Englishness - an identity acknowledgment

Picture of Chinese premier taken at Mansion House

I am invited to China's youthful Premier Li Keqiang keynote speech in Mansion House.

At a point in his talk, in the coded language of diplomacy, the premier is piqued, gently mocking a very British, even English trait.  

He says, I know you Think Tanks like to deal in abstracts. We (Chinese) deal with facts. Previous sentiment from the premier's office have been less guarded.

A day later, there's a need to reflect on Englishness further.

One of my Master's student Li Yang had completed her online assignment in the nick of time to be awarded a merit, but it was the last few passages of her essay that stood out like white peaks of the Andes.

"I always admired the English, but now I know you are shallow minded, are not interested in learning about anything, are lazy and have no interest in anyone else".

For that brief moment, I carried the weight of Englishness in determining whether I should address this off-piste topic, or ignore it.  I did the former.

She's not been alone. Almost every year, Chinese students, buoyed by tales of England before they arrive are somewhat crestfallen by the year's end. 

The first steps towards correcting alcoholism is to acknowledge you are an alcoholic, according to Alcoholics Anonymous. Yes, the English get drunk on their own sense of superiority, but they have ever reason to: the Magna Carta- the crucible of democracy. Never mind that it was foisted upon the populace. 

Its success in wars and meeting aggressors head-on. The English creators or co-creators (according to different narratives) of the beautiful game, gentlemen's game and summer post-coital game (Brideshead) ; Football, Rugby, and Cricket in that order.

The English are wont to feel full of themselves. But is that not what other nations radiate in their national identities? The Italians, Milan and cuisne; the French for their language of rhetoric and comprehending beauty; the Chinese for their work ethic and nay say can't and America for all things "Transformer" size and that psyche that the lines between a porter and president is within reach.

The English, though possess a dissonantly unique trait. Acknowledging their problems, discussing at length its remedies, but painfully not seeing them through.

Its borne out in recommendations in education policy. In the row over schools in Birmingham becoming Trojan horses for Islamic extremism, Ofsted's Sir Michael Wilshaw says he told the education secretary that if you want to conduct a fair assessment of a school it's better not to inform the institution when you intend to visit. Michael Gove MP, apparently ignored this sensible advice. 

The Metropolitan Police force have been informed by several bodies and a major enquiry  they are institutionally racist. But their current commissioner Bernard Hogan Howe's television interview rejects this.  "I hope not. I don't think it's for me to judge", he told ITV News.

The media can see no wrong, even when hacking a missing girl's phone that provided the impression she was still alive, and was seen as repulsive. Leveson's recommendations for change to protect the privacy of individuals has seemingly neither been helpful to press and media barons in the wake of such actions.

In all the last three cases, education, law and order,  and media, symptoms of the alcoholic disease is evident, denial of a real problem. For the period these events become newsworthy, they are discussed with the intensity of a grandmaster Chess player's crunch match.

Discuss, deject, damaged (DDD) could be an appropriate slogan. In spite of the realms of discourse, an inevitable dispiriting mist descends on the debate when no action is taken, and in time the damage becomes inevitable.

However, no where is the trenchant genre behaviour observed at a national event, more so, than in the united theme of sport, and in particular the game of football.

And if there is one arena where a drunken man wanders into his first AA to declare he is unfit, listened to, told what to do, but returns drunk again 4 years later to go through the same cycle, as if collective amnesia has gripped the AA meeting, it is the World Cup.

No matter what happens at consecutive World Cups, the formula stays in tact; the result is the same, the cycle of behaviour is unswerving. Cynically you could blame it on the media; they have to, after all, sell newspapers and television spots for advertisers and share holders. 

But truthfully, it is that singularity identified by Li Yang.  If x = feelings of superiority, then no matter how much it is diminished towards reaching zero, it forever is portrayed as infinity - an infinity of self-belief.  This by the way is the formula for resolving infinity.

Today, like previous years the over inebriated soul is spoken to: we have too many internationals in our domestic game, we can't cohere as a team; the rot starts from the playgrounds of 8 years olds hoofing and a roughing the game as Dad Terry stands on the sideline screaming "C'mon ma son ge stuck in there".

