Євгенія Тюхтенко - диплом, 2013

Міністерство освіти і науки України Національний університет «Києво-Могилянська академія» Факультет соціальних наук і соціальних технологій Могилянська школа журналістики

Магістерська робота освітньо-кваліфікаційний рівень - магістр на тему: «Interactive web documentary projects as a documentary genre: case of Gol! Ukraine»

Виконала: студентка 2-го року навчання, спеціальності 8.03030101 Журналістика Тюхтенко Євгенія Сергіївна Керівник Панін Ю.О., Старший викладач Консультант Гринько А.М., Старший викладач, PhD Рецензент_______________________ (прізвище та ініціали)

Магістерська робота захищена з оцінкою «_____________________» Секретар ДЕК ___________ «____» ___________________2013 р. Київ 2013 1

Table of contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..3 Chapter 1: Literature review 1. Defining “documentary” and the webdoc (interactive web documentary) genres……………………………………………………………………………..6 1.1 Defining the documentary genre………………………………………………6 1.2 The Webdoc (interactive, web documentary)…………………………………8 2. Interactivity…………………………………………. …………………………..13 2.1 Interactivity and perception………… ……..………………………………...13 2.2 Modes of interactivity…………………………………...……..……………..15 2.3 Modes of interaction …………………………………………………………18 2.4 Social impact of web documentaries…………………………………............23 3. Examples of interactive web documentary projects………..……………………24 3.1 A Journal of Insomnia ………………………………………………...……..24 3.2 Alma – A tale of violence…………………...………………………………..26 3.3 Gol! Ukraine………………………………………………………………….28 Chapter 2: Methodology 2.1 Content analysis……………..…………………………………………….…30 2.2 In-depth interview……………………………………………………………35 2.3 Expert interview………………………………………………………………37 Chapter 3: Data Analysis 3.1 Content analysis results………………………………………………………39 3.2 In-depth and expert interviews results………………………………………..50 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS....................................................................60 REERENCES.........................................................................................................64 APPENDIX A…………………………………………………………………...70 APPENDIX B…………………………………………………………………...71 APPENDIX C…………………………………………………………………...72 2

Introduction With the development of digital media sphere and the progress of social networks new forms of information delivery emerge. Whenever new technologies appear storytellers are especially willing to experiment with new forms of expression.

The World Wide Web has become the platform for distribution of the documentary films and at most is used for interactive web documentaries. In addition, the rising prominence of web-based media has provided new opportunities for documentary to create social impact [31].

Documentary film has grown significantly in the past decade. The form of “linear” documentary has undergone major transformations. As new media technologies and new forms of communication emerge, contemporary documentary makers are engaging in a process of actively re-thinking the forms of documentary film. They are imagining what documentary might become: non-linear, multi-media, interactive, hybrid, cross-platform, convergent, virtual, or something else as yet un-thought [39].

Researchers point to the emergence of the new form - Interactive web documentary, but it is arguable that it has derived from the documentary genre.

The main “key” players in this sphere are the National Board film of Canada and ARTE. The National Film Board of Canada’s is featuring over 2,000 films, excerpts, trailers and interactive works. ARTE is a European public-service cultural television channel. Its originality lays in the fact that it targets audiences from different cultural backgrounds, in particular French and German. Arte.tv is focusing on doing web documentaries. The goal is to produce video content which fits the nature of the Web. Arnau Gifreu names the three key interactive documentaries: “Alma. A tale of violence” (2012), “Prison Valley (2010)” and “Gaza-Sderot (2008)”. “Alma. A tale of violence” is an interactive documentary about local gang violence in Guatemala. “Gaza-Sderot” is an interactive documentary that consists of series of two-minute films document the daily lives of ordinary people in Gaza (Palestinian territory) and Sderot (Israel) during 10 3

weeks in 2008. The films follow six individuals in each city as they go about routine activities, mark family occasions or dream of the future, posing implicit questions about shared experience in a divided region and demonstrating that even in the midst of notorious and bitter conflict life, in spite of everything, goes on [35].

In 2012 an interactive documentary about Ukraine came out. It is a documentary web-project created by the French journalists Stephane Siohan and Mathieu Sartre. It was presented on “Docudays film festival” in Kiev as “Workshop Gol! Ukraine”.

The workshop by authors of “Gol! Ukraine” wasn’t only a presentation of this specific project, but also a conversation about understanding web-documentary as it is, the opportunities it opens up, and the ways that it can change our views on documentary film. Interactive web film is presented on the websites of the French newspaper Le Monde and the TV channel ARTE demonstrates an innovative perception of football, Ukraine and its citizens. Awards: Gol! has been put in the official selections of the New Cinema Festival of Montreal (Canada) and of the International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) of Amsterdam in 2012. In February 2013, Gol! won the ward of the best web-documentary (vote by internauts) at the Festival International du Film d’Environnement (FIFE) of Paris.

Interactive web documentaries are not fully studied and explored, actually “they are new to analyze”. There are researchers that provide possible definitions and name the main concern – the interactivity.

The overall goal of this research is to explore web documentary projects as a genre of documentary on the case of “Gol! Ukraine” project. The study aims to gather the information about the interactive web documentary genre: its structure and format, relevance and analyze the elements of “linear” and “interactive” documentary on the case study. “Gol! Ukraine” is the first and only interactive web documentary that presents Ukraine (culture, politics, and sports, global and social issues) to the rest of the world through an interactive interface.The key points in creating and presenting an interactive documentary will be discovered.

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Research questions.

The current study researches the structure and format of the interactive web documentary projects. According to the purpose we have set the following tasks: 1) Go though possible definitions of the documentary and the webdoc 2) Review the main differences between the documentary and interactive web documentary 3) Review the offered categorization of the genre 4) Overview three different web documentaries 5) Choosing a methodology for analyzing “Gol! Ukraine” 6) Interview the producer of “Gol! Ukraine” 7) Interview an expert in the field of interactive documentary 8) Present the results The subject of the research is the new genre of documentary – interactive web documentary, which is a new form of narrative journalism on the web and is increasingly gaining popularity.

The object of the study is the interactive web documentary “Gol! Ukraine”. This is the first study to analyze “Gol! Ukraine”, moreover, this is the first interactive web documentary about Ukraine.

Structure. The work consists of an introduction, three main chapters, conclusions and list of sources. In the Appendices of the work the offered categorization of the studied genre by three different researchers is presented. The total amount of work is 70 pages.

The first chapter, literature review, overviews possible definitions of linear and interactive web documentary genres. The main differences and similarities between those two will be named. The main feature – “interactivity” that forms the perception of web documentary will be explained. Also, chapter one is dedicated to the description of three different interactive web documentary projects, one of those – “Alma, a tale of violence”. It is one of the three key documentaries in this sphere.

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In the second chapter I will describe the chosen qualitative content analysis, indepth and expert interviews as methodology. Content analysis will present the categorization of “Gol! Ukraine”. In-depth interviews with the producer of the project – Stephane Siohan will answer questions about the creation and production. Expert interview with Arnau Gifreu - lecturer, researcher and director in the audiovisual and multimedia field and producer of interactive documentaries will set the main difficulties in creating an interactive documentary and try to describe if “interactivity” is beneficial or not.

The third chapter will present the results of our research, analyze and discuss them.

Limitation: The research is focused on the phenomenon of a new genre, its features and categories and possible structures. For further research it is recommended to use focus groups for analyzing the perceptions after viewing the interactive documentary project “Gol! Ukraine”.

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Chapter 1.

Literature review.

1.1 Defining the documentary genre In chapter 1 I will try to give the definition of the documentary film, which now gained the name “linear documentary” and try to define the “frames” of an interactive web documentary. Also, elements that’s differ those two genres will be named.

‘Documentary film practice is the site of contestation and change' Bill Nichols

Since the term "documentary" has emerged it started a discussion on the formation of its definition and rised it’s main key question of “reflecting the reality”.

Filmmakers are becoming more and more inventive in creating new ways of “reproduction” of the “real”, thereby expanding the frames of the genre. Researchers point to the recent growth in publications on the topic over the last decade and its much stronger presence on film studies and media study programs. As Bill Nichols suggests, it is sufficient to consider the movies that have been awarded an Oscar from the mideightieth on to realize to what extent documentary has risen as a compelling form, and how much interest it has aroused in both scholars and general public [41]. Many terms like documentary "boom" and 'post-documentary' culture are emerging, but the frames of documentary film itself still remain “fuzzy”. The “fuzzy concept” of documentary as a genre was introduced by Bill Nichols.

The very first definition of “documentary” belongs to the film producer John Grierson, who has described the documentary film as “the creative treatment of actuality” [3]. Grierson defined the aesthetics of film and art as harmful to documentary 7

genre, which aims to represent social reality. For him the mission of documentaries was to educate and enlighten individual citizens. Film producer, Jon Bang Carlsen “gives” documentary a close meaning: he sees documentary filmmaking as an art form [13].

Dziga Vertov [26] denied the “idea of art”: movies as art were thought by him as a mistake. Producer Dziga Vertov believed the documentary to be a very powerful tool of propaganda. He saw sound recording, editing and montage as the key twentiethcentury technology for creating fake realities. Opposed to Dziga Vertov, Bill Nichols believed that documentary film is one of the discourses of sobriety that include science, economics, politics, and history discourses that claim to describe the real, to tell the truth. Stella Bruzzi [10] criticized Nichols’ proposing that documentary makers have aimed for the 'perfect representation of the real’. For Stella Bruzzi the documentary is ‘a negotiation between reality on one hand and image, interpretation and bias on the other’ [10]. Bruzzi positions herself against the developmental model of documentary theorization exemplified by Bill Nichols in which documentary falls into the five modes of expository, observational, interactive, reflexive and performative. She is concerned with the 'rigidity' of such 'theoretical orthodoxy', and attempts to rescue the maligned tools of voice-over and narration and highlight politically subversive uses of these techniques. [10] What is a documentary? A simple answer might be: a movie about real life. And that is precisely the problem; documentaries are about real life; they are not real life.

They are not even windows onto real life. They are portraits of real life, using real life as their raw material, constructed by artists and technicians who make myriad decisions about what story to tell to whom, and for what purpose [4].

As with any other genre, documentary is continually evolving; it has never been fixed into an ideal form, or associated with a limited set of social-political functions, which can be championed as the epitome of the genre [28]. The documentary's evolution has gone from representing reality to organizing it, and finally, to become a negotiation of reality [21]. Yet, the definition of the term is still under development and change.

