This blog followed the process of creating the documentary website, Building Anonymity.
The final post!
I have had some positive responses from people who have viewed the Building Anonymity website and, perhaps even more rewardingly, all of my interviewees seemed very keen to explore the issues surrounding the Anonymity exhibition. Simply by delving deeper into some of the issues around Anonymity I felt that many of my interviewees truly realised how important their role was in the artwork and how important the artwork itself was as a representation of Melbourne’s non-mainstream art scene.
Personally, I have revived my long-unused editing skills and explored a few new ways to play with audio, digital images and WordPress. I loved the opportunity to put more time into a big project and try to produce a more involved final product compared to many of my subjects of the semester. That being said, as is usually the case with many forms of media, the documentary ended up being incredibly time consuming in the final weeks. There just never seems to be enough time for this sort of project!
Being able to produce my documentary without any sort of budget was a very pleasing achievement and has inspired me to look into producing more media projects (documentaries or otherwise) at the completion of my degree.
Where would we be without the internet? It’s easy to forget, especially as a 20-something year old, that the internet in its truly global format has only existed for a short period. The world wide web is of endless use to amateur and professional documentary makers alike, not only for pure communication purposes but also for research and access to software.
My documentary is quite literally mounted on the internet, as well as marketed and disseminated through it, and the semi-interactive multimedia aspects could not be possible without the Building Anonymity website.
The beauty of the internet is that the number of communities, conflicts and subjects that can be easily contacted and researched is almost endless. Furthermore, it greatly increases dissemination opportunities through social media and opens up a huge variety of mediums that suddenly become viable thanks to downloadable software (with tutorials) and the ability to mount multimedia projects online.
As technology and the digital world continue to advance at such a fast pace it is going to be integral to anyone involved in the media industry to stay up to date. Keeping an eye on related blogs and twitter feeds should be an excellent start.
Creating a documentary from scratch, working alone, and with a host of other pressures from other subjects (not to mention day to day life and earning a living), it is very hard to find the time to take a step back and really brainstorm the best way to approach a problem.
Thankfully, with an entire class of people going through exactly the same ordeal, there have been a lot of ideas floating around through twitter and the blogs that have pointed me in the right direction. Here are a few of the stand outs:
Sometimes less apps is more:
– I had been trolling through different programs and apps to try to find the best ways to record my audio and and gather digital images and had run into a few walls (especially seeing as I didn’t have any sort of budget to spend on software). But thanks to a push in the right direction after a small discussion with some classmates in tutorials, I tested some of the older or pre-installed apps and programs with great success. Sometimes the ‘lesser’ programs and methods are more than enough for the project at hand.
Interview options:
– Although I had several contacts within my community and good avenues to get in touch with interviewees I had a lot of offers in the form of links, phone numbers and suggestions from classmates for where I could gather some even more specific content. I certainly would have utilised all these contacts had I not changed my focus to be so specifically centred on Vandal Spruce and his documentary instead of the broader street art community.
Twitterverse:
– I have to say that I have never been too much of a tweeter. You may have noticed that I have tended to run my blog instead of tweeting for the majority of the semester as well. Although it is a little embarrassing for a media major of my generation, I have to say that researching and following trends through the simple method of searching #tags had never really occurred to me as a useful practice. After using twitter on a slightly more regular basis through tutorials my eyes were opened to this valuable resource of up to date news and social trends on very specific subjects.
Was great to view everyone’s documentaries earlier this week. I was blown away at the sheer variety of subject matters, communities involved and mediums used. Many of the projects had some very polished and professional aspects, which is great to see considering the time and budget constraints that I’m sure every students had to deal with.
I enjoyed seeing many students looking into communities that they were personally involved in and had very unique avenues with which to research the area. It’s fantastic to see documentaries emerging from completely different cultures.
I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of great final products might have arisen had those with different skills combined forces to make a longer and more thoroughly executed piece.
With the deadline reached and the documentary uploaded I can’t help but wonder how the website would have looked had I more time and resources to devote to the task.
My favourite interview with Vandal himself was the interview showcased in Part 2 of the documentary, where the recording was done outside and on the move. It is this brash, passionate side of Vandal, with a unique viewpoint and a strong personality, that I was really hoping to bring to the forefront in the documentary. It is a quality that I think at times holds him back but largely fuels his determination to succeed and in turn has given birth to some of his more innovative styles and methods. If I had the luxury of following Vandal for a longer period of time I would have attempted to get more interviews outside of the quiet, sedated interview space, instead opting to capture Vandal in his element on the streets and engaged in natural conversation.