Football pundit Garth Crooks on Newsnight said this is not a night for hysteria, rather calm reflection. Whilst the other inteviewee the gorgeous ( er not my phraseology) David Ginola clearly had stronger issues to vent, but restrained himself on live TV. 

Notwithstanding the clever selection of pundits for Newsnight, the dichotomous views rather sums up why the English fail to address being 'drunk' on the pitch.

Both pundits agreed England lacks a national identity buttressed against the 3-million population of Uruguay who clearly know there's or the Vorsprung Durch Technik of the Germans.  But an equally fallable Achilles is reaching a consensus how to address this malaise running several generations.

My own two bit: groom a selection of strikers to reduce their odds at not fluffing the ball when the goal scoring chance is inevitable and find something which enables English footballers to handle pressure. 

Never mind I tweeted after the match.

With shades of the Oracle's advice to Neo in mind... You don't believe in all this crap. Have a cookie and when you walk away from this you'll feel bright at ray.

So back to the drawing board. Perhaps in reading the Times with its headline featured piece: 'Reforms are crushing creativity and turning children into robots', this is at centre of England's woes.

Based on fact,  the Brits and Englanders are good at creativity e.g. Olympics. Maybe then its management stifling advances. Move over the FA. Or maybe, as an outsider looking in suggests, we're just not good enough anymore.

All grist to my mill. I'm about to present a paper from my doctorate thesis on how to reform television news. It's not as if no one knows the media is broken and others have tended ideas year after year. But broadcasting for the last 50 years has more or less remained the same. 

England. We like our traditions. And we like a real pint of beer as well and getting hammered on the weekends.

A framework for students to conceptualise future news e.g. WVU J-School Brainstorms an Experimental News Venture

University of Westminster MA International Student

It was a worthwhile exercise and brought back memories of work, as well as yielded thoughts about the future.

PBS Media shift's headline ran: 

How do you produce the future of news as an educator, similar to WVU J-School Brainstorms an Experimental News Venture. More here 

It continued... 

You have infinite resources, no obstacles, a talented startup staff and brilliant students: Now build an experimental venture from scratch. (With a caveat: You can’t replicate any existing models — you have to invent one.) 

Having undertaken approaches similar to Seward I thought of sharing this response. I;m an educator and in 2004 put together a team from the University of Westminster to tell the BBC about the future of News.

Whilst brainstorming is a tried and tested method for generating ideas, the cognitive ability to do so is limited by the individual's own experience or the Wisdom of the Crowd. That does not negate the benefits or efficacy of artistic thought, and perhaps has a 'cause effect' somewhere in the chain of ideas.

Put another way, if we consider this period as a renaissance, and look at previous 'bursts of thinking' in the 17th century, to conceive of flight at that time would have been a far-fetched idea.

However artist,Leonardo Da Vinci thought and conceptualised flying, yet it would take a couple more centuries before it was realised with the Wright Brothers.

The incidents of artists thinking up the future before the artefact materialises or catches up with societies' perceived 'natural form thinking' is legion.

Artistic thought by the way amongst journalist is not taught. Journalists tend to be rational and logical and as educators, we look out for this. These broadly two, but often overlapping themes, profoundly affect the way we think up new things.

I've been on the Net since 1996 and it's no small wonder that designers, technologists drive its future, but even then for the web to be commercial, it required logical sign posting for larger swathes of society to understand its worth.

So, amongst students/people etc. it can be challenging to reinvent the wheel because of our naturalised conditioning, and if we do invent something way off, it has the ring of art/science fiction about it.

Closer to conceptualising the future aligning with realism is to trend extrapolate. If Facebook does this now, and we as a society are like that in 2025 what will Quartz Mk V be like in 10 years time when it overtakes Facebook?

That feat involves comprehending, via analysis the rhetoric, history and mechanics of Facebook.

Of course that has its difficulties too. Technology and human thought are not always predictive.

Yet, even Facebook emerges from a linearity in thinking at the time. e.g. Friends United, MySpace... And both of these were products of Web 2.0 and Dotcoms.

This segues into my last point. Again, something I engage with my MA students.

Within the rational logical approach, as opposed to artistic, to look behind the wall, it is expedient to know what was there before and why.