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1.2 The Webdoc (interactive, web documentary) New media technologies and practices are extending the documentary project in a number of different directions. As new media technologies and new forms of communication emerge, contemporary documentary makers are engaging in a process of actively re-thinking the forms of documentary film. They are imagining what documentary might become: non-linear, multi-media, interactive, hybrid, cross-platform, convergent, virtual, or something else as yet un-thought [39]. The evolution of the internet has become the main factor for the interactive documentary projects. The report entitled Del Web 2.0 al Web 3.0: nous models de negoci i oportunitats empresarials en la Xarxa del futur [From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0: new business models and business opportunities in the network of the future] (2009), produced by the Analysis and Forecasting Unit of the Centre for International Markets, suggests that the Internet has now become the most important means of accessing information and knowledge [24].

The relatively widespread use of the name by broadcasters like the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and France 24 (which offers an annual web documentary prize) suggests the emergence of a new form of documentary genre. The first time the term “web documentary” was used in 2002 in Paris at the film festival „Cinema du Réel Festival“. The first product that could be categorized as this genre is – „La cité des morts – Ciudad Suarez“, that came out in 2005. The origin of this project was the intention of the authors and Internet professionals to create a new editorial form that gives another dimension to the book. Using notes, images gathered during the investigation, they chose you to experience places, meet the players and try to approach a distant reality.

Lacitedesmortes.net is an interactive program webdocumentary type that accompanies the book “The city that kills women” investigation in Ciudad Juarez, written by JeanChristophe Rampal and Marc Fernandez [17].

The digital age and the shifting capabilities of the World Wide Web have very much influenced the art of linear documentary storytelling. The Web is no longer 9

populated by static pages designed by specialists: it hosts highly networked and dynamic content that can be produced from everywhere by not particularly digitally skilled individuals. In such networked cultural and technological context people interested in factual narrative are rightly considering digital media as an alternative medium to video and film – which have been the traditional media of documentary makers so far [19].

Kate Nash [39] suggests that web documentary (sometimes webdoc, interactive web documentary or web documentary) describes a body of documentary work, distributed via the internet that is both multi-media and interactive.

The variety of terms (Webdoc, web documentary, interactive movie, I-Doc, Multimedia) indicates to a very complex definition of the genre, but at the same time simply refers it to “stories of documentary character that appear on the Internet. Web documentary (web documentary, webdocs), or just an interactive movie – is a new form of narrative journalism on the web, which is increasingly gaining popularity [51].

Not all the researchers mix the identification of web documentary with “interactivity”; another definition of web docs: documentary projects that use the Web as a broadcast platform for traditional linear documentaries, and which may or may not have interactive paratextual components. A “wide” categorization of the genre according to if it is placed on the web or not is suggested by Arnau Gifreu (see Appendix A).

When analyzing the genre the researcher Sandra Gaudenzi often uses the term idocs instead of webdocs. The discussion here is held between two short names. If focusing only on one platform (medium) rather than on interaction we shall call those webdocs? Sandra Gaudenzi answers: We hold that web documentaries ARE interactive though the interaction does not necessarily have to occur between the user and the documentary itself. Interactivity in a webdoc means that there is more than the act of interpretation. Some physical and cognitive interaction must happen between the user and the webdoc for it to be called interactive [18].

As the number of projects that we would call web-docs has exponentially risen, the definition of what a web-doc is has blurred even more – melting in between the 10

transmedia docs, the game docs, the cross platform docs, the collab docs, the augmented docs and all the other possible “docs” that might use the web in one way or another[18].

What is evident in contemporary practice is that experimentation with new models of production, particularly cross platform design, social media usage and new technologies are driving a degree of accelerated innovation in the form of i-docs that is remarkable [45]. The interactive media have started to redefine the documentary experiences outside of traditional film. We can confirm that these experiences are documentaries in the sense that they provide information and knowledge on the topics and subjects in real life, but unlike traditional documentaries, these new documentaries allow the users a unique experience, offering options and control over it [21].

Authors argue if the webdoc (interactive, web documentary) has derived from the linear documentary genre. The discussion here is held on mixing the documentary and digital media as the two fields of communications, and adding the internet as a platform.

It is difficult, and probably counter-productive, to frame digital interactive documentaries as a continuation of linear documentaries since, although they both attempt to document reality, they use completely different logics in doing so [18].

The main difference between traditional documentary and interactive web documentary is that it is linear: which means that it takes the audience from the starting point to and ending point. In the case of interactive documentary – the viewer has the demand of some physical participation. The order in which the content is presented can be modified by the users, so that structure of the storyline is no longer the author's prerogative. Sandra Gaudenzi defines this as a “passage from linear to interactive narrative” [19]. This implies that the interactive web documentary projects raise the question of the new role for the audience: “The audience is no longer sitting back and consuming content. They are active participants in the experience. A level of engagement is expected and required for them to learn about the stories. With “Hollow” we have considered providing an autopilot option, as well. It’s a balancing act when trying to provide your audience with choices 11

and providing them with a more guided, emotional experience. The “Hollow” team believes that we should give a user a reason to click and explore, not just expect them to.

It is our job to draw in the audience and keep them interested and hopefully it will all seem seamless and effortless on their end. Allowing an audience to create their own unique path out of the narratives makes them active participants and engages them on a level beyond consuming a film [42].” - Elaine McMillion in her interview talking about her work - her interactive documentary “Hollow”, a “hybrid community participatory project and interactive documentary” that uses HTML5 to depict a West Virginia community via video, photography, soundscapes and interactive data.

If linear documentary demands a cognitive participation from its viewers (often seen as interpretation) the interactive documentary adds the demand of some physical participation (decisions that translate in a physical act such as clicking, moving, speaking, tapping etc...); if linear documentary is video, of film, based, interactive documentary can use any existing media; and if linear documentary depends of the decisions of its filmmaker (both while filming and editing), interactive documentary does not necessarily have a clear demarcation between those two roles [19].

Interactive web documentary projects become varied with the use of: maps, photos, illustration, videos, links and spaces that are presented via the interface. A webdoc is a database that is structured by an interface. The user’s engagement with the database will be strongly influenced by the way in which information is structured and presented to the user via the interface [39]. An i-doc can it is a discrete contained work encountered on a single platform, and in earlier examples tends to function as a closed database.[45] There is a need to find new metaphors for information access—to provide different guises for the database style structure (rather than display it all too explicitly) [11]. To conclude, what else makes interactive web projects different from “linear documentary” is an interface. An interface makes it necessary to have a designer work in a team with journalists, producers of the piece.

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Web interactive documentary projects simply give the idea of 2 components: what and how? The documentary part of the project is usually done using stories, interviews, photos, archival/footage materials, reconstruction, voiceover. The “how” part – is how the material is presented. It is argued, that elements and techniques of the “linear” documentary will still play the main role in the approach.

By combining the power of the film medium to provide perspective and the ability of interactivity to improve the user’s participation with the material, the interactive documentary film may be able to offer more significant documentaries. The idea that interactive media can reduce the distance between the producer and the user is promising for any documentary filmmaker seeking to increase participation in their stories. However, at the other end of the scale, if this difference is diminished by too great an extent, the documentary may lose value and interest, particularly because of the lack of a strong narrative voice and a specific narrative program (this is precisely the fear of most traditional authors) [25].

To conclude all of the above: web documentaries provide a new flexibility in storytelling making use of a range of multimedia assets such as photos, text, audio, animation and graphics and have the phenomenon of user interaction. But still, the main unit of the genre remains the “story”. New blogs and websites on interactive documentary emerged in the last 5 years. Some of them, like Sandra Gaudenzi’s blog [20] even have the guide with all the tools listed of how to make one interactive documentary yourself. Right now the web interactive documentary is at the stage of evolution and active development.

2.1 Interactivity and perception Interactivity becomes the main challenge of the form of web interactive documentary. It is not the fact of being digital, that gives web documentary a specific form, nor the fact of documenting, but the fact of documenting through interactivity [19].

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In documentary practice the role of the narrator is given to the filmmaker, as is the choice and control, in interactive documentaries the concept of choice is considered the right of the user. Having declared interactivity a defining characteristic of the webdoc and suggesting that it has the potential to contribute to the meaning of the text it is necessary to clarify what is meant by the term [39].

Kate Nash suggests that interactivity is a singular phenomenon, something that is characteristic of computer-mediated documentary and which distinguishes it from its film and television cousins [39]. Interactivity is something we may call "defined", but it is hard to precisely name all its functions. The same feature, clicking on a link, for example, may be technically identical but have very different impacts when used in the context of different webdocs [39]. The variety of interface “solutions” widens the way the content is delivered to users. For example, the web documentary project “Highrise: Out My Window” which consists of parts that sum up about 90 minutes of film – 49 stories filmed in 13 cities. The user is given a choice to click on any window of a skyscraper and this action will take him or her to a different city. As the user enters each of the flats, they navigate the 360-degree panorama in search of secret ‘hotspots’, with certain images playing a navigational role as representation-instruments; in addition to their representational role[39].

Arnau Gifreu suggests that the linear (audio-visual) documentary and the online interactive multimedia documentary have each adopted their unique set of properties and characteristics: the documentary genre provides a variety of modalities in representing reality, and digital media provided the new mode of browsing and interaction [21].

With the “interactivity” of the webdoc a new perception of the content is “meant”.

Producers point out that to better understand the material a user is supposed to interact with it: Beattie[5] suggests, for example, that by interacting with each of the scenes in her documentary The Wrong Crowd, the user is able to ‘understand more fully, more deeply, the layers of the truth of that moment’. She associates the act of navigation through the webdocumentary space with a distinct epistemology. While the form of film 14

and television documentary is fixed prior to reception, in the case of the web documentary projects the user plays a part in the structuring of the documentary’s “pieces of information”.

Sandra Gaudenzi defines webdocs as locative narratives. A locative narrative is not to be listened, it is to be experienced. This goes beyond the active/passive debate, as it is a different way to conceive what mediation can offer. In the case of locative projects mediation is about adding layers to the felt perception of reality [18].

The positive influence of the mechanics of interactivity can initiate exploration: prompt the user to navigate though the content. Graphic user designs and interfaces are usually useful means for content delivery. But the criticism that is currently suggested is that interactive documentaries are at best minimally interactive. One can return to Murray’s flagging of the importance of pleasure as a significant aspect of engagement with digital media and increasingly more recent dynamic interfaces are designed to be pleasurable and exploratory in their own right. Notably, it is this aspect of experience design that often offsets and balances what can be challenging and/or distressing content [45].

In web documentary production it is arguable whether the interactivity of the story is beneficial or not. Successful webdocs have the spectator a relatively high degree of linearity and avoid too many choices [51]. The game designer Florent Maurin speaks of a "tsunami of information" when out of sheer choice arises the fear of missing something of the content: it is necessary for the viewer not to “loose the threat”.

Given that webdocs deal with a range of social issues and historical subjects, and, like film and television documentaries represent a shared social world, the idea that interactivity might be evaluated in terms of users’ social and political goals is pertinent.[39] This implies another feature of interactivity. Web documentary projects bring people around the issue that is under discussion facilitated by the built-in internet forums on special platforms, sewn into a web app project.

