity all over the world. And people started to react even more, with still photographs, comments but nothing was censored What did you learn from Gaza Sderot’s blog that you would definitely apply to your next project? A few things. First of all, in the last two years, the internet has changed immensely. You look at Iran in 2009 and you look today at Egypt or Tunisia, the internet is different. Yes there was Facebook and Twitter but it was not even close to what it is today. Today there are many more ways to incorporate social networks to enhance your work. So there are many new ways today to get lots more people to react to a project.
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Today we would do a much better job for the publicity than we did back then. Plus, ARTE at that time did not want us to upload on Youtube, which I think was the wrong decision. But this is part of the big debate about exclusivity. I personally think that exclusivity is a completely 20th century notion. We need to think totally differently, and today you should embed on Youtube, Facebook and all available platforms. How did the concept of the line emerge? First of all, we sat down with Alexandre Brachet’s team at Upian and this concept was the first thing we talked about. It was not the result of twenty drafts, and this was amazing. The basic idea was that you would have both sides on your screen at all times, even if you go full screen. You never get rid of the other side. Two sides, on the screen, all the time. Then the whole design came from this basic concept. Did people play the game? Or was the interactivity a bit too complicated for the viewers? Yes, people did play it. Of course, I would have liked them to play more, but you know as a greedy producer you always want more (laughs). But one of the interesting things that we found was that the average time spent on the website was about 8 minutes, which is a huge amount of time for the internet, meaning that on average they would watch 2 or 3 videos and play around a bit. This was very important to us. Then the fact that people came back was also important for us, and there was a large part of the audience that came back many times. Are broadcasters changing the way they think about the web? This is a very tricky question. I mean when we did Gaza Sderot, we were pretty confident that broadcasters would be getting much more cooperative.
Except for a few places like ARTE and NFB, there are not many doors open to us. I am afraid that at this point in time TVs are very much behind. There are some changes taking place but it is still going very slowly.
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Why do you think that it is going so slowly? First of all, I think that most of the broadcasters are classic TV commissioning editors; many of them probably do not like the internet, and anyway most of them do not think in terms of the internet. And my perception is that they see the internet as a second-rate platform. Second, there is not much money available, and the reason is that broadcasters think about TV above all. Third, there simply aren’t enough good ideas out there, and of course the lack of funding does not help to bring out these new projects. Take a look at the pitching at IDFA, you have several hundred films competing, while you only have 20 online projects. I am a bit disappointed because I thought that by now we would be more advanced but we are not. Back to the funding problem: how do you achieve funding? Producers must absolutely consult other funding channels apart from broadcasters. We are completely dependent on broadcasters and this is wrong in a way. We need to find funding from private partners like newspapers, NGOs, foundations etc. But to do this, we need to be creative and think of new ways to create a financial model.
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What is important when designing a webdoc? What is key is that your concept will work on the website. So the first step is to ask ourselves the question of why this webdoc should be on internet.
If the reason is because internet is cheaper, then that is not a good reason. The webdoc must be designed specifically for the internet, in terms of style and narrative. This is rule number one. Then, you need to work on the design. It needs to be simple, to be intuitive. Whether it’s in HD or not won’t make any difference. How do you bring and keep viewers to watch your webdoc? Number one, make it interesting and friendly. Number two, take some time to think seriously about ways to get people to watch your webdoc. If you are on ARTE or the BBC, that will be easier. But if you’re not, then the key question is how do you get traffic? Today with social platforms it is easier, and I do not say easy, but for people like you and me, who are not computer geniuses, there are services, expertise and tools available that make the difference. What do you think are the strengths and the weaknesses of Gaza Sderot? Let’s start with the easiest part, the strengths. I think it was the fact that we were able to tell a story every day in a way that we could not talk to one another. The internet was crucial in the way we actually produced this. So the main strength was that we created a broadcast that was daily, that people could follow and get excited and informed about these two places. Now, the main weakness is that we did not reach enough people. Today we could have got many more people. Also I do not think you have to put a story online every day. For instance, if you have a budget for 40 days of shooting, you could upload two stories per day. I would now prefer to work with 3 stories per week for 13
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weeks, rather than 5 stories per week for 8 weeks. In fact, staying on the air for longer with new stuff is the secret to getting more and more traffic. So 13 weeks makes a huge difference.
Title : Havana Miami Production: ARTE, Tamouz Media, Alegria, Upian, Troqua Vision Link: http:// havana-miami. arte.tv/
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From Zero (Stefano Strocchi) Stefano Strocchi is director @ Move Productions. He is the author and producer of From Zero. http://www.moveproductions.it/ How did it all started? When the earthquake happened in Italy, thousands people were displaced in tents. At first all the media were there, but as always, they quickly turned away after a few weeks. We wanted to cover it in the long run, and tell the many stories of the people who had to live there. I realised that this was a place with many stories, and the webdoc, as a window, would enable people to go there even if they could not be there physically. The original idea was to follow a series of protagonists in their daily life, to follow the slow development of their destiny in these tents by producing small, 3 minute webisodes. One of the challenges we faced was to create narrative for each character inside the web-
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series. We stayed there for three months. News reporters would never do that, but this way we could collect lots of material, enough for about 10 different characters. So you could watch one webisode per day, and follow this person on a weekly basis. Pretty heavy logistics it seems to me? Yes, we occupied 3 tents, given by the Red Cross. It was a big challenge because we wanted to produce from the tent camps, living in the tent camps - not just shooting during the day then going back to a 4 star hotel, as that wouldn’t have made any sense. We were a team of 5 directors and 5 editors, and each ‘couple’ would follow two characters. While the director was shooting on his own, the editor was working on the material from the previous day, and very quickly they built a relationship which made the work easier and faster. Of course, we had some small problems... For instance, I remember when we were shooting in the mountains, it was often freezing cold! But the tents were very well equipped with heating. The rain was the worst, as all the computer cables in the editing tent had to be suspended in case of flooding. Knowing the difficulties to raise funds in Italy, your financing model is very interesting. Could you tell us more? In Italy, we only have one 10-hour slot for documentary films per year. And even for this earthquake, there was no funding at all from either public or private broadcasters. We asked them to broadcast a small 3 minute webisode on a daily basis, but they said there were no slots.