This is the substance of media philosophy - arguably everything is philosophy, but a critical explication. Why is it called News and how was it framed news ( paper, TV, Online) at the time when one considers interconnecting matrices e.g. culture, tech, society?

Why do doors open the way they do? Why don't we pursue artistic skills in the same way we do literary and maths when growing up.

Research, research, research - not necessarily in Mass Comms, but in areas that promulgate discursive thinking.

That requires a different type of approach: reflective thinking, and some, around the acquisition of deeper levels of knowledge.

As educators we can help move these processes along by providing the framework to let different modes of conceptualising flourish. However, I'm rather taken by this whichhttps://vimeo.com/87448006 explores a common impediment.

Video For Digital Platforms: What’s Working? Online News Association The report at the BBC - OMG it's 2005 again

The session was labelled Video For Digital Platforms: What’s Working? Online News Association. Actually, it reminded me of  2005 all over again, when I presented at the ONA summit in New York, as I'll explain. 

David Dunkley Gyimah presenting at the ONA

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It was more a statement than a question posed to probe a kink in today's presentation.

If it were a question, it would go something like this.

When was the last time you attended a conference to do with all things digital, in which the panel were traditional media and you implemented their strategy and now you have a successful business?

If you have, you’re one of the rare entrepreneurs.

The Online News Association gathering at the BBC this evening had the scent of ONA at the BBC in 2008 (see video below), and the world of digital in 2005.

The speakers today were from the BBC , The Telegraph and AP, united by being traditional media and the universal message that 'online is not television'.

Actually, that's not entirely correct. Online is anything you want it to be...television and some; many more somes.

US film professor Robert Stam sums it up in Film Theory- an Introduction when he says, the possibilities of digital resemble 1920s when anything was possible, and before Mass Communication asserted there was a right and wrong way of doing things.

Almost ten years ago, since I presented at the ONA session and a chasm between online and TV emerged, today's event had the distinct feeling of 2005.

Back then the world of media was much polarised. It really was them and us.  If you ever want to see a Jeff Jarvis in fine form cursing the traditional media luddites, I have the video.

In 2005, YouTube had just come online. Online was lean forward, not like television. 

In New York on the tail end of winning one of the US' most prestigious digital media awards, the Knight Batten I was invited to give a presentation at the ONA Summit in New York. 



The event was streamed in Time Square...



At ONA, and across several sectors, traditional television was wrestling with unfamiliar themes. What made ONA unique was that a forum was being made available to bridge a space between different groups united by 'being online'.

Conference after conference and through the interaction of institutions, like the BBC, with Silicon Valley where they hired the likes of Eric Huggers new theoretical knowledge emerged within traditional media e.g. The Telegraph's hub that the BBC would adopt. 

Media viewing became less defined by class, but of new parameters of digital this, or digital that.

Between 2008 and 2012 came the quantum knowledge leap for traditional media. The gap was closing. In 2014, we've reached a new plateau, much elevated than before, but a new plateau none the less in theoretical enquiries or practised-based media illustrating radically new ideas.

So, online is not Television. But actually if you're the Telegraph, or Financial times, good sturdy TV style is just the ticket for your constituents - as I found out training FT and Telegraph Journalists.

The Theory, Practise thing!
Though today's ONA event was low on theory as to why somethings work and others don’t the presentations revealed different strategies between the broadcaster, agency, and newspaper turned videomaker.

And rightly so.  In the internet age of everything, where journalism is exposed to everyone, culture, society and audiences demonstrate how truly important they are in the media matrix. 

Journalism was never a one size-fits all. For decades, the illusion was kept that way. That is, it had to be done in a certain way. Now, anything goes which in traditional media is usually framed as “experimenting’.

But a word of caution, traditional media can experiment because of the 'give and take' in their resources. A malfunctioning idea can quickly be jettisoned. Chances are you’ll never read or hear about it. Really! But if you’re a digital entrepreneur this assumptional premise to copy the traditional media can be costly.

For similar corporate entities, that's a different matter. It's not for nothing that traditional media continually monitor each other during daily broadcasts and for intelligence into innovation.

However, I hazard a guess that a fair few attendants at the ONA meeting today were students, indies or start-ups.