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2.2 Modes of interactivity of the webdoc Kate Nash [39] suggests the three aspects of interactivity that are relevant to the webdoc: control over content, the ability to contribute and the framing of user contributions and, finally, the ability to form relationships and present one’s case.

Due to the three aspects that the researcher mentions as relevant to the web documentary genre, a categorization the webdoc is proposed: the narrative, categorical and collaborative webdoc.

The narrative webdoc is structured so as to facilitate narrativization; in other words it is structured so as to privilege a mode of engagement that is similar to that of traditional linear documentary narratives [39]. Webdocs that are narrative usually include rather the documentary maker, the user or the other individual – who takes “the central narrating position [39]” and emphasize the casual linking between the pieces or events of the narrative. The mode may include observational style webdocs, simulations in which the user’s journey provides narrative coherence or webdocs that focus on the filmmaker’s journey [39].

Examples of the narrative mode of the webdoc are: “The Wrong Crowd”, “Rapporteur de Crise”, “The Whale Hunt” and “The Prison Valley”.

In the case of the webdoc “The Prison Valley”: it is the documentary maker’s trip that arranges the various encounters with residents of Canon City. Described by the filmmakers as a “road movie on the web,” viewers are asked to sign into Twitter, Facebook, or make an account on the film’s site in order to hop on board. The viewing experience unfolds much like the open road: the film starts with a car rumbling down Skyline Drive in Canon City, making its way down to the valley of prisons below [47].

The first scene takes the spectator into a world of dysfunction, a problem situation converging on the USA jail system. Establishing shots of rundown buildings acquaint the user to the world of the documentary while short interview excerpts and voiceover by the filmmaker present the documentary’s thesis: ‘We’re in some God forsaken place 16

in the middle of Colorado, Canon City.’ At the end of each piece of the story the viewer is given the choice to leave the ‘movie’ or ‘hit the road’ that is, turn back to the film.

The video segments making up the principal story unfold chronologically and the voiceover makes frequent references to earlier encounters. The documentary stores info about the user’s movement so on return the user picks up where they left off. As the user engages with the content, the documentary maker’s point of view and the ordering of various encounters into a narrative structure contributes to the text’s meaning [39]. As in a traditional documentary, opening and closing sequences frame the documentary, emphasizing the documentary maker’s vision of Canon City [39].

A categorical mode is the one in which at the same time existing collection of objects or elements gives the forms of the documentary. The categorical webdoc may consist of a list of elements, but more often, the list is united in some way such as by theme, subject or location [39]. In the categorical mode the temporal ordering of elements is not as significant as the main keys: the “comparisons” and “associations” that the user is prompted to make between the documentary’s parts. Categorical webdocs predominantly (although not exclusively) consist of a collection of micro narratives, short video sequences that in themselves exhibit a narrative structure, however, there is no narrative relationship between the sequence [39]. Kate Nash suggests that a categorical webdoc is the one that uses “mosaic structure” described by Bill Nichols. In spite of the narrative structure, the categorical one does not give an option to construct and explain the relation between the opening and concluding parts.

The documentary “Gaza/Sderot” demonstrates a good example of the categorical mode.

The documentary Gaza/Sderot is made up of 80 short videos shot in the neighboring towns of Gaza (Palestine) and Sderot (Israel). In front of the user there is a black screen which is divided into two parts by a white line. One side of the screen is devoted to Gaza and another one to Sderot. The interface serves as a symbol of the border. The web documentary consists of films on the real life in these two close, but at the same time so far, cities. The parts describe the reality of living on both sides. There are four different 17

ways to navigate through the movie clips. The viewer may look at a given day and compare the video shot in each of the cities. Another way of following is picking up a face to see a collection of videos featuring a single person. Also, it is possible to choose videos by theme and location but again the user is prompted to make comparisons by watching videos that share in an association.

The third category is the collaborative mode that involves participation. The meaning of the documentary for those who participate is bound up with the relationships that form through their contribution and may be less easily deduced from analysis of the documentary text alone. In studying collaborative documentary there is a need to look for traces of these relationships [39].

Eighteen Days in Egypt is a documentary project that is collaborative mode. It aims to bring together the photographs taken by people who were in Egypt during the 2010 revolution. The official website says ‘You witnessed it, you recorded it, now contribute it to the 18DaysInEgypt project’. People are also invited to contribute to the editing process.

The Goa Hippy Tribe documentary project is about people who shared a common place and time on the shores of Goa, India during the 70’s ‘hippy revolution’ and are now re-uniting after more than 30 years via Facebook. It is a collaborative webdoc created for ‘broadcast’ on Facebook. The documentary tells the narrative of a group of people who had been a part of the hippy community in Goa, India during the 1970s.

While the project has now developed into a categorical web documentary, its primary development, on Facebook, was highly collaborative.

While each of these projects may ultimately become a narrative, categorical, webdoc, or even a film or television documentary, the community that forms around the project provides the structure of the project in the first instance [39]. Researchers point to the significance of the comments added by users: they add additional details – that are based on personal experience), they are relationship forming and, as such, stand in for important tokens in the construction and support of the community. The collaborative 18

webdoc raises a number of theoretical issues, particularly in relation to documentary voice and the role of the documentary community as the guarantor of the documentary’s truth claims [39].

2.3 Modes of interaction of the i-doc Sandra Gaudenzi [18] suggests the four modes of interaction with reality for webdocs. Sandra is using the systematic approach of Bill Nichols (taking in consideration the author, the user and technology). On one hand Nichols does not coin a single definition, but chooses three points of views (the filmmaker, the text, and the viewer), and on the other hand he sees those three points of views constituting an overall logic that creates the documentary mode of representation of reality[18]. At first Bill Nichols suggested four main modes of representation of documentary genre In Representing Reality [40] and then added two more in Introduction to Documentary [41]. Those modes of representation are: The Expository Mode (voice of god)- arose from the dissatisfaction with the entertainment figures of fiction film, social issues assembled into an argumentative frame, mediated by a voice-of-God narration, often associated with 1920s-1930s.

The Observational Mode - introduced a mobile camera and avoided the moralizing tone of the expository documentary as technology advanced by the 1960s and cameras became smaller and lighter, able to document life in a less intrusive manner, there is less control required over lighting etc, leaving the social actors free to act and the documentarists free to record without interacting with each other. Some examples: Friedrick Wiseman’s High School (1968), Pennebaker and Leacock’s Primary (1960).

The Participatory Mode - the encounter between film-maker and subject is recorded, as the film-maker actively engages with the situation they are documenting, asking questions of their subjects, sharing experiences with them, and stressing the actual lived encounter between the filmmaker and the subject or the environment. Some 19

names: Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (1960).

The Reflexive Mode - demonstrates consciousness of the process of reading documentary, and engages actively with the issues of realism and representation, acknowledging the presence of the viewer. Corresponds to critical theory of the 1980s.

Some examples: Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989).

The Performative Mode - acknowledges the emotional and subjective aspects of documentary, and presents ideas as part of a context, having different meanings for different people, often autobiographical in nature. Some names: Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989), Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990).

The suggested by Sandra Gaudenzi [18] four modes of interactivity: conversational, hitchhiking/hypertext, participatory and the experiential mode.

Conversational mode. The interaction that constitutes the conversational mode is based on Lippmann’s idea of a conversation. He thinks that an conversation must be interruptible (interruptibility), an unanswerable request must lead to a smooth transition (graceful degradation), sentences must be decided on the fly (limited look-ahead), sentences need to feel unpredictable (no-default) and the conversation needs to feel potentially endless(impression of infinite database). He was the director of the Movie Aspen Project, a virtual travel space where the user can drive through a virtual representation of the city of Aspen on a screen. The idea behind the project was the possibility for the user to interact with the software that would smoothly adapt to her inputs. Even though the procedural ability of the computer were quite limited at the time, it was a way to describe reality (the city of Aspen) simulating it. The role of the Author is to create a space that could facilitate the conversation between the viewer and the space in the best way possible. An example of this mode of interaction is America’s Army. It is a docu-game created by the US Government in an attempt to document reality, otherwise closed to a civilian, of a battle: ex-soldiers were asked to help 20

recreating sounds and situations that could simulate the reality as closer as possible.

Despite the game logic of it, America’s Army could be considered an iDoc since the will of the author was to recreate a reality, the battle, simulating it, exploiting the procedural characteristics of the digital media.

Hitchhiking mode (Hypertext). This mode, also known as hypertext, is probably the most used in iDocs. The idea behind it is very old, certainly older than the computer (iChing was created 3000 years ago) and it is based on the idea of creating a non-linear narrative rearranging lexias (or block of text) through a branching structure the user could navigate, not create. These lexias are fixed. Its closed nature makes it the perfect mode for the author who wants to control the flow of information, make the user explore the possibilities but still be in charge of the narrative. In fact, the viewer could only jump from link to link, like surfing the web. That is also another reason that made this mode so popular: it exploits internet affordances. The control over the narrative and internet conventions made it the most employed mode in iDocs, but the interaction is quite limited. One example of this mode is Forgotten Flags: this iDocs is about the fear of association with rightwing nationalism of Germans during the soccer world cup of 2006.

Through different video-lexias, the viewer is able to explore the reason that made overcame this fear in the people interviewed. Again, the database is closed to any participation, the only thing that she is able to do is explore.

Participative mode. Unlike the conversational and the hitchhiking, the participative mode is characterized by being open to the viewer contribution. It is not a closed system designed by the author anymore, now the user has the chance to add her lexia in order to create the narrative and, with that, her version of reality. The spread of camera phones and wi-fi connection made this process natural and quick, millions of potential filmmaker out there, ready not only to be influenced by the system, like with the conversational and hypertext, but to influence the reality that is narrated. The user becomes part and parcel of the narration, switching her attitude towards reality from “what do you have for me, author?” to “what can I give you, author?” The database in 21

not fixed anymore neither has to give the idea of being infinite, but it is growing, lexia after lexia, created by the user that can interact with it. Iranian Stories is a website created to give the chance to people involved in the Iranian protest to have a place to speak. The viewer has the chance not only to browse the interface and discover other people’s point of view but also upload their version of reality. Although the database is open to the user contribute, the author is still, in this particular example, in control of the editing part, through an editorial process of evaluation of the lexia, giving less control to the viewer.

Experiential mode. With the arise of Mobile Phones and PDAs with built-in GPS, a displacement of the attention from a private and solitary dimension of the interaction in favour of a public and located one took place. Thank to the locative media, the viewer now is able to explore the space, leaving the virtual and immerging in the physical world, experiencing it, creating a kind of interaction which is unpredictable, based on different variables: not those designed by the author anymore, but the ones that exist in reality. The negotiation of reality is now mediated by a different medium that afford an interaction that doesn’t respond only to the virtual logics anymore, but also the physical logic, making the viewer experience the space she is occupying, adding a new layer of perception, the reality layer, to the experience, changing it drastically.

