Inspiring Projects:

4.2.1 BBC Open Collective Production:

In the middle of 2009, the BBC World Service launched a joint project with the Open University to produce a series of documentaries under the title 'The Virtual Revolution'. This was done to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. The new thing about this project was that it used a radical new technique to tell the story, known as The 3D Documentary Explorer, which allowed viewers to access different parts of the documentary separately (interviews, footage, and graphics) through the BBC website. It also allowed the audience to choose from these clips what they see as reflecting their own perspective about the story. The viewer was then able to make suggestions, raise questions or add comments about the documentary, and even do their own editing according to their own vision, in such a manner that allowed everyone in the audience to have their own version of the documentary. This paradigm shift in BBC documentary- making was called 'Open Collective Production'.

This project represented the climax of instantaneous interaction which was, until then, one of a kind in the Internet realm. It was able to reflect the maximum possible amount of user input. However, the project failed in two specific areas. First, the production process was starting at the BBC side, ending at the user’s side; therefore the user could not be

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considered as the sole producer of the documentary. Second, we simply never saw the end product because there was no option on the website for the user to upload it.

Fig. 4- 1 Open Collective Production project

4.2.2 BBC My World competition:

On 22 January 2010, the BBC World Service announced a global multimedia competition entitled My World, aiming to build a unique picture of people’s lives around the globe, via user-generated video. Audiences worldwide were invited to shoot a two-minute mini- documentary with compelling personal narratives, using any kind of camera available to them – from a mobile phone to a digital camera. The most original, ambitious and thematically important pieces would be shortlisted, and then be assembled into sequences of ten films by guest curators to be shown on BBC World News. Finally, a single film would be chosen by the curators and awarded the prize of a semi-professional camcorder.

The following is a description of the competition as published then on the BBC World Service website:

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1. You can interpret the My World theme any way you choose. Your film could be a compelling personal story, tell of a place that is changing, or document the joy or difficulty of your work life.

2. Each film must be relevant to one of the five major continents - Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania - and must be tagged as such. You can shoot a single shot documentary, if appropriate to your story, or edit your film with any editing software available to you.

3. A selection of all work received may be shown on TV and online and an ultimate winner will be selected based on the judging criteria.

4. After submissions close, five prestigious My World curators will each be assigned films from a particular continent. From each, they will choose and assemble a sequence of up to ten of the best films creating a fascinating portrait of the world today.

5. Finally each of the five curated sequences will be available to view online and on BBC World News. An overall winner will then be chosen and receive a prize of a semi-professional HD mini DV camcorder.

(BBC Arts & Culture - My World, 2010)

Fig. 4- 2 BBC My World Competition

I compared the aims of this competition to the experiment I was looking forward to conducting in order to prove my hypothesis stated in this study. I found two observations; firstly, the competition did not require that all who had participated in it should have been amateurs, and secondly, the final product (made up of a number of winning videos) would

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certainly reflect the jury's own views about the world, which would be clear in the video clips they select and their order in the final film. Therefore, we cannot perceive that final product as a completely user-made documentary.

4.2.3 The Echo Chamber project:

Meanwhile, two collective documentary projects were gaining prominence on the Internet. The first was The Echo Chamber Project, which aimed to produce an open- source, investigative documentary about how biased TV media discourse led to the war in Iraq. This was to be done by developing collaborative techniques for producing the film, potentially providing solutions for incorporating a broader range of voices and perspectives into the mainstream media.

The following flowchart shows how that project was to be implemented;

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As we may observe, these steps could easily be carried out by experts; however, they may seem too numerous and too complicated to be followed by amateurs. In addition, they did not allow for immediacy, which is paramount for amateur film-makers.

4.2.4 Lost Zombies social network:

The second project was Lost Zombies, a zombie-themed social network whose purpose was to create a community-generated zombie movie. The members would submit their photos and videos, corresponding to a script suggested by the project managers, who had the right to include or exclude them. These videos would actually have to include created dramatic scenes depicting zombie attacks on humans. It was therefore inappropriate to consider the outcome of this project a documentary, not to mention the fact that it was not fully generated by amateurs (they did not participate in the writing of the script).

Fig. 4- 4 Lost Zombies social network

These two online projects were among the most prominent of their kind between 2008 and 2010, and were based on providing an online platform for generating film with

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maximum possible dependence on the amateurs themselves. In fact, as we have seen, neither of these projects succeeded in presenting a documentary that was fully generated by the amateurs. As a result, these projects cannot be called upon to test my hypothesis concerning whether UGV could be seen as a new genre of documentary.

Likewise, neither of the interactive documentary projects on the Internet was appropriate as an experiment to answer my research questions. The interactive documentary's beginning is normally proposed by the creator, left to the interactor user to find divergences along the trajectories they follow. Such project has no single discourse; authorship and control over the storyline are more shared, which makes the task of analyzing the behavior of individual users more difficult.

It was indispensable for me to come up with a documentary-specific project with measures and standards to suit my research. That is how the idea of designing a website called The Amateur Documentary Workshop (www.egdoc.com) came to life; primarily targeting Egyptian amateurs in order to control for extraneous intercultural variables.