Therefore, whilst traditional media serves as a framework, one of the first question digital entrepreneurs ought to be asking is, is your audience my audience, and do I possess the requisite style to gain traction into your consumers. 

Vice and Buzzfeed and the Huff clearly have their answer.


Video presentation
The BBC’s Ben Benvington @BenBevington #ONAUK, an experienced journalists made salient points, but they require qualifying.

Hook the audience from the start, he said. But how? What with? Engaging media ! In cinema it's called the 'initiating incident'. A point of tension/drama that plays backwards to satisfies your craving.

But you don't always need an incident. The vibrancy and texture of the cinematic as proved by several films e.g.  Mediastorm Agency or I am Joseph Kony indicate how strong visualisation draws in audiences. 

Benvington categorised three different styles of video in the BBC’s in-tray: the standard package, viral and photomontage.

In practise these are styles at the genre level known as forms, and within each form lay overlapping multiple styles.

For instance, the photomontage, which became the hallmark of multimedia packaging can mix styles to incorporate Ken Burns animated effect. Imagine that Burn's The Civil War made in 1990 used photos for documentary, way before multimedia producers could claim the style to be their own.



Similarly, viral has different genres e.g. the shocking, comedic are but two.  In TV, there exists the broadcast package. Outside its walls are variations e.g. cinema verite, the essay, the spatial documentary and so on.


Benvington's description of video that moved from one subject to another failed to describe why the need arises to do so.  They were different scenes with different energy – summed up, somewhat.

These are literary tropes e.g. the page turner, or a genre called cyber realism consciously side stepped by TV of Ore because it muddled directness. And TV news in particularly requires an ideological directness -" just tell me the story".

Each of these styles beg different reasons to be used e.g. skills of video maker and style of content. There are a myriad factors which I'll blog another time.

Sue Brooks, a veteran in the News industry and well respected too, was emphatic:

But AP's brand of video will do little for the start up or graduate looking to figure out what works in the discursive post-cable and digital age.

AP is an agency, so its raison detre is to shoot video that others can repurpose, so AP will largely eschew stylistic approaches, though there are exceptions in figures like the brilliant award winning videojournalist Raul Gallego Abellan.

And the claim don't try and reinvent the wheel, while broadcasters have been doing this for years, their TV trope requires examination. These are not my words, but a host of broadcast professionals I came across during my research.



Generally, TV news doesn’t like hearing this and clearly the chair at the ONA thought my views off message too - actually did I go on? I had emailed the ONA earlier to make this point. Reach out for diversity, both in the knowledge and cultural make-up. The net is the amazon forest of media making and there's some unique stuff from the cut-off tribes. 

The ONA-US is making a point about this. In its September gathering in Chicago, executive director Jane McDonnell says their event is looking to 50% diversity in race and gender.

Fancy that, and about time; panels driven solely by women and people of colour.

The Telegraph, for similar reasons to the NYT keeps to particular styles. If it strays too far from its core constituents it risks alienating them. Thanks to my online students who showed me what the Telegraph see as their natural online consumer. 

Apparently they have funds exceeding £100,000 tucked away for a rainy day. That's a 100,000 reason to keep closer to their main audience.

Here's  a shot clip I filmed attending the ONA at the BBC in 2008; the BBC is experimenting with embedded video, having established how different it can be to broadcast TV.



So while traditional media remains respectable, trusted etc, they still to a large extent rely on their brand and the need to be cautious themselves - like 2008. 


My own PhD research in Dublin reveals some interesting data, such as: 

• Just what does it take to make compelling stories - myth busting.
• Videojournalism, past, present and the future, and now the real news... (My 2000th post). The president of the....
• Presenting at the International Journalism Festival on the future of video.

The what works and doesn't in a digital long-tail age is still up for grabs.

David Dunkley Gyimah is a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster. He recently submitted his 6-years-in-the-making research looking at the future of video. He is an artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre and a Chair of jurors at the RTS Awards for Innovative News. He's behind Viewmagazine.tv.  He is the recipient of a number of awards as can be seen from this video made in 2006

Robert Peston: 'BBC follows the Daily Mail’s lead too much' . But why is that? former Newsnight researcher reports

Reports on newspapers adopting the web in 1995

The Guardian headline ran:

"Robert Peston: BBC follows the Daily Mail's lead too much".  It went on "Corporations editors have a 'safety first' attitude and are obsessed with newspapers' agendas, says economics editor".