An example of this mode is Core Sample, a GPS-based interactive sound walk that mixes the past and the present history of Spectacle Island, in the Boston Harbour. In the piece, the viewer is able to experience the reality on two different levels, the real one, a recently created landfill park, and the virtual one, made of sounds and interviews reflecting the past life of the location made of grease extraction plans, casinos, hotels and people living there. Thanks to the GPS devices used in the piece, based on the location captured, the user would find himself in two different realities, the physical and virtual that would merge into a hybrid one.

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2.4 Social impact of web documentaries Web documentaries are different in structure and presentation, but they follow the documentary genre in rising different subjects. Producers mention that the purpose of their web documentaries was to create communities around issues and to make a social impact. Paulina Tervo presents her documentary Awra Amba as a case in article “Social Impact through Web Documentaries”. Most projects start as a traditional feature film and then use creative techniques to engage their audience online or through live events; but we are increasingly seeing projects that are using the internet as their primary platform for storytelling, engaging their audience and achieving social impact – all in one [49]. Paulina Tervo [49] decided to start a project that would combine the experience of visiting the Awra Amba village with the ability to easily discuss some of the most critical global issues with other viewers and with the Awra Amba community.

Awra Amba community village comprises of over 340 people residing together 62 kilometers away from Bahir Dar on the way to Debretabor. When they started as a small cooperative more than 20 years back, they were only 19 people. The community is distinct in that its members work together, are diligent, disciplined and self-confident.

Children get access to primary education in a school run by members of the community itself. The main means of livelihood for the community is weaving. Women have equal rights as men and there is no distinction in divisions of labor between male and their female counterparts. All people in the community have no religion as distinct from most communities in Ethiopia. They believe in hard work and being good to people [48].

Paulina decided to make a discussion that she calls “an interactive scarf”. She was inspired by the weaving in Awra Amba village and thinks the best way to visualize the discussion online is to make a scarf out of it. “Everyone who contributes will be part of a collective weaving project that will result in an interactive scarf. But this scarf is something completely unique. It will change color when we change the theme” [49].

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“We believe that by telling this story and opening up a global debate, we will be one step closer to changing the world. Our big dream is that the discussion can be crosslanguage and allow people to connect, who would otherwise never be able to talk to each other, due to language / geographical / cultural barriers.”[49].

3.1 A journal of insomnia A Journal of Insomnia (French: Journal d'une insomnie collective) is a 2013 web documentary about insomnia, produced by Hugues Sweeney and created by Bruno Choiniere, Philippe Lambert, Thibaut Duverneix and Guillaume Braun for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). A Journal of Insomnia, was originally conceived by Sweeney in the summer of 2009, when he and his wife were up nights due to the irregular sleep patterns of their newborn daughter [1].

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) (French: Office national du film du Canada, or ONF) is Canada's twelve-time Academy Award-winning public film and digital media producer and distributor. An agency of the Government of Canada, the NFB produces and distributes documentary films, animation, web documentaries and alternative dramas. As of March 2013, the NFB devotes one quarter of its production budget to interactive media, including web documentaries. According to transmedia creator Anita Ondine Smith, the NFB is a pioneer in interactive web documentaries, helping to position Canada as a major player in digital storytelling. From January 2010 to June 2011, NFB interactive works reached over 2.2 million users, in both English and French.

Inside a webdoc “A Journal of Insomnia” users can follow the stories of one of four protagonists who share their own experiences with sleeplessness as well as explore close to 2000 contributions from other insomniacs that have been collected since the fall of 2012: the moments when they are sleepless were recorded by the webcams and microphones in their computers. Insomnia is viewed here as a growing dilemma in all 24

industrialized nations, where on any night up to thirty percent of the population is unable to sleep. In this first phase, A Journal of Insomnias maps this syndrome in all its variations, in an artistic rather than a clinical way. Sweeney says he and his crew – it also includes sound designer Philippe Lambert and art director Bruno Choiniere – have no clinical or “therapeutic intention” with A Journal of Insomnia. The concern here is personal and anthropological – how insomnia is a solitary, often shameful experience (an insomniac, for instance, often will wait 10 years before seeking medical help, says Braun) at the same time as it’s shared by millions in the developed world, with profound ramifications for each sufferer’s family, work performance and leisure time [1].

When entering the website, first the interface is really simple, it is dark and we hear the voice of a woman that says: “At night I can’t sleep”. The voice mentions that in developed countries it is 30% of people who also has insomnia for different reasons.

“Since the fall of 2012 privately under the cover of darkness i have been meeting them and collecting their stories” – continues the voice. Then, we see a collage of 4 faces and can click on any of them to hear a story from a person with insomnia. As we continue, we hear a short introduction of a story: where is the person from, what he does for life, why does he or she have insomnia. We also see images of his or her bedroom. Then the intro of the narrative ends and we hear the voice ask: Would you like to know more? Do you wish to experience this “character’s” insomnia? Only by making an appointment and coming back tonight you will receive the full experience and invest a part of your night”. And it is true. What happens next is that as a user you are asked to enter the convenient time for you, enter the e-mail address and your cell phone number, your country. In the mentioned time you get a phone call and you are supposed to go online and get a follow a link which is sent to your email, where you can fully see the experience of one of the character’s insomnia. “Each character” – one’s a travel agent, another firefighter and so on – “represents the problem of insomnia in his or her own way. Each illustrates a state of mind and how it affects the body.”

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Meanwhile, what happens if you sign up and sleep through the phone call? Not to worry, Braun says. “We’re going to send you an e-mail and say, ‘Come back tomorrow, you missed your appointment.’” The current plan is to have A Journal of Insomnia run indefinitely after its Thursday bow, all through the nights [1].

There is also an offline installation of this project. The installation – “a black confessional cube,” in the words of A Journal of Insomnia creative director Guillaume Braun – will sit on a small incline in a darkened room. Visitors will enter through a tilted doorway, then sit before a screen from which a disembodied female voice – “the Voice of Insomnia” – will ask such questions as, “During the day, are you anxious about the coming night?” and “What is preventing you from sleeping?”[1].

3.2 Alma – A tale of violence Alma: A Tale of Violence was released on arte.tv on Oct. 25, 2012. It was produced by Upian, a French creative studio that has won numerous awards for their web documentaries and also won the First Prize in World Press Photo 2011.

A young former gang member Alma tells a story about group violence in Guatemala which is presented via interactive narrative documentary. This interactive documentary allows the audience to swipe back and forth between presentations of the violent confessions of former gang member Alma. There is also an alternate image stream that puts it all in context.

Alma was only 15 years old the first time she took a life. She was a fellow of one of the most violent gangs in Guatemala, the Mara 18, for almost 8 years. Alma spent these years of her young life in a society ruled by violence. She has suffered a miscarriage after a brutal beating. Over the years, she has tried to leave the gang, but her try was met with an assassination attempt that left her a paraplegic. “I was fifteen when I wanted to join a gang.” And to join the gang, Alma had to commit murder – there were no two ways about it.”

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Alma's story draws a model of the youth life in her country. Group violence is a major problem in Guatemala. The territory’s population is about 14 million people with one of the highest murder rates on the planet. Alma grew up in a cardboard and plastic shack, with no mother and an alcoholic father. In 2008, Alma met with Miquel Dewever-Plana – the photographer who has been photographing the violence in Guatemala since 2007. Plana stayed in touch with Alma, eventually realizing her narrative could be a powerful tool to interpret the larger story of violence. “I became convinced that her intelligence and forceful nature made her the icon I was looking for,” Plana said in an interview with Le Pelerin weekly’s Catherine Lalanne. “She was the key to understanding the most secretive twists and turns of the gang phenomenon. [33]” Alma wants to help prevent the violence in her birthplace. She decided to cooperate with Plana and writer Isabelle Fougere. Her tale is at the center of a new, multi-platform project centered on an interactive web documentary that presents Alma’s telling in a straight-forward confessional format. Photographs of her Guatemalan neighborhood and its group violence make the audience visualize the world in which she lived in and drawings by Hugues Micol demonstrate troubling scenes from Alma’s life.

Photographer Miquel Dewever-Plana and journalist Isabelle Fougère allow Alma to tell her tale on various platforms: aside from the interactive web and writing- application, they have also created a TV version, a photo exhibition and a pair of books. The interactive tablet version brings all these elements together. The user has the choice to switch back and forth between two image streams, presented above one another. The bottom screen shows Alma against a black background, telling her story – from her initiation to her violent struggle to leave the gang. The second screen, which is accompanied by an immersive sound mix, contextualizes Alma’s narrative (which continues in voice-over) through Dewever-Plana’s photographs and drawings by Hugues Mìcal. The app also offers four modules that provide more knowledge on Guatemala, the Maras, the country’s brutality and what could be done about it. Plana [33] and Fougere, say they intended to create a final product—with a sensitive and innovative 27

approach to a narrative— that would be interactive and accessible. The final product, which took two years to bring out, is incredibly in-depth—allowing its audience to observe the tale through the innovative web piece, two books and a film, all available in four languages.

“This combination of media communicates Alma’s reality in the most effective way,” Plana said. “The web documentary was designed to inform under age people about the dangers of gang existence. That was my highest purpose.”

3.3 Gol! Ukraine As a case for analyzing the webdoc as a genre I chose the web interactive documentary project “Gol! Ukraine”. An interactive tour of Ukraine, presented by French newspaper Le Monde on the occasion of the European Soccer Cup in Ukraine and Poland in the summer of 2012. A journey through Ukraine, co-host of the 2012 Euro Cup. “Gol! Ukraine” is composed of 12 short films exploring this largely unknown country at Europe’s centre, caught between the Europe of Brussels and sprawling Russia at its doorstep. Mathieu Sartre and Stephane Siohan, the journalists and directors behind Gol!, turned their gaze to the country’s football stadia and beyond, travelling across Ukraine during a year and a half. Our hosts Oleg and Katya bring us into their worlds by way of 12 documentary film shorts. Oleg’s world revolves around soccer, so we get a portrait of Dynamo Kiev’s biggest (and loudest) fan, interviews with Ukrainian soccer superstars Zoltan Sabo and Olexander Zavarov and a film about sunflower seeds, Ukraine’s biggest export product and a favorite snack in the stands. Katya shows us what’s at the heart of modern-day Ukraine: soccer in Chernobyl; a tram ride through Lvov, the city at the crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe; the fallout of the Orange Revolution in 2004; a portrait of Sasha, who works as a prostitute but is also just a girl. The films can be played in sequence, switching back and forth between Oleg and Katya’s world, or selected individually. What’s more, the website offers a game-like experience in which information on soccer players is unlocked by fulfilling certain tasks.

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Also, fictional versions of Oleg and Katya lived their lives on Face book in the run-up to the site’s launch in June of 2012.