An interview that I only gathered a few sound grabs from, my interview with Bevin Campbell from PBS, was perhaps the most engaging and enlightening interview of all. Thanks to his own experience with audio based media, Bevin spoke very well and articulated some fascinating points of view regarding the links between various non-mainstream art forms and their support groups. These comments related more directly to my initial thoughts as to the direction I would take the documentary, before the Anonymity exhibition became such a main focus. To have compared this interview with Bevin with similar content from visual street artists like Vandal and perhaps non-mainstream artists of other mediums including theatre, live music, poetry and the like may have yielded a much broader and more encompassing audio aspect.
Alas, as is always the case, we can only work within the time constraints we are burdened with. With unlimited time and resources, an open mind and a hefty dose of will power there really is no limit to how far the documentary could reach. All this being said, if Building Anonymity can start any sort of dialogue or inspire just a few people to look into and support amazing artists such as Vandal Spruce so that Melbourne’s vibrant arts scene can continue to grow, then my efforts have been more than worthwhile.
The slideshow function of WordPress allows me to present my still images in an interesting way. It ensures that all images are shown at a decent size and that each can have its own caption. The controls allow viewers to move through images at their own pace.
Unfortunately, despite trolling through forums and search engines I found no way to slow down the speed at which the slideshow runs if the controls are not being utilised. It seems that this is simply a customisation that WordPress does not accomodate. The speed at which the slideshow moves makes it near impossible to inspect the image and read some of the larger captions during the time it is displayed. Thank god for the manual control buttons!
This slightly unfortunate aspect of the slideshow function is not detrimental and I much prefer this style of presentation to the use of a thumbnail gallery.
Annoyingly, just as my due date nears I realise that I have neglected to take down the details of the music tracks I downloaded from Soundcloud to use in my documentary. As the Creative Commons licence requires me to credit the creators of the tracks, and Soundcloud does not record my plays and downloads on the site, I am forced to painstakingly search through my browser history for names of the tracks and their creators.
As the audio files are often abbreviated names of the track it is not possible to simply search for the name of the audio file on Soundcloud to find the correct artist to credit.
It is silly little time consuming setbacks like these that are the reason I have always been aiming to complete my documentary one day ahead of schedule, so that I have time to do some tweaking and fix any little mistakes.
Of course my learning contract will need some serious alterations as my final product differs greatly from my original idea both in content and medium!
Although I was originally planning to upload the documentary through Youtube and Vimeo as a short film (albeit a film compiled from a series of still images), my new format of a semi-interactive website requires me to upload my audio content as pure audio. Soundcloud is definitely the perfect site to host my material.
After loading each of my four audio tracks to Soundcloud individually I was able to insert a widget into my WordPress pages, creating a minimalist audio player within my site. This will allow viewers to play the audio content whilst reading the accompanying text and browsing the accompanying images.
I have also been utilising Soundcloud to source Creative Commons licensed music that I was able to download and mix in as background music to my interviews. Truly I could not have presented my documentary in this format without utilising the Soundcloud site.
Finally, just a few days out from the due date, I believe I have found an appropriate way to present my documentary that will allow me to present a reasonable chunk of audio and provide a visual aspect without succumbing to a gigantic, tiresome 15 minute long slideshow.
I now plan to break my audio into four tracks that follow a narrative progression throughout the initiation and fallout from the Anonymity exhibition. Accompanying each audio track will be a small gallery of related images and a few paragraphs of text explaining the context of the interviews and their place within the overall documentary.
This will all be presented through a newly formed website – www.melbourneanonymity.wordpress.com. I’m choosing to host the documentary on an entirely new wordpress blog as Vandal has requested that the ‘work-in-progress blog’ (that this very post is published on) not be mounted on the same site.
The downside of this method is that I will be unable to host my documentary in its entirity on the likes of Vimeo, YouTube and SoundCloud. This of course will mean I have to modify my learning contract once again. However, the benefits in the presentation of the final product are far greater than any dissemination shortcomings, and the Melbourne street art related pages and threads on Facebook and Twitter will still be very viable outlets on which to publish links to the page .
With the website itself just beginning to take shape (I just have a bit of fiddling to do with the themes) I have only to clean up some of the images to post into galleries and make decision as to where to break up my audio.