Peston was speaking at an event organised by British Journalism Review and the University of Westminster, where I teach, and his observations seem to have caught the wind in its sails.

Peston's remarks and reasons are salient, but some crucial points are missed in the Guardian piece that explains not only why the BBC relies on newspapers, such as The Daily Mail, but why broadcast journalism relies on newspapers.

I was a researcher on the BBC's flagship news programme back in 1991 when the then editor Tim Gardam asked his editorial team to look further than the political village of westminster for its stories. 

To do this he requested the programme search through provincial newspapers for its news.The advice had purpose. One of the biggest child abuse scandals in Frank Beck from Leicester was running.

I had just joined Newsnight from working at BBC Radio Leicester and the Frank Beck case was a regular feature of Leicester's newspaper, The Leicester Mercury.

I was struck by what Gardam said. I wasn't that naive; at BBC Radio Leicester newspaper cuttings were one of the main sources for news.

In 1991, three years before the net would become commercial and even when it did, up to 1998, if you wanted to research your news, you'd walk up to a designated room called "newspaper cuttings" to order a folder of newspaper stories on the subject you were producing.

It seems antiquated now, but there was no other way of collating material: a group of researcher sat in a room and scoured the newspapers cataloging the stories.

However, the reliance of broadcasting on newspapers is a relationship that goes back much further than 1998 to the structural formation of broadcast news in the 1950s.

Firstly, BBC Journalism was founded on hiring personnel from the newspapers, but secondly, equally if not more important, broadcast journalism makes no provision for its journalists to replicate the 'beat' format of print journalism.

Whilst print journalists cultivate contacts, sometimes disappearing into communities (their beat) to gather and produce news, broadcasting could ill-afford this.

Economics plays a part. Broadcast news was made with five personnel crew. The same costs could be used to hire several specialist newspaper journalists who could rotate on a page to provide a continuous stream of news over week.

The structure of broadcast news is so time-sensitive compared with newspapers, that there was little time to research original stories on the day. Before the broadcast news team left the office, the news they were looking for had to be already 'packaged'. Newspapers provided them with that comfort.

In 1994,  a revolutionary cable station that I worked for, employing videojournalists broke this convention. For the first three months or so, 30 videojournalists were tasked with finding their own stories.

Many still used newspapers, magazines, the wires etc, but equally contacts in the community (the beat). But there was a problem? As the station's appetite for news increased, the flow of news could not, unless there was a repository of news ideas to pre-plan the next day's news. 

Channel One reverted to the tried and tested method of relying on newspaper cuttings. Interestingly, Channel One was owned by the Daily Mail and so the idea that the cable station could set its own agenda was a real prospect, if the station could get access to the Mail's news agenda.

Not a chance! The Evening Standard and Daily Mail scorned its sister broadcast outfit according to Channel One Managing Editor Julian Aston.

If anything this new relationship in broadcast outfits setting the news could be realised at the new London station, London Live, which works closer with its sister outfit The London Evening Standard that changed owners in 2009.

However a more realistic model is that the newspapers, now with their own Net broadcast strategies, not only set the agenda in print, but drive a web-news format as well. 


But as Peston notes too there is a proverbial catch 22. The BBC is damned if it breaks too free of the news agenda promulgated by those who get there first - the newspapers. It shoots itself too in the foot when it becomes too aligned to the newspaper agenda.


Peston's link between newspapers and the BBC seems ideological, but to a large extent it's also structural.

If the broadcast format changes, or broadcasters begin to recruit from a different pool and more reporters, you may see a difference.

True Video Life : a millennium factual film language

We are fond of neologism in the Video-film world e.g. the Narrative Clip, Mobile film making, Videoblog. 

Often they are tied to specific technologies such as the iPhone  and help the innovative or/and commercially minded sell an idea. If you're lucky, you might even have a film style named after you, guaranteeing you immortality e.g. the Burns effect.

Many film scholars and film makers, such as Brian Winston, author several books on film, will tell you much of what we see today can be traced to the pioneers of the 1960s, 1930s and 1900s. 