Producers have chosen to launch the material in a form of a web documentary project. The project has a friendly and simple interface that leads to personal stories, which continue to social, political and cultural subjects. The two directors, using soccer as a pretext, have travelled through the stadiums in the country and beyond, during a year and a half, following Ukrainian paths and roads, east and west, through cities and countryside. Discover the stories of society and nature they tell us. With their two Ukrainian friends, Oleg and Katya, the hosts of the documentary, they reveal a personal vision of Ukraine, intimate and sensitive.

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Chapter 2.

Methodology.

2.1 Content analysis In order to conduct investigations today, researchers use a variety of techniques.

Content Analysis is used in media studies to investigate the content of the Mass Media (although it has applications across a wider range of spheres – the analysis of historical documents, for example). In other words, it’s used to explore the content of various media (books, magazines, TV, film etc.,) in order to discover how particular issues are presented [12]. The content analyst views data as representations not of physical events but of texts, images, and expressions that are created to be seen, read, interpreted, and acted on for their meanings, and must therefore be analyzed with such uses in mind [32]. The development of content analysis is fundamentally connected to the development of mass media and international politics and content analysis has gained significance in the first half of the twentieth century with the dramatic expansion of mass communication [37]. Kripendroff [32] mentions that contemporary content analysis has been forced to develop a methodology of its own, he names three reasons: - Content analysts now face larger contexts.

- Greater numbers of researchers need to collaborate in the pursuit of large- scale content analyses.

- The large volumes of electronically available data call for qualitatively different research techniques, for computer aids.

The advantages of content analysis as a research method: 1. It is relatively easy to gain access to the broadcast or publication you want to study.

2. It is relatively easy and inexpensive to build a representative sample.

3. It produces highly reliable (usually quantitative) data. Content Analyses are usually easy to repeat (“replicate”). Complex forms of social interaction can be quantified using

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a standardized framework (the content analysis grid) that can be applied across a wide range of media.

4. It can present an objective account of events, themes, issues and so forth that may not be immediately apparent to a reader, viewer or general consumer.

5. It is an unobtrusive method - it doesn’t involve the researcher interacting with the people / things being studied. The researcher cannot, therefore, influence the behavior of the people being studied.

Weaknesses / Limitations of Method.

1. May not be as objective as it claims since the researcher must select and record data accurately. In some instances (such as a television programme) the researcher must make choices about how to interpret particular forms of behavior (for example, when a character is acting aggressively). For example, the researcher decides things like: what categories will be used and whether or not everyone be put neatly into a particular category).

2. By attempting to quantify behavior (such as the relationship between people), this method may not tell us very much about the quality of people’s relationships.

3. May be time-consuming (for example, analyzing a range of newspapers or TV programmes in detail).

4. As with all statistical data, it provides us with a snapshot of people’s behavior at a single moment in their life.

5. It describes, rather than explains, people’s behavior. It does not tell us what behavior means to those involved and those watching.

Forming categories of analysis are more associated with "quality" studies, while analysis of a set of attributes categories in the text often requires "quantitative" analysis, ie, the "qualitative" analysis is present in "quantity" and vice versa.

The object of (qualitative) content analysis can basically be any kind of recorded communication, i.e. transcripts of interviews/discourses, protocols of observation, video tapes, and written documents in general etc.

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Seven components of qualitative content analysis by Mayring [37]: - Fitting the material into a model of communication: It should be determined on what part of the communication inferences shall be made, to aspects of the communicator (his experiences, opinions, feelings), to the situation of the text production, to the socio-cultural background, to the text itself or to the effect of the message.

- Systematic, rule-based analysis: The material is to be analyzed step by step, following rules of procedure, devising the material into content analytical units.

- Categories in the center of analysis: The aspects of text interpretation, following the research questions, are put into categories, which were carefully founded and revised within the process of analysis (feedback loops).

- Subject-reference instead of technique: instead of merely being a set of techniques for text analysis, the connection to the concrete subject of analysis is a very important point for qualitative content analysis. This implies that the procedures of content analysis cannot be fixed but have to be adapted depending on the subject and its context.

- Verification of the specific instruments through pilot studies: Due to the subjectreference, fully standardized methods are abstained from. That is why the procedures need to be tested in a pilot study. Inter-subjective verifiability is a case in point here.

- Theory-guided analysis: Technical fuzziness of qualitatively oriented research needs to be balanced by theoretical stringency. This means that the state-of-thefield of the respective research subject as well as subjects closely related are required to be taken into account and integrated into the analysis.

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- Inclusion of quantitative steps of analysis: Quantitative analyses are especially important when trying to generalize results. As a matter of fact, this notion of triangulation to argue in favor of an integration of qualitative and quantitative methods is not limited to content analysis but has been raised by many researchers.

- Quality criteria of reliability and validity: The procedure has the pretension to be inter-subjectively comprehensible, to compare the results with other studies in the sense of triangulation and to carry out checks for reliability.

The main aim of content analysis of visual material is the classification of content of the text according to categories that sets itself researcher. The result of this analysis is a quantitative statistical analysis of data, the conclusion of which may be the distribution of key elements of the film in a hierarchy, for example [52].

In this research content analysis will mostly be applied as a qualitative method (qualitative content analysis). Categories of content will be provided to describe the structure of “Gol! Ukraine� project and name the elements of linear and interactive documentary. Also, the categories in which the project describes Ukraine will be named.

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2.2 In-depth interview In-depth interviewing, also known as unstructured interviewing, is a type of qualitative method which researchers use to elicit information in order to achieve a holistic understanding of the interviewee’s point of view or situation; it can also be used to explore interesting areas for further investigation. This type of interview involves asking informants open-ended questions, and probing wherever necessary to obtain data deemed useful by the researcher [6].In-depth interviewing is a qualitative research technique that involves conducting intensive individual interviews with a small number of respondents to explore their perspectives on a particular idea, program, or situation [8]. In-depth interviews are most appropriate for situations in which you want to ask open-ended questions that elicit depth of information from relatively few people (as opposed to surveys, which tend to be more quantitative and are conducted with larger numbers of people). It is used as a way of understanding the complex behavior of people without imposing any priori categorization which might limit the field of inquiry [44].

Based on the degree of structure involved interviews are usually the 3 categories: structured, focused or semi-structured, unstructured interviews. In-depth interviews are usually semi-structured or unstructured. Patton [43] suggests three basic approaches to conducting qualitative interviewing:

The informal conversational interview. This type of interview resembles a chat, during which the informants may sometimes forget that they are being interviewed.

Most of the questions asked will flow from the immediate context. Informal conversational interviews are useful for exploring interesting topic/s for investigation and are typical of ‘ongoing’ participant observation fieldwork.

The general interview guide approach (commonly called guided interview).

When employing this approach for interviewing, a basic checklist is prepared to make sure that all relevant topics are covered. The interviewer is still free to explore, probe

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and ask questions deemed interesting to the researcher. This type of interview approach is useful for eliciting information about specific topics.

The standardized open-ended interview. Researchers using this approach prepare a set of open-ended questions which are carefully worded and arranged for the purpose of minimizing variation in the questions posed to the interviewees. In view of this, this method is often preferred for collecting interviewing data when two or more researchers are involved in the data collecting process. Although this method provides less flexibility for questions than the other two mentioned previously, probing is still possible, depending on the nature of the interview and the skills of the interviewers.

By using the in-depth interview (qualitative method) I seek to identify why the producers of the projects chose to make a web interactive documentary instead of a "linear documentary" film. What was the purpose of structuring and categorizing the material the way it is done in the webdoc "Gol! Ukraine".

- In your opinion, what is the future of interactive documentary projects?

- In your opinion, what are the trends observed since the emergence of web documentary genre and their progress in relation to the development of the World Wide Web? - Why have you decided to make a web documentary project instead of a "linear" documentary?

- What is the oriented “Gol! Ukraine”film's audience?

- Do you think that your project is limited to viewing only by Internet users, due to the fact that it is "sewn" to the Internet?

- Does the structure of the project, in your opinion, help the viewer to get a better perception of the content?

- How does the structure of “Gol! Ukraine” influence the perception of the plot in general?

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- If you had the chance to change something in the structure of the project right now, what would it be and why?

- What are the main difficulties in creating a web documentary project?

- Are the strategies of gathering info similar to that of "linear documentary" genre?

- What were the tools of gathering info for Gol! Ukraine?

- What is the "main purpose" of “Gol! Ukraine”project?

- Was “Gol! Ukraine”built on a specific platform?

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2.3 Expert and open-ended interviews The Expert interview is ideal for presenting content and encourages subject matter experts to share knowledge in an informal, relaxed setting.

Expert interviews - a method of qualitative data collection that can be both formal and non-formalized nature.

Most often find semi-structured expert interviews, ie those that have harvested question without a clear scheme basis. These interviews also need enough time to deployment respondent answered the questions of the interviewer and strengthened their words factual information. The most successful form of communication between the respondent and the researcher is the transition from a simple question-answer dialogue to voice an expert in reflection [26].

Advantages of the method [2]: Exploratory phase -

Fast access to new or unknown field

- Quick way to obtain specific information - Less time consuming than many other methods Experts - Have high insight in aggregated and/or specific knowledge - Processes, Group Behaviors, Strategies, etc.

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Information difficult to explored by other methods

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Often networked person

- Easily leads to other interviews - Motivated persons - Often willing to cooperate and exchange - Problems of influencing less problematic Expert knowledge [2]: - Technical knowledge 37

• Very specific knowledge in the field • Details on operations, laws, etc. influencing field -

Process knowledge

• Info on routines, specific interactions, processes • Expert has knowledge as she/he is directly involved - Explanatory knowledge • Subjective interpretations of relevance, rules, beliefs • Ideas and ideologies and their inconsistencies • Interviewee him/herself and his/her routines/thoughts focus of interview Disadvantages [2]: Knowledge obtained not neutral - Experts and counter experts - Interview setting influences information obtained Effects of interaction rather high - Procedures not rigorously standardized - Open non-structured dialog in which interviewer actively participates - Danger of anecdotal and illustrative ‘information’ - Not inter-subjectively repeatable Expert: Arnau Gifreu Castells is a lecturer, researcher and director in the audiovisual and multimedia field. He is a doctor in communications and has a master’s degree in digital arts from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). He has a bachelor’s degree in audiovisual communication from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).

Arnau Gifreu has been doing research on the topic of interactive documentary for seven years. He also produces interactive documentary with his students.

Open-ended interviews: Oleg Sosnov - logistics, support and translation of the project, also the host of the project.

Katerina Babenko: gathering information and shaping ideas for shots, arranging footage, music, host of the project.

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Chapter 3.

Results.

