Some thoughts on documentary in a participatory culture

     How to make a documentary? Although a fairly simple interrogative sentence, it is a very multifarious question. It can certainly be talking about documentary production, and that is an aspect of making a documentary. However, I think that what this question is asking implicitly is, what subject makes a documentary and how does the documentarian decide that? In our 21^st Century media creation and sharing amongst non professionals and professionals has become easier, democratizing media. But for many media creators, especially younger creators, the issue seems to lie in the perception of documentary rather than in the actual production. The main sticking point behind the inhibition of documentary creation is that the creator may have trepidation in choosing a subject to focus upon. Hopefully I can address this topic with brevity and with allusion to other related matters.

     One of the ways that younger media participants get hung up when trying to produce a documentary is that they become bogged down in answering some of the basic questions of why their documentary is the way it is. In a paper published for the MacArthur Foundation, Henry Jenkins, Director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, talked at great length about essentially, the same conundrum. While Jenkins was talking in broad strokes about applicability he did provide a list of 11 critical skills needed to overcome pedagogical challenges. They are: 

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving 

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery 

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities     

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

     Using these 11 skills it can become easier to know how to produce a documentary with more substantial weight behind it than polish. But that still doesn’t answer the issue of how young creators decide why to make a documentary. For that I am going to talk, somewhat, about a feature documentary by a writer, Josh Fox, called Gasland.

     Gasland, is a 2010 documentary directed by Josh Fox, the basic premise of the film is about how the drilling practice of “fracking” (pumping a cocktail of chemicals, solvents, and other such stuff, into oil wells to fracture the shale, thus releasing trapped natural gas to be pumped out) has caused numerous health problems by poisoning drinking wells of people who live near them. This might seem like a typical documentary fare and put down the hopes of younger, would-be documentarians, however, it might be a comfort to know the back story of the documentary’s production. The premise of the film was stumbled upon because the director, was living in his childhood home when he got a letter from a drilling company offering him money to put a well on his property. He decided to read up on drilling and came across the word “fracking”. As he learned more and more about the practice he decided to look up the effects of such a practice and decided to film his journey on a mini DV recorder. This whole, big process was kick started by simply wanting to find out more about something Josh Fox cared about, his childhood home.

     Now how does that relate to media creation and critical skills? Well, in simplistic terms, documentarians make documentaries about what they care about. What they care about doesn’t have to be covered in a feature length documentary. The Fit For the Kingdom series of documentaries on the internet is a perfect example of a collective of short docs that each have their own cares and desires. One, called Birdie, is about children’s reaction to the death of a, short-lived, pet bird. The documentarian’s main care is about his children seen through the lens of a somewhat traumatic incident where many perceptions about death and spirituality were called into question. Now this documentary’s purposes are neatly folded into the larger purpose of the Fit For the Kingdom series, but on its own, this short doc has all that is needed to be both informative and compelling.