Take the Russian film maker Dziga Vertov. In his early 20s in the Soviet Union, he found a job as an editor of news material. In the ensuing years, Vertov devised a way to film people unawares.   It was called Zhin Vrasplokh.

By flash mobbing his subjects or concealing his camera, he could film people without the perennial accusation that the moment people know you are filming them, they change their behaviour.

Today, this technique emerges as the narrative clip. Vertov however constructed stories out of his honed style.

My own neologism today is True Video Life. It emerges from several sources.

• Cahier du cinema - French film makers and scholar's attempt to start a new 'true' film dialogue in the 1960s.
• True Detective and True Blood - for their successful attempts to fold multiple plots into a narrative.
• Videojournalism - from our modern penchant to validate all that we see with video in a sort of Truman existence.

True Video Life is a way to tell bold passionate stories underpinned by deep engagement with film, whilst trying to inspire the audience.  Its followed with a new site revolutionising viewmagazine.tv  These aren't easy asks to accomplish.  

But the last couple of years of filmmaking, talking on the circuit and doing a doctorate study on film has proved very useful. True Video Life, is not a process.

The process that makes this form work likes in an innovative film schema called videojournalism-as-cinema.

In film's stylistic characteristics, it's the innovative production of factual material, but stems from collapsing multiple film styles.

Arguably, we could say we already do that. Yes, but often we're constrained by what we don't know from the Masters of film communications.

We're told of rules and laws, which at most may guide us, but if we know why these rules were made, you'll find many of them antiquated.

Imagine if you could take the innovative technologies of motor manufacturing to produce a car fit for the 21st century. That's how I see True Video Life. But unlike the 20th century, there isn't just one model car, but many to suit the appropriate circumstance.

Here's a though, literally. Could you tell a news story in which rather than the subjects speak, you decipher their thoughts and bod language to tell the story? This may be a more extreme form, but it opens up the possibilities of building on film's grammar.

Which by the way, exists not because it has a fixed language, but because clever filmmakers have done something that resonates with viewers and hence becomes part of video/ film's lexicon.

In the coming weeks I'll expand more on the emergent styles. The next post looks at the the relationship between the size of camera and intimacy and poses the question.

What's so profoundly different in film style for the iPhone? 

Future of Video : What makes 12 years a Slave an exemplary film to learn from

Newsmaker, Artist, lecturer, PhD Researcher, Digirati and filmmaker David Dunkley Gyimah

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If you like Future of Video, click for From wars to music videos, a 21st Century style of newsmaking in videojournalism-as-cinema.
David discusses digital and journalism, with CNN's Christine Amanpour at the Frontline Club, London.
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It is as hauntingly immersive in its compositional scenes, as it is perversely in the more difficult acts e.g. Patsy's beating. 

In its viewing, you'll likely lose yourself in its thickened oil work, unfolding a simple-to-follow plot, which is equalled by a visual poetry. 

Even in the darkest moments; the near hanging to death of Solomon, the director finds art to play out the scene.

What is evident about 12 Years a Slave, is it is an artist's film. It inhabits a world of theatrical framings; how movies were once made, enveloping hues, colours that manifest as a moving image painting.

If video could truly hail itself as the successor - a direct comparison to canvas oil painting, and what the likes of Caravaggio, or Rembrandt would have conceived - this is it. 

Recently released on DVD, I had the opportunity to watch 12 Years a Slave away from the frenzy which rightly carried the film during its Oscar run. This time around I could analyse the film's nuances.

This is reportage; the closest how I would define videojournalism-as-cinema  (my PhD thesis) as a proxy to what Steve McQueen, a moving image painter achieves.

No, I am not and would not dare compare myself to McQueen. What I am saying is 12 Years a Slave features a plenitude of styles that ironically, cyclically, define modern factual filmmaking e.g. news. In my work I identify this as a form of videojournalism cinema predicated on art.

Journalism critiquing can often be discursive, with the writer offering opinions, albeit professional, to evaluate a film. Academic critique, as undertaken by the film scholar David Bordwell (a theme he himself addresses) tends to be more explicatory and evidence-laden.

It's Bordwell's approach, which I'll try and use to delineate the film, coupled with my own sensibilities as an artist; an artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre, with my primary focus situated in news and factual programme making.

