Poetics of video story telling

It goes by the working title of Vanguard on the front page of Viewmagazine.tv 

It's a short film that previews a film I'm making that has taken five years. That's the duration it's taken for an 80,000 word thesis which investigates new knowledge in video story making.

How can some people produce stories that have us transfixed when the content is not the determining factor?

I used the expression with academic colleagues of a poetics of video story form. This has very little to do with the telling of poetry, but how the elements in a story hit a sweet spot or sweet spots.

The artifacts of narrative are so immersive that it's not the sheen per se associated with the film, the 5D look that is the clincher, though understandably subconsciously we are wedded to this. However to debunk that idea spare a thought for all the auters who shot on 16mm.

The underlying style is one which reaches a metronomic state. It's not definitive and certainly not unitary. But it's the beginning of the architecture for a schemata which also is not out and out prescriptive. You simply don't just pick up the results and apply them to your camera.

Sometimes we wish life was that deductive.

In the states of learning, a poeticism is without convention. It is the something else beyond the explicit, which is why some people see what we can't see. And then even those who can see have a respect for others who are transcendental. Think Gladwell's Blink.

If you're in a university, studying news and factual film forms,  or an aspiring film maker, or dare I save have some experience, it may have some interest for you.

I mentioned some of the themes in a discussion as a panelist at Europe's biggest newsgathering, NewsXchange (400 media people from more than 60 different countries, which the managing director Amy responded with this kind missive below.

You delivered an outstanding session on alternative storytelling techniques being adopted by traditional (mainstream) broadcasters. Our delegates were VERY interested in your observation on what is working and what isn't working and, in particular, in what the new world order might be.

That new world order, the title of an article I wrote in 2001, can be better understood in this post herre: New Minds for a new form of university.

Below are some frame grabs from the short film that I have annotated.

Opening shot

In semiotics, this is what's known as a motivational shot. The image does not adhere to the conventions of framing. The effect on the viewer forces them to make sense of the visual narrative. 

The result will my make you dismissive of the filmmaker  or help you appreciate its stylised effect. Again, the tension in the sweet spot is understanding how the shot works without being style for styles sake. Which paradoxically has its allure as well.

Shower

Scopopholia is one of the secrets of film making. We are drawn to moments of intimacy, beautiful people or character faces. This is a shot of me in the shower reflecting on ideas. Did you know that research indicates that the shower, running/walking, and moving in a car are some of the most fruitful places for generating ideas?

Composition

Compositional framing in which the background is the focal point that is deep focus, which in the antithesis of the in-vogue shallow depth of field. The scene has a draw from a combination of its lighting and the ambiguity of the scene. 

Movement

Movement is one of the keys in visual narrative, otherwise the illusion of movement is a requirement in a poetics of story telling.

Metronymic

Video as with art has the power of suggestion. These two shots have presumably nothing to do with the primary narrative, but they attempt to mimic the notion of thought. Freud's psychoanalysis and implicit meaning are strong attractors here

Thought or realism

Mark Cousins

As part of the feature, I invited five respected film maker to evaluate my work. I also interviewed three of the most revered film makers, who pioneered film form fifty years ago.

special forces

 In one of the plots in the film, a group of journalist are in the hot zone filming

on stage

Sharing a stage with Kenji Kohno, Deputy Director of NHK's international division

If you have time I'd suggest you peak the promo from where I grabbed these frames. It's on www.viewmagazine.tv. I'll dump it on youtube in due course.

David Dunkley Gyimah is completing a longitudinal Doctoral study in alternative video making and journalism. He is a juror for the Royal Television Society's Broadcast in Innovation Awards, which rewards UK and International broadcasters for their creativity in news story telling. He recently presented a three hour performance lecture to Senior Danish Journalists in Denmark. 

Social Video. Marketers imagination or the next trend?

No word quite enraptures businesses and post modernism media type, whilst befuddling traditionalists than the word "Social Media".

Harder to define, its description falls somewhere between the spread of information based on networks of consent and intra correspondence between ambient friendships.

Social media is the emperor's clothes, apparently. You really can see and marketers unable to contain their glee now preface every conversation with "social" as a panacea to deliver. How antisocial we must have been a priori 2005.

Take Twitter, Tumblr, Four squares, Youtube, Facebook, Pinterest, blogging and knit them all together and you're there.

Except social media experts will proclaim it's more than connecting the dots when singing for your supper. Each possesses a unique set of codes. Twitter is as much about finding great links to share, as it is revealing how unorthodox your life is.

Being resourceful, means understanding the power of presence and volume. That is being there on the conscious of your followers perennially, as well as generating that presence by your voluminous data, unless you're a celeb.

Unsurprising then, as tweeted by @MonicaSarkar, that Nokia states that social video is next in line for the magic stardust treatment.

Social video! It sounds like an oxymoron. Video by its very nature is meant to be shared, generally.

We go to the cinema to watch a film - social.  Crowd sourcing video is by its very nature social. Who can forget Eric Whitacre's Social Choir in 2010 which I spoke about participatory social media.

 Two years on what's changed?



Pedagogically do we know any more? Philosophically or thematically are we any wiser? Where does social end or even render video or film a uniquely different entity?

Social Video 

For my money I would posit, it lies in the connotative "call to arms" quality of the film.

Take these five  films: Super Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth, and Kony2012, and Triumph of the Will byLeni Riefenstahl. The latter mobilised a country and its footage has been used just as prominently by producers anti its messsage.



What they all have in common is a social message, as opposed to the classic Hollywood traditionalist film or concert cinema of Transformers. With the exception of Kony on my list, the others, in spite of their social good require you to fork out a princely sum of money to watch.

Kony 2012, as many other videos I have not mentioned ooze social because we're able to share their social message in their entirety.

But this is where we need to take stock. Video can become social by dint of it being shared and so for that reason alone almost every video on Youtube is social, which is a poor argument. Or as alluded to there is something inherent in the content that mobilises us.

If the latter is the case then social video has a more prominent Achilles. It cost. Good video relies on resources i.e. money and time to make.

That's because, though we may all get there one day, at present the art of making video, good video along the lines of the aforementioned is not the same as firing off a tweet, but is an artistic endeavour.

So whilst Nokia may have hit on the next best iteration of social, it's not as easy as it appears.

However, and that's a small however, whilst on this blog and viewmagazine.tv I speak about the art of breaking rules to make videos, there are patterns and rhetorical strategies that go into making good social video.

For that though I'd urge you take a look at this popular post on a semiotic breakdown of Kony2012.