3.1.1 Technical Talking about the categorization of interactive documentary – there are researchers, who proposed certain categories. Some are refer to performance, others to the structure and form of presentation. Arnau Gifreu Castells, who is a lecturer, researcher and director in the audiovisual and multimedia field, proposed a categorization of digital multimedia documentaries. He suggests that there are four types: - Online generative multimedia documentaries - Online non-linear multimedia documentaries - Online linear documentaries - Offline multimedia documentaries (see Appendix A). The web interactive documentary “Gol! Ukraine” is the third type online non-linear multimedia documentary also called “(Online) Multimedia Interactive Documentary (MID)” with different possible modes of navigation through the content.

This states that - the documentary is “sewn” into web (web) Online it is “physically” situated on the page of French newspaper Le Monde, but it was also presented on film festivals.

- it has a non-linear structure (non-linear narrative) There is no chronological way in which the content is presented neither united.

- it has different ways of navigating through the content(interactivity)

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“Gol! Ukraine”is interactive and has options to navigate through the content. To conclude, it is actually only a part of a trans media project. But “this part” is available only on the web.

3.1.2 Structure and presentation Further categorization offered by researcher Kate Nash that divides web documentaries into narrative, categorical and collaborative (see Appendix C). “Gol! Ukraine” is an example of the categorical webdoc. As mentioned before in chapter 1, categorical webdocs predominantly (although not exclusively) consist of a collection of micro narratives, short video sequences that in themselves exhibit a narrative structure, however, there is no narrative relationship between the sequence. “Gol! Ukraine” consists of 12 micro narratives – which have no certain order of view. They are divided into two sets – one set of the “narratives” is presented by the host Oleg, and the other set of narratives is presented by Katya. Oleg presents the category “soccer”, and Katya shows us what’s at the heart of modern-day Ukraine. In the case of “Gol! Ukraine”, the categorical mode of interactivity offers the viewer to navigate through “video stories” - by choosing one or the other host and continuing to their set of stories (choosing by category) - by clicking “next” and continuing to the next story from the same set - Once the viewer has finished watching a micro narrative and doesn’t click on anything, he or she will be carried to opposite host, from the one chosen current.

Researcher Sandra suggested a similar categorization (look Appendix B). She suggests that the interactivity is either semi-closed (the user can browse but not change the content), semi-open (the user can participate but not change the structure of the interactive documentary), or completely open (the user and the interactive documentary constantly change and adapt to each other).” “Gol! Urkaine” is a hypertext mode, where 40

the user can only jump from link to link, like surfing the web. In this mode the viewer is only the interactor, but not the collaborator of the project.

3.1.3 Structure and themes “Gol! Ukraine” has a structure that provides a huge number of variants of different sequence of views for the user. This is due to the fact that it is interactive. Out of 12 different stories, which themselves contain a narrative structure, we are offered to start with any of them, continue to any of them, and finish whenever we want. Each of the pieces is an independent story/narrative. Each starts by presenting a single topic and continues in raising more political, social and historical questions. Each theme is actually an independent short documentary.

For example “The match of death” story describes the legend is a name of an exhibition association football game in the summer of 1942 between the team of a local bakery employees "Start" - former professional footballers from Dynamo Kyiv and Lokomotyv Kyiv — and soldiers of air defense artillery, pilots and airfield support personnel "Flakelf". The legend says that if Ukrainians lost the match – they would be killed. Experts explain that this was only a legend, but not the true story. This legend was often used in USSR as a tool of propaganda. To conclude, we see that the story goes through historical moments and at the same time continues to the topic of football in Ukraine.

Another global issue (listed in Table 1) is raised in the story of people who still work and live on the territory with dangerous levels of radioactive contamination. In spite of this they continue to live their lives. “Gol! Ukraine” provides an episode, where we “visit” places that were forever left by their residents because of the Chernobyl disaster, which is widely considered to have been the worst nuclear power plant accident in

history.

41

Table 1. Structure and themes.

Ukraine Football

Politics

Fan Andriy

Fan Andriy

FC CHERNOBYL

Orange card

The match of death LESSON OF THE FOOT OF MR Zavarov Donetsk in G minor Semki! THE HISTORY OF THE LITTLE SEED

The match of death Lviv, a city named desire

Culture/traditio ns

Semki! THE HISTORY OF THE LITTLE SEED Lviv, a city named desire

Sabo

Carpathian snows of the past

LESSON OF THE FOOT OF MR Zavarov

Le chant des partisans

Manufacturing, Industry, farmstead

Global issues

Semki! THE HISTORY OF THE LITTLE SEED

FC CHERNOBYL (ecological disaster)

Sasha, a normal girl

The match of death(war, fascism, propaganda)

The Door Currency D'Olga

Donetsk in G minor

Social issues

Religion

Educati

Media

on

Lviv, a city named desire Sabo

The

Orange

Door -

card

Currenc y D'Olga

Carpathian snows of the past

Sabo 42

Chart 1: The percentage of time devoted to each single story in the webdoc Gol! Ukraine Semki! THE HISTORY OF THE LESSON OF LITTLE SEED THE FOOT OF 5% MR Zavarov 5% Donetsk in G minor

5%

The match of death 11% Le chant des partisans 4%

Carpathian snows of the past 11%

Fan Andriy

7% The Door - Currency D'Olga 7%

Orange card 10%

Lviv, a city named

Sasha, a normal girl

8%

FC CHERNOBYL 10%

desire 9% SABO 10%

3.1.4 Elements of linear and interactive documentary In order to get a clearer view of what the interactive documentary project consist of and whether or not it is the manifestation of the “linear” genre of documentary we need to analyze what elements “Gol! Ukraine” has incorporated. Interactive documentary projects differ so much that to analyze them by the same categories would be impossible and the question whether they are a documentary genre remains open. For example “One Millionth Tower” blends video with Flickr photos, Google Street View and realtime weather data from Yahoo, and allows viewers to navigate the story in a 3-D environment. So in the case of “One Millionth Tower” there are no stories, or narratives to analyze.

Elements of the “linear documentary”: - stories, interviews 43

“Gol! Ukraine” consists of twelve stories that contain narrative structure. Each of the stories can be classified as a separate documentary. The most commonly used pattern for building the narrative here is “personal story”, which is a classical “linear documentary” element. To get acquainted with all the topics listed it table 1, we go through the personal stories. All the characters of the documentary are residents of Ukraine that work and live in the country. An example is a story of Ukrainian soccer superstar Zoltan Sabo. Zoltan starts with a story of his childhood and how he started to play football: “I can say I got lucky because when I was a child I came under the influence of one man. When I turned fourteen, he “threw” me into the adult team. Then Sabo continues his story and tells about his work conditions of as a football player and how the communist regime influenced those: “Each coach had a plan, the plan then surrendered to Moscow. Moscow threw off what to do. We had no right to say that we get paid. Dynamo Kiev was the team of Ministry of Internal Affairs”.

- voiceover

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A basic technique of documentary - the voiceover: the filmmaker speaks directly to the viewer, offering information, explanations and opinions. Twelve episodes contain minimum voiceover and mostly it is used here as an introduction.

- archival, or stock footage “Gol! Ukraine”uses stock footage of football games, cartoons and films produced in Soviet Union. AFP, Dynamo TV(Kiev), 1+1, Mos Film ("Trety Taim", 1962), Stanislav Tsalik (*Kiev.Notes des annees 1970, editions Varto, Kiev).

- montage Taken from the interactive documentary genre: - the content is presented via the interface that consists of Graphics: special images were designed for the visualization. The set of six stories presented by Katya are visualized as paintings on the wall of her room. There is also a photo in a frame, its letter M - a symbol of Kiev subway. The element is clickable and takes us to a subway station in Kiev, where the supporters sing Ukrainian songs. Oleg’s location also contains graphics that visualize the set of stories presented by him. A football ball played by Oleg is also clickable. After clicking on it we get a quiz that has questions about history of soccer in Ukraine.

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Hosts: the “welcome” screen carries the viewer to his first choice between two hosts on the screen: Katya and Oleg. The whole interface is built on two different locations. The “metaphor” that is used to switch between the two hosts and their locations is the clickable telephone, which rings.

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Links/navigation: there are links and clickable objects that enable the navigation through documentary’s content. Also, there is a path to fictional versions of Oleg and Katya on social network “face book”.

- a closed database of video content Physically there is a closed database of the video content that we see: stories that we choose and Oleg’s and Katya’s speeches and actions.

- imitation of online conversation Katya and Oleg have a conversation over the telephone.

3.1.5 Example characters The variety of characters presented in “Gol! Ukraine” gives a panoramic view on the society in Ukraine in general. All the topics listed in Table 1 are covered though stories of citizens.

Narrative

Character

About 47

Orange card

Journalist

She works on a local channel and describes the work of Ukrainian Media at the time of “Orange revolution.”

Zoltan Sabo

Zoltan Sabo(footballer)

A

Ukrainian

soccer

superstar

Zoltan Sabo. Describes his life and football history in the years of “Soviet Union”.

Sasha, a normal girl

Sasha

A

woman

that

works

as

a

prostitute in Ukraine. In a short personal story she tells us that this is not the main job, but that way she started to have more money.

Lviv, a city named

The woman tram driver

desire

Tells us what Lvov looks like in the morning when she starts driving through the city.

Artist (a girl)

She draws painting only featuring Lvov, describing that to paint something is to “love it”.

The Door - Currency Olga- French language D'Olga

teacher

Olga is a French language teacher in elementary school. She talks about the “level of life” in 48

Donetsk and about low salary for teachers.

Fan Andriy

Andriy

Andriy is a football fan, who attends matches in Kyiv. He tells us that when Kyiv Dynamo and Shahtar Donetsk teams play – it becomes

not

only

watching

football, but the politics.

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3.2 Results of in-depth and expert interviews The following results are based on the unstructured in-depth and expert interviews. I chose to combine them into categories. Arnau Gifreu Castells has been researching more than seven years on the topic, but also, he applies his research to his works with students and together they produce interactive documentary. So basically, both Arnau and Stephane will give answers on questions about creating and producing.

In this section I will not only focus on the main points in “Gol! Ukraine”, but also on the interactive web documentary in general. Interview with Stephane provided the information on the media with which project has been linked, as well as learn about the budget and ratings.

Key facts about Gol! Ukraine Stephane Siohan – the producer of the project has named all the key elements of the Project.

Authors: Stephane Siohan & Mathieu Sartre Production: Kids Up Hill & Le Monde.fr Diffusion: le Monde.fr + Arte.tv Partners: So Foot + Les Inrckuptibles + Le Soir Le Monde is one of the leading newspapers in France, and its internet website has been one of the very first to put web-documentaries online in 2007. Arte.tv is the internet portal of the French-German cultural public TV channel Arte, leader in Europe in web-documentaries and transmedia productions.

So Foot is a very successful football culture monthly newsmagazine with an alternative and original approach of football culture. Les Inrockuptibles is a cultural 50

weekly newsmagazine (music and society) and Le Soir is the biggest Belgian newspaper. The three of them have diffused Gol! in a mini-series format : they released online regularly the individual films of Gol! without its interactive platform.