1. Camera
Framing 
McQueen's style is to shoot square on as if directing for the theatre. It is reminiscent of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman e.g. The Seventh Seal. 

scene from the seventh seal

Like Bergman the camera is still, and there are few privileged positional cuts. McQueen's trope is his compositional weighting, so that a character dominant in the foreground is balanced by an event in the background usually in the 3rd  of the frame (see below). 

The deep focus (as opposed to the penchant for shallow-depth-of field) invites the viewer to decode the screen - just like a painting. It's the closest to 'objective filmmaking' (read Cesare Zavattini). 

There are a number of reasons why the film could be labelled unconventional in its visual framing. In fact it's an Art movie, or to classify it correctly based on its cues, this is an artist's film.

Take this framing. Very few directors would have the courage to frame this and leave it in the edit. The image is truncated leaving nominal film frame data off screen.

Perhaps, this is one of the most extraordinary shots in the film. This whole sequence where Solomon faces near death by hanging lasts two minutes, but this one scene lasts almost one minute with no cut, no camera movement. The movement occurs in the scene. The camera's stillness is countered by McQueen's play in the empty third sector of the frame.

If you're familiar with Bela Tarr's Werkmeister Harmonies, then you'll see similarities in durational cuts and how they induce reflective thinking.




These are not new concepts; French film scholar Andre Bazin stressed the importance of long takes towards film realism in the 1950s. What's remarkable is because the average film cut today is 3 seconds that McQueen can work against the grain, could be conceived as bold.

Further evidence of Arts influence is strewn across the film. The lighting and composition e.g. Chiaroscuro which Wiki states is

in art is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for the use of contrasts of light to achieve a sense of volume in modelling three-dimensional objects and figures.^[1] Similar effects in cinema and photography also are called chiaroscuro.

This scene from Bergman's Winter light captures the art of Chiaroscuro.

Winter light

12 Years a Slave

This shot here from Kubrik Barry Lyndon is influenced by Caravaggio.

This is Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus (1601)

And below is 12 Years a Slave

One last reference to art, which was evident was this... 

and it points to this Georges Seurat's pre-pointilism Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884).

2. Plot
If you're familiar with Bergman's films, The Silence (1963), Winter light (1962) then some of the themes collide with McQueen's.  

In Winter light, a film that drew on Bergman's upbringing, the priest is torn between infidelity and God. Just as Bergman pushes the envelope on sexuality, McQueen raises the bar in onscreen violence, but not for the sake of it. 

If you substitute sex in this description of Bergman's The Silence, for slavery, you could be referring to McQueen.

from trailer The Silence

Plot in film refers to the structure of the edit, as opposed to story which is the unalloyed narrative of the film. Here, McQueen plays with some modern tropes of Neo-Noir filmmaking. What is often called elliptical filming. It allows the filmmaker to play with different scenes out of order, and by so doing present a plot that acts to refresh the screen and make the audience work.

The scene where Solomon is drugged and ends up in chains, leads to mini flashbacks. McQueen could have let the whole scene play through from drinking wine, to throwing up, then Soloman finding himself in chains. 


3. Sound 
Sound presents the ability to elicit emotions from the viewer. Far from being subjective, the music is often used to compliment the scene, unless like Eisenstein who uses counterpoint. Music is subliminal when it works well. Interestingly Hans Zimmer is the hand here and he revives those famous chords heard in Inception, at the time this character starts to speak about her loss.

If you listen attentively you'll also hear references from There will be blood (2007).


4. Gaze
The character gaze is another trope from art movies that you find in 12 Years a Slave. Often described as breaking the forth wall, Solomon's long gaze into the camera draws attention to the artefact of filmmaking. It's no longer this subconscious act of realism.  Here's the a shot of the 'gaze' from a film called Summer with Monika, which shocked the film world when it was shown. It's Bergman again!




5. The artist's work
Artists tend to have an ambivalent relationship with their audience. I love this analogy by Bergman, but I believe he misses out an important component.


The artist can only create the work, they want, but unless they live a hermit's life they are undoubtedly affected  by the critique of others - the audience. 

They need the audience to thrive - to earn a living, but the more comfortable they become with their personal style (which by the way, has partly been shaped by the audience) the more they become individualists in starting to shun what their old audiences wants, because the artists wants to move on. 

