Impressions from any media workshop @IDFA 2007–11–24
Amit Breuer
Away from the hustle of the festival group of participants who are engaged in the visual arts, print media and traditional documentaries. Gathered together at the mediamatic studio for five days to participate in Any Media Workshop- located above the Stedelijk museum in the dok area.
It is the end of the second day.
The lack of funding for projects via Television and/or other traditional funding sources for projects, and the curiosity to learn more about New Media creative practices, are the key motivations of the participants.
I decided to join the workshop as an observer to see the process from close up. There are pronounced gaps in technological knowledge between the young participants and the older participants, between traditional filmmakers and those engaged in non linear thinking. Notions of participatory media, context and contact, creating one’s own social network, raise some eyebrows. We used to research , shoot, edit, release ,hand to distributor ,small screen , Theatre, festivals ….What is this brave new world!?
The main technique used by Mediamatic's workshop is the Korsakow system created by a Berlin based visual artist named Florian Thalhofer. His system offers a creative way to organize material through keywords for non linear interactive projects. "Linearity” focuses the filmmaker on delivering a predicted outcome.
“Stories are containers, stories are pills ", says Thalhofer "the system allows us to work in an associative way, to follow the paths of thinking. Get off the highway and find the small roads. This is a key for discovery" suggests Thalhofer to the participants.
Media researcher and writer Jacob Schillinger, who has worked with this software for many years, uses it as a "sketch book". His interest in Korsakow system came from his interest in the interaction with an audience rather then telling a story in a non linear way.
Some of the workshop participants, during the next days, will work with their own material while exploring the Korsakow system hoping to move on with the development of their projects.
Another technique, presented by media researcher Martijn de Waal, was "Locative Media" which suggested how one may use data to tell a story. It speaks of the use of real space as an interface for information (or using it as representation of space), and how this data can create a documentary project or be embedded in documentary content . A place or an image of a place. used as a starting point to tell a story, and shooting with a GPS device, can sometimes be combined with other sources like flickr, google map, bliin live (a social networking service lets you share your location and geo-tag photos from your handset in real-time). Some examples are www.youarenothere.org or, a story of milk making its way from Latvia to Amsterdam through a GPS device.
The workshop leader Klaas Kuitenbrouwer shows us how to use YouTube in intelligent ways and offers the participants key questions while going over each project, suggesting the exploration of Form Rules, Content Rules and Time Frames.
The workshop opens the minds of documentary content creators to new tools for creativity and communication. However, this process still needs to be pursued individually well into the future.
Back at the festival venue I see many young filmmakers hanging posters in bars and on restaurants walls, distributing small flyers, trying to get ‘eyeballs’ to their films’ premieres. Its all about visibility .The excitement of the creators showing film for the first time is like a first kiss. Looking into the eyes of a few hundreds strangers, that are soon to become intimate friends for an hour or two. Can one experience the same feeling in a virtual space or over a mobile device?
I go to the beautiful Tuschinski Theatre where IDFA is celebrating 20 years of primarily linear POV story telling. Respected speakers encourage us to continue making documentaries that can trigger change , to keep making provocative , engaging films in an era where news is fast becoming entertainment and Paris Hilton is the hottest item everywhere. I think to myself- we have to work harder to be so convincing and more creative then ever before, in order to keep this ongoing dance between an active and non active audience; an audience that soon will become content generators themselves on the one hand and more fragmented on the other hand.