Start of the project: summer 2010. Gol! has been put online in June 2012.

Overall budget (including industry + cash input): 180,000 Euros.

Overall audience of the project: 200,000 viewers.

People involved in the production; between 20 and 25 persons in two years.

Technology: Flash Awards: Gol! has been put in the official selections of the New Cinema Festival of Montreal (Canada) and of the International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) of Amsterdam in 2012. In February 2013, Gol! won the ward of the best web-documentary (vote by internauts) at the Festival International du Film d’Environnement (FIFE) of Paris.

Time spent on travelling in Ukraine and the team Oleg Sosnov mentions that stories were shot “in one country in one year “and they try to give a panoramic impression of what is happening in different parts of Ukraine. At first Stephane was travelling to Ukraine alone. He says that he I did 3 travels alone at the beginning of the project (January > June 2011. 4-5 weeks of « trails » altogether) to -investigate, look for stories, write articles on his own, meet people, and discover the cities. 5 shooting sessions were then done by Stephane together with Mathieu, each time between one and two weeks, starting in July 2011, finishing in March 2012 in Donetsk.

Gol! Ukraine contains stories from different parts of the country: Lvov, Kiev, Donetsk, the Carpathian Mountains, Chernobyl and other.

The team on the ground: The 2 directors, myself and Mathieu, one sound engineer, Mariya Nesterenko, and one assistant/translator: Oleg Sosnov.

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Is there an issue or a concern that the interactive web documentary will only reach its audience in the internet?

Basically interactive documentary is using internet as the main platform for distribution. There are also “physical” live installations present on presentations and film festivals.

Arnau Gifreu mentions that here the main thing is the different model of distribution. “We need to consider the interactor. We are empowering the user. And there is a problem of course. “Imagine that you are working on television or in front of your TV or your computer every day for 8 hours. So when you come back to your home, what do you prefer? To sit comfortably on your coach and to eat popcorn or to stay here like this (in front of the computer screen) and to interact?” Interactive documentary is not possible to watch in the cinema, so this becomes an individual process.

“Yes, but it in experimental and pioneering cinema, in such cases the risk is always there.” – explains Oleg Sosnov, host and editor of the “Gol! Ukraine”project.

“I don’t think that reaching our audience is the chance only via internet in the case of “Gol! Ukraine”, because part of the “Gol! Ukraine” project - is my column printed in Le Monde, Stephen Laurent Zhelena’s materials in So Foot, other printed materials, photos, presentations and lectures that go beyond the internet.” – says the host of the “Gol! Ukraine” and journalist Katerina Babenko.

Stephane Siohan also mentions the “transmedia approach” – telling a story on different “canals”. He agrees that web documentaries are conceived for the web. A transmedia project can be translated in a non-linear doc, but also a linear one, broadcasted on TV. This has been the case for « Prison Valley » (by David Dufresne), one of the most important that has been ever produced in France. « Prison Valley » was a masterwork of delinearization, but the production company also delivers a 52’

52

documentary for the French German TV channel Arte. Later on, a book has been released.

Engaging with the audience Both the producer of the project and the expert I interviewed mentioned that in the case of interactive documentary genre it is very hard to “keep the internaut” in the story.

“It is difficult to keep the people in one story, imagine if you want to explain the same in some kind of “spots”. And you can jump from spot to spot and at the end you will never probably arrive to the end of the story. Because you are trying to keep people that are spending less than 25 seconds on a website in general– imagine this”. – says Arnau Gifreu. Arnau Gifreu mentions that a very important key here is the “immersion”. For interactive documentary creators he recommends using an introduction that would be linear and having a “skip” button at the beginning. “It is better for the intro to be full screen at the entrance of the site, it has to be not more than one minute long. “With these you can get the people’s attention, the immersion with the project and then the engagement. The engagement is very powerful, because normally though the engagement you can use the interactor and keep the interactor safe in your project.”

Arnau mentions that out of 100 percent 90 percent people chose not to do anything (when given the choice of interaction), 9 percent add some comment on face book or twitter, 1 percent – act or become a co-creator of the story. Arnau Gifreu concludes, that “interactivity” is a minus: “It is not only making an interpretation of what you are seeing – but you have to understand the system. That is too much things. We are so surrounded of information that the last thing I want to do is interact.”

“We know that the most difficult challenge for web documentaries is to keep the audience on the platform. Believe me, but average of time spent on webdocs is really low. For Gol!, people have stayed in average 5 minutes on the webdoc, which means that some of them have watched maybe 8 of the 12 films, but also that some of them 53

have left the platform after less than one minute. 5 min” – says Stephane. He is contented with the results: “5 minutes is not a bad average. Webdoc, which reach an average time of consult of over 10 minutes are very rare. I don’t know how any people have watched the 12 films of Gol, except of the team! Every internaut has its very own personal experience of such a project. Our perception was the next: there are two types of internet users. Some of them are very fond of interactive delinearized experiences; others get completely disturbed as soon as they have to make their own choices to enter into the content. So we decided to have a double narration.

1)

Either you don’t click on anything in the webdoc, and a whole user scenario

including Oleg and Katya’s sketches + the films is playing on the screen. If you don’t touch your mouse, you can have 1, 45 hours of documentary experience in a sort of linear way, like in a circle 2)

But, Gol! is an interactive object: and if you decide to click somewhere,

each media put into the interface becomes interactive. If you prefer to watch the films presented in Katya’s part, you click on the phone in Oleg’s studio, and you change of room. If you prefer to decide which film you want to watch, you click on the frame. If you decide to interrupt one film, there’s something’s special happening with Oleg or Katya”. To conclude, Stephane mentions that he more interactive possibility you give, the more complicated your project becomes.

To conclude, Stephane Siohan says that it is a real challenge: bringing longformat documentary productions on the web, “an environment where it is hard to keep the attention of internauts for more than a few minutes.” “Basically, professionals know the « how to do » to make a good linear film for the TV or the cinema, but nobody has found a perfect receipt to attract mass audiences on the internet.”

“Moreover, due to the interactive principle, which is the key stone of webdocumentaries, it was really interesting to try a renewed approach of doing journalism.

We’re not alone in this case. In France right now, lots of journalists and documentary makers are using this long term tendency (less people watching TV and reading 54

newspapers, and more online presence) to redefine the way of doing the news and telling stories.”

Basic difficulties in creating an interactive documentary As mentioned before, interactive web documentary combines the documentary and digital media practices. Stories are presented via special user interface.

Arnau Gifreu who is producing web documentary with his students at the Universitat de Vic (UVIC) mentions the problem of disconnection of the “Storytelling and coding– two worlds.” “So sometimes these two worlds are completely disconnected. And on the other hand, normally, the developers, the coders, have no idea about the audio visual world.”

Arnau Gifreu gives an example: ‘Once you start to think of interface, you give programmers their task, and in the middle of the work, you decide to make it a whole different, so now they have to change it and you pay double.”

Arnau also mentions that there is a lack of transmedia producers and coordinators that would lead the whole project.

Another issue is the budget. “Interactive documentary needs a lot of money to develop. It seems an easy way to do things – but it is not. For example “Alma: A tale of violence” costs 6 thousand hundred Euros.”

“Money is necessary in any case, but it is only a tool that facilitates and improves the quality so much better when they are present, especially in such of experimental projects. But then again, if you have the right vision for the organization of the process of filming, post-production and communication - that the budget can be optimized.” – Oleg Sosnov. Oleg named three main difficulties of the creation of Gol! Ukraine: - “Abroad, there are specialists for coding and programming, in Ukraine there is a lack of this and also a lack of experience.”

- “It was hard to shoot the 12 stories in such way, that they the viewer would feel the connection between the stories” 55

- “When building the structure, to make “introductions” before each story” Kateryna says that the basic difficulties of creating an interactive web documentary are similar to that of linear documentary – getting the right idea and information.

Is the interactive web documentary the natural evolution of the linear documentary?

In first chapter, I overviewed the possible definitions of the interactive web documentary by different researchers. In the course of in-depth interview with lecturer, researcher and director in the audiovisual and multimedia field Arnau Gifreu, whose doctoral thesis (PhD) is dedicated to the study of the interactive documentary we found that there is a coming project: “There is a project that I’m developing. It is called COME/IN/DOC (http://www.comeindoc.com.).It is a kind of Collaborative Meta Interactive Documentary).” Arnau has interviewed 40 people; most of them are the “key players” in the field of interactive documentary: “Do you think that interactive documentary is the natural evolution of the linear documentary - was the key ask.”

“Most of the people I have interviewed said that for them it is a completely new thing.”

Oleg Sosnov – the host and assistant in “Gol! Ukraine” project thinks that web documentaries have derived from short documentaries.

“Gol! Ukraine”: why interactive documentary?

Stephane and Mathieu are both “from print media”: “We’ve been mainly working on features for the print, and year after year, we got always more assignment for web media. Our professional background in TV is rather little. I’ve acquired TV skills while I attended my journalism school (ESJ Lille), but I decided not to go into TV.” In the past years Stephane has been working on TV assignments from time to time. Mathieu had mainly a photography culture. “Our main common interest in terms of documentary 56

journalism was « long formats ». And due to the on-going global media crisis, it’s always harder to work on long-term journalism projects with a documentary approach for classical media, except when you’re working for TV companies or TV production companies, with its specificities. But in this case we didn’t want to have a TV approach.” – explains Stephane.

Stephane and Mathieu had started to work on web formats, for examples audioslideshows which offer a renewed approach of doing news on the web, but in the case of Gol!, they decided to do their first web-documentary: “Why a web-documentary ?

Because if you decide to make a documentary film dedicated to a web environment, you cannot do it as it has been done for years. Internet navigators give the power to the internet user. Moreover, due to the interactive principle, which is the key stone of webdocumentaries, it was really interesting to try a renewed approach of doing journalism.

We’re not alone in this case. In France right now, lots of journalists and documentary makers are using this long term tendency (less people watching TV and reading newspapers, and more online presence) to redefine the way of doing the news and telling stories.”

The structure and interface In section 3.1 – content analysis we analyzed the structure of “Gol! Ukraine”. We found that each story presents and raises more than just one issue and that most of the stories go through the topic “of football in Ukraine”. In the interview, Stephane mentions that their main concern in structuring the project was the following: filming 12 stories and finding a concept which could help people watch them without saying “Oh, Ukraine, this is not for me, I know anything about this country.”

“So we had two leading ideas: 1)

“Gol!” - a webdoc which tells a bit about football and a lot about Ukraine.

Football was like our Trojan horse to make football lovers watch a documentary about Ukraine that they wouldn’t have watched in another case 57

2)

Reintroducing the codes of a TV show in an interactive production, with

two docu-fictional hosts: Oleg and Katya, which are the connection between our work and the audience.”

