‘Life’ YouTube channel and the notion of extended content
Posted by Edward J Delaney on February 20, 2011 · 3 Comments
“Life in a Day” has made its Sundance debut, and now has a sleek YouTube channel that offers a variety of clips for the viewing. Given, of course, that the Ridley Scott/Kevin MacDonald crowdsourcing project is not a standard linear film but rather more of a mosaic, means that any clip it shows would seem to be both an excerpt of the larger project and an artifact in itself.
YouTube began as the ultimate amateur venue, the idea of turning the camera on yourself and putting the result out into the void, and with that it also helped reconfigure the way people watch video, why they watch it, and how they do (or don’t) distinguish between professional and amateur. A video 0f Egyptian protests caught on a cell phone camera can have the power of the most highly produced news content; a video of a guy doing dance moves can get 160 million views and not make him any money.
Where does that leave documentary filmmakers?
Monetizing gets harder in a world of free content, but linear gets harder, too. Television adapted to the invention of the remote control by often collapsing down story into something with smaller reward cycles – be it sitcoms with a stream of lame one liners, or a new “challenge” every three minutes.
In essence, online viewing may turn audience habits into the same dynamic in which iTunes destroyed the concept of an “album” by selling off individual songs like car parts. The notion of a record as being a larger entity, which had evolved in a way that had done away largely with 45 singles, was deconstructed.
So, is YouTube, online viewing and a world in which there are always multiple distractions mean that documentaries will become more component-driven? To some degree, the movement in documentary toward reality “plots” may be part of a response.
But if documentary “film” is really going to be a web-based phenomena, thinking about websites such as “Life’s” is worthy exploration. The website is often seen as the extended content, but to a lot of people, it’s the content itself, in an age of quick movement through digital space.
When newspapers began grudgingly putting up websites in the mid-1990s, they saw it as no more than a promotional device for the paper-and-ink product. We can all see where that went. So a web presence we think of as publicity may become, in many ways, the product itself, in which the film is the “extended” media. Some filmmakers, like some newspapers a decade ago, are beginning to get ahead of the curve.
Chang, Paradigm shift, Obsolesce; call it what you want but only in death do things stay the same.
The “new media” on-line, interactive, non-linear, participatory; that is the new paradigm. We still make music and films in a linear fashion, but they are delivered in a very different way now, how to take advantage of this and not be ruined by it is the real question. The “free” nature of content on the web is fine, as long as it cost nothing to make! The only “free” content I put up is what I would otherwise have to have an advertising or marketing expense. If you need to make money, do so, put your content behind a “pay-wall” many models exist, and surprisingly they are not “popular” so what! Do you want a million views or a thousand customers? That is the real choice.
The million views, can lead to a thousand customers if you have structured your offering to work like a business, If your model is to give everything away, I hope you can get enough grants to live on, because you will eventually fail, or you are putting up content for ego gratification without concern for revenue, great if you have a well paying day job, for those who don’t you have to use the system at hand and figure out a way to make it pay.
M
I’ve been having related documentary thoughts of late. Wrote recently on my blog: “John Grierson defines a documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality.” Bill Nichols reminds us that every doc has a voice: reflexive, authoritative, poetic, etc. Given documentary’s roots in time based media (film and video), we have historically thought of the crafting of such an argument through artistically arranged fragments of filmed reality as a linear enterprise. But for the sake of Zuckerberg, let’s grow this to encompass a network: a “documentary” that sits multi-spatially, as well as temporally, on and about the web and within all the media that converge there. As Facebook unrolls its creatively voiced but highly authorized, ah-shucks he has a girlfriend and a foundation, interpretation of Mark’s sorry story, we see a new kind of documentary coming into being alongside the very social networks it covers, shamelessly uses, and owns: the creative and also corporate controlled, multi-platformed, expertly networked, and then user-ventriloquized treatments of reality.”
It is the dimentioanlity of this new turn that seems most exciting to me as a documentary maker, allowing for montage practices that mimic the many that Eisenstein named (in space, time, screen, emotion and between) so many years ago. I’ve been engaging in just such montage digital writing practices in my free online video-book about YouTube just out from MIT.