We decided to go online, and we estimated a budget of €100,000 for the project. I therefore had to find sponsorships. It was time-consuming but it did work! First we asked the Red Cross for funding and logistical support, and they were very happy that someone was there, showing all the work they were doing. And we could stay independent. Then the film fund for the Piemonte Region and the local bank Adriatico decided
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to support us as well. Logistical support was given by the Abruzzo film fund. Finally, a key supporter was Al Jazeera UK, as they coproduced a 52 minute version. You also pitched it at IDFA, how did it go? Yes, because we wanted to do this in many other places around the world. But it was the very first cross-media pitching at IDFA. There was only me, and Alex Brachet with Prison Valley. Broadcasters were very interested in the concept, but they did not know how to fund it because it was presented as a web project only, and we had no connection to TV. Although many broadcasters were very excited by the idea, in the end the pitch was not very successful, because we pitched a format and not a real story idea. What is the main lesson you draw from your experience, for someone who is pitching a webdoc? The problem today is that most broadcasters don’t yet have a dedicated web department with funding where you can pitch your project. So in order to convince them that your project is worthwhile, it is important to show them that you have found other partners to fund parts of it. That way they won’t think that they have to produce it all. And for a cross-media project it is kind of normal to find cross-sector funding too. Book publishers, newspapers, firms, NGOs, foundations and others. So you have to be very creative as a webdoc producer to find the funding. Finally, many think that producing a webdoc is just uploading your production on the web. But what matters is that your project has been created to live on the web, and uses the web for different reasons: interactivity, funding, feedback, non-linear storytelling etc.
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Do you have any statistics about your project? At the beginning we had 600 visitors per day. Then one of our assistants was Facebooking and trying to get more visibility for the project, so we reached 800 per day. Sometimes it peaked at 1000. And when there was an article or a radio show, then viewer numbers would double for a few hours. The good point is that we realised that you have about 20% of these new visitors who then come back on a regular basis. We also realised that many people would visit the website for about 30 seconds, and then leave. But they would come back in the evenings and weekends and spend 8 to 10 minutes, which is a lot. The average was about 2 minutes, but often people come for only a few seconds at first, just to check what is new on the site. Moreover, a very interesting statistic, bearing in mind we had no partnership with newspapers was that 70% of the audience came from social networks and blogs. One final statistic is that overall we had 35,000 single visitors, who regularly came back, over the course of the production. Since then we still have about 100 visitors a day, without any publicity. What is the main mistake you made?
One mistake that I made, is that I did not involve any newspapers, as they were not co-producing the project. But I should have realised that they could bring a huge audience of readers, even if they contributed no funding. Another mistake was that we did not add a ‘share’ button on the video, to share it immediately on social networks. This was a beginner’s mistake in a way, as we thought we would lose our rights and we were trying to protect them. Today I would add all these sharing options.
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Useful Websites > General > TFI New Media http://www.tribecafilminstitute.org/filmmakers/newmedia/ Webdocu http://webdocu.fr/web-documentaire/ ARTE http://webdocs.arte.tv/ Doc Agora
http://www.docagora.org/
National Film Board of Canada http://www.nfb.ca/interactive/ X Media Lab
http://www.xmedialab.com/
Transmedia Lab
http://www.transmedialab.org/en/
Interactive Narratives http://interactivenarratives.org/ European Documentary Network Reelisor
http://www.edn.dk
http://www.reelisor.com
International Documentary Association http://www.documentary.org/ Channel4 Britdoc Foundation http://britdoc.org/ Magnum In Motion http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/
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Webdocs - A Survival Guide
Film Festivals & Cross Media > IDFA DocLab http://www.doclab.org/ Sheffield Film Fest http://sheffdocfest.com/view/interactive MIP Content 360 http://www.mipworld.com/miptv/conferences-and-events/content-360/ Hotdocs Film Festival Forum http://www.hotdocs.ca/conference/hot_docs_forum/ SXSW
http://sxsw.com/interactive
Sunny Side of the Doc http://www.sunnysideofthedoc.com Dok Leipzig Cross Media Lab http://www.dok-leipzig.de/industrypress/industry-offers/training/cross-media-lab
Workshops > Power to the Pixel http://powertothepixel.com European Social Documentary
http://www.esodoc.eu
Doc Campus http://www.documentary-campus.com/v2/page/masterschool/ Crossover Labs http://www.crossoverlabs.org/ Mediastorm Training
http://mediastorm.com/train
European Television & Media Management Academy http://www.etma-academy.eu/
Useful Websites
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