There are some positive and negative aspects that Oleg names about perception due to the structure of the film: - “The structure allows the visitors to interest the viewer using the new scheme: imitation online conversations introduction to each story, the semantic content distribution by gender principle and so on, it's easier perception of the film.”

- “But at the same time, this structure complicates holistic perception, focusing on specific subjects.”

Arnau Gifreu says that in the general, the less categorical structure of the webdoc is the better: “I personally don’t like when it is all “mosaic”.”

On opinion of Katerina Babenko: the structure of the project helps to get a better perception of all its parts and of the plot in general.

Flaws of the project The host and assistant Oleg Sosnov says that he cannot call the project totally successful: “I cannot call it a success, because I know how it was conceived and what came of it. I advise my friends to see 5 of the 12 stories, so we can assume that in my opinion this project is a success in around 45 percent. But given the novelty and efforts, it should be considered a success”. Oleg’s main clue is that they had to work more on the stories.

Stephane Siohan: “we divided our films into two worlds: Oleg’s world and Katya’s world. We didn’t want to play on the traditional difference: “Men love football, women don’t” But indeed, the films presented by Oleg’s world were more connected to sport, the ones in Katya’s world had a more sensitive approach which brought the internaut in 58

different issues, for example like the Carpathian mountains, the film has no connection with football, but is very complementary from the other ones. But at the end, the “coloration” of those two intimate worlds could have been sharper, and we should have worked more on this.”

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Summary and conclusions Based on the study it can be concluded that the interactive web documentary projects do not yet have a precise definition, and a single form. Also, some researchers refer to it as “webdoc”, which means there is no precise name too. The main “feature” of web interactive documentary is “interactivity” meaning that they are not linear – as the documentary genre: viewers are able to browse through content and have different options of navigation. According to categorization offered by Kate Nash and Sandra Gaudenzi some interactive documentaries even allow the user become a part of the project and add information.

The main difference between the interactive and featured documentary is that it is non-linear. But there are elements that are used in both genres. For example “voiceover” is optional and not necessarily required. There is no list of specific elements for web interactive documentary except for it has to document the real and use the digital interactive technology, also it has to be places on the web. For example, some researchers say that “Google maps” is considered an interactive documentary.

It can be concluded that by adding an interface and ways of navigation to a linear documentary – we get an interactive one.

What unites documentary and interactive web documentary genres is that they are “documentary” – claiming that they try to “represent the real”. Another common thing is that they pretend to have a social impact. Web documentary projects set the goal of creating communities around issues and engage with the audience through “interaction”.

Often the connections to social networks or special forums are used.

Based on the information of the “expert interview” the interactive web documentary is not a natural evolution of the linear documentary genre.

The main challenges of web interactive documentary are in the four keys: - Exhibition Key points: 60

Telling “a good story” is comes from audio- visual world and journalism. But creating an interface is a quite different thing.

The main platform is internet, but many of the web interactive documentary projects are parts of transmedia storytelling. For example “SO Foot and “Le monde” released online regularly the individual films of Gol! Without its interactive platform.

- Production Key points: The gap between the coding and the storytelling worlds.

The lack of experience and lack of a person/director to lead the whole project.

The budget - Distribution - Reception Key points: Interactivity is considered a problem and a minus. It is difficult to keep the viewer on a website more than 25 seconds in general, and when the person starts to interact and he or she doesn’t understand the system – they leave the page. The more interactivity you give – the more complicated the “system” becomes.

Interactive web documentary project Gol! Ukraine is an interactive documentary that combines elements of the linear documentary: - Stories/interviews Twelve stories are presented via the interface which is divided into two worlds.

The first world spins around soccer and the second about what’s in the heart of modern Ukraine.

- Archival, stock, footage Cartoons, archival football games, films.

- Montage - Voiceover Minimum voiceover is used as introduction and some in the stories.

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With the interface that consists of: Graphics: special images were designed for the visualization. The set of six stories presented by Katya are visualized as paintings on the wall of her room. There is also a photo in a frame, its letter M - a symbol of Kiev subway. The element is clickable and takes us to a subway station in Kiev, where the supporters sing Ukrainian songs. Oleg’s location also contains graphics that visualize the set of stories presented by him. A football ball played by Oleg is also clickable. After clicking on it we get a quiz that has questions about history of soccer in Ukraine.

Hosts: the “welcome” screen carries the viewer to his first choice between two hosts on the screen: Katya and Oleg. The whole interface is built on two different locations. The “metaphor” that is used to switch between the two hosts and their locations is the clickable telephone, which rings.

Links/navigation: there are links and clickable objects that enable the navigation through documentary’s content. Also, there is a path to fictional versions of Oleg and Katya on social network “face book”.

- a closed database of video content Physically there is a closed database of the video content that we see: stories that we choose and Oleg’s and Katya’s speeches and actions.

- imitation of online conversation Katya and Oleg have a conversation over the telephone.

“Gol! Ukraine" consists of twelve independent narratives. As a genre of documentary the twelve stories cover different themes (Table 1). Each starts by presenting a single topic and continues in raising more political, social and historical questions. Each theme is actually an independent short documentary.

Both the producer Stephane Siohan and the assistant mention that the project is not totally a success, but due to the novelty and resources they had they are happy with the result. Minuses: more works needed to be done on the stories, Stephane mentioned

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that the sharper coloration of the two interactive worlds presented in the web documentary must have been done.

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26. Hoffman, R.R. The problem of extracting the knowledge of experts from the perspective of experimental psychology.//=AI Magazine. – 1987. – Vol 8 №2. – 15 p.

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Appendix A: Modes of interaction in digital interactive documentaries by Sandra Gaudenzi

Conversation al mode (Metaphor = Conversing)

Interactive documentary examples

Logic of interactivity (different sources)

Function of the user (Aarseth)

Role of the author

• the Aspen Movie Map (1980) by MIT • Sim City (1989)

Inspired by Andy Lippman’s 5 corollaries: 1. interruptability 2. graceful degradation 3. limited look ahead 4. no default 5. impression of infinite database

Explorative Role playing Configurative

To create a world, its rules and the user’s agency

by Will Wright • JFK Reloaded (2004)

by Traffic Software • Gone Gitmo (2007) by Nonny de la Pena

Hitchhiking / hypertext mode (Metaphor = Hitchhiking)

Moss Landing (1989) by Apple M.MediaLab • Forgotten Flags (2007)

by Florian Thalhofer • Journey to the End of the Coal (2008) by Honkytonk Films

Inspired by Turing’s algorithmic computation: • limited storage • computation is closed • behavior is fixed

Explorative

To create possible paths within a closed database

Participatory mode (Metaphor = Building)

• Boston Renewed Vistas (1995-2004)

Inspired by : • interruptability • evolving database

Explorative Configurative

To create the condition to populate a database and decide what to do with the database

Explorative Role Playing Configurative Poetic

To design experiences in a dynamic environment

by Davenport • 6 Billion Others (2008) • Global Lives (2009-ongoing) by David Harris

Experiential mode (Metaphor = Dancing)

• Greenwich Emotion Map (2005-6) Christian Nold • Rider Spoke (2007) Blast Theory

Inspired by: interactive computation (or the Super-Turing computation) • interaction with the world • infinity of memory and time resources • evolution of the system

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Appendix B Proposed classification and categorization of the interactive multimedia documentary

CATEGORY AND MODES IT COVERS 4. ONLINE GENERATIVEMULTIMEDIA DOCUMENTARIES (Online) Multimedia Generative Documentary(MGD) GENERATIVE INTERACTIONMODE+ ALL THE NAVIGATION MODES INTERACTION MODE WITHAPPLICATIONS 2.0

3. ONLINE NON LINEAR MULTIMEDIADOCUMENTARIES (Online) Multimedia Interactive Documentary(MID) ALL THE MODES OF NAVIGATION

2. ONLINE LINEAR DOCUMENTARIES Audiovisual Online Documentary AUDIOVISUAL NAVIGATION MODE

DESCRIPTION AND EXAMPLES The user is not only limited to viewing content in a linear way or navigating in different modes in a non-linear way, but instead interacts as they leave an imprint of their time in the application: This trail can lead to discussions in a forum or in the most advanced sense of making audiovisual contributions to the same itself, while adding videos and experiences to the documentary. They mix the modes of non-linear navigation and modes of digital interaction effectively.

City of memory (2009) Guernika, pintura de guerra (2007) MetamentalDoc Multimedia (2010) Our First Loves (2009) Spacing Montreal (2009) The website itself contains no documentary, it is the documentary.

They have one or more modes of non-linearnavigation.

They may contain an entire audiovisual documentary, split in parts and other types of navigate the content (or other modes for navigating and organizing the information and content) BCNova (2003) Becoming Human (2000) Capturing Reality: the Art of Documentary(2008) Gaza Sderot (2008) GDP:Spacing Montreal (2009) Guernika, pintura de guerra (2007) Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica(2006) Journey to the End Of The Coal (2009) The Big Issue (2009) The Iron Curtain Diaries (2009)

Websites that contain online documents, either complete or divided into themes, sequences, chapters, etc.The documentary can be consumed in a linear way or can also be presented divided into different parts.

Guernika, pintura de guerra (2007, TV3 a lacarte) Saving my language (2008) Piraterie en Somalie (2009) Le corps incarcéré (2009) 71

MetamentalmediaDoc (2010)

1. OFFLINE MULTIMEDIAINTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARIES Offline Multimedia Interactive Documentary ALL MODES OF NAVIGATIONThis

This category contains various types of predecessor formats of the interactivedocumentary in a CD-ROM or DVDROMapplication or format: interactive essays,interactive cultural dissemination works, etc.The reader's contribution is limited to a closedoffline system, which is always within thenavigational parameters established by theauthor of the work.

Le Louvre (1994) Dotze sentits (1996) Op茅ration Teddy Bear (1996) Joan Mir贸. El color dels somnis (1998)

Appendix C Proposed modes of interactivity of the webdoc by Kate Nash

Mode Narrative

Categorical

Collaborative

Description

Examples

Structured so as to privilege a mode of engagement that is similar to that of traditional linear documentary narratives.

The Wrong Crowd In order to achieve this the webdoc will include a central narrating position (this might be the documentary maker, The Whale Hunt the user or another individual) and emphasize the causal Prison Valley connection between events. The user need not experience events in chronological order, but the way in which events are structured and the documentary framed makes the chronological structure and causal relationships between events evident.

Categorical webdocs predominantly (although not exclusively) consist of a collection of micronarratives, short video sequences that in themselves exhibit a narrative structure. Overall, however, there is no narrative relationship between the sequences.

The meaning of the documentary for those who participate is bound up with the relationships that form through their contribution and may be less easily deduced from analysis of the documentary text alone. In studying collaborative documentary there is a need to look for traces of these relationships.

Gaza/Sderot Waterlife

Mapping Main Street Eighteen Days in Egypt Goa Hippy Tribe

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