Similarly what new audiences yearn for can also be shunned because the audience don't understand the artist's heritage. 

This is most evident in music concerts, where sometimes the artists refuses to play the one classic that has defined her work with the audience, because it no longer defines her, as she has moved on.

Conclusion
All filmmaking is a negotiation between several parameters. As I mentioned before it's a dynamic relationship between different techniques and styles. 

The easiest step is to learn how to shoot. More difficult is understanding different styles, some of which are 100 years old that may be deemed redundant.

Factual story e.g. news making's achilles is it invented a limited form for the screen, which a televisual literate generation are finding less than challenging today. 

McQueen up ends Hollywood's form by reviving art filmmaking with his own developed style, pointing to an understanding of the future. That the rules that defined filmmaking are less stable and that film is no longer framed by defined rules.


End+

David Dunkley Gyimah's PhD research involved exploring the interstices of cinema, documentary and news and what makes compelling video. It is a historical and analytical framework covering the field from its inception to the present. David, an award winning videojournalist states that to understand the future of film and video is to quote award winning doc maker Dimitri Doganis, one of David's ex colleagues, to disregard the boundaries of docs, news and cinema. Play video below.

Just what does it take to make compelling stories - myth busting.

It wasn't that long ago when lean forward meant watching television. 

Television tried to ape cinema to keep viewers locked to the screen. Techniques included that old cinema trick; the popcorn stay-in on sports nights,  today its pringles. 

Its programming schedules were also devised to keep viewers on one channel with techniques such as 'tent poling'.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaThe term tent-pole or tentpole refers to a broadcast programming or motion picture expected to hold up (as is the function of a tent pole) and balance out the financial performance of a movie studio or television network. It also refers to movies that are expected to support the sale of ancillary tie-in merchandise.

Individual storytelling in docs and factuals also followed a pattern. A style developed called the television documentary. It was an elongated news features, with all the earnestness to boot.

The reporter's voice carried the narrative and the visuals adequately knitted the story together. In the more visually aesthetic school of the 60s, Cinema Verite schooled a generation to up the ante.

The hypocrisy of the Cinema Verite approach, albeit unintended, still meant off camera asking your subject what they were doing today and whether it was filmable. So much for not interfering.

And herein ladies and gentlemen lies the first problem for creating compelling video.

Compelling video comes from generally well define variables, each of which can be delineated into a thesis, but broadly you can shape compelling video by its:

• the content ( if you take pictures of cats, you get cats)
• the style of genre - meaning TV docs differs from Cinema Verite
• the style of the filmmaker.
• the period of the style and the audiences reception. That means docs in the 1980s are different to docs and audience of 2000.

Of all of these, personal style and picking the right content is something you can develop. I'll come back to these, The really tricky one for the professionals is how different periods require differing approaches.

'It's the audience, stoopid' to paraphrase Clinton. And the logic goes like this. The audience you once knew in the 1990s is not the same as the audience today. Meaning the personal style you used to win awards, is markedly different to the style appreciated by audiences today. 

Just listen to this rare critique of a BBC executive speaking about how his colleagues are challenged by twitter and criticism. 





 YouTube and its bespoke audience - the new lean forwards make demands on programme styles that are fundamentally different ten years ago.

The tropes, cues and styles that made traditional news and doc making compelling has changed because the audience needs have changed.

The Cinema Verite or award winning classic doc may bag you an audience, but as mass viewing goes, the audience have cottoned on to something else.

It's a world of YouTube and Netflix, where once sacrosanct rules of movie making existed, and still do for television, for online with its massively growing audience, the rules are are absurd, defunct, old hat.

That doesn't mean you can't still watch Nanook of the North and think it's a cracking film, but that the mass audience yearn for something that indulges in contemporary practices.

The question is what are those? As a filmmaker who specialises in forms as well as a researcher I'm continuously testing audiences to find out what these parameters are.

Audience define the culture and sociology of viewing habits. It's the reason, Hollywood continues to remake classics, because of what audiences are looking for.  What worked ten years ago may not necessarily work now.

In my six years PhD research, this is where it gets interesting and in the next few posts I'll illustrate more details about the audienece and making compelling videos.