Smaller lens, bigger picture : exploring Zulu cultural tourism employees' identity by using cellphilms as a medium for participatory filmmaking methods.

M.Soc.Sc. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2013.Media promoting cultural tourism is argued to present specific romantic cultural attributes. In the case of Zulu cultural villages, the image offered is of militarism and bare-breasted maidens. The Western gaze offers the template within which such spectacle is constructed. PheZulu Safari Park is one such venture in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands that offers tourists a "uniquely African experience". Cell phones are rapidly proving to be a viable and accessible medium through which individuals can represent themselves. This dissertation evaluates the use of camera-enabled cell phones by Zulu cultural village performers. The subject-generated representation is analysed in order to assess the performers‘ view of the typical Zulu representation in the media, using a participatory video and participatory communication for development framework. A qualitative methodology was used to conduct focus groups, with field notes and unstructured interviews adding depth to the data. Thematic analysis was applied to the collected data, which included the cellphilms produced by the cultural performers. It was found that video enabled cell phones are indeed a viable technology to use in place of traditional digital video cameras in a participatory video project. The cellphilms that the participants produced negated the typical western media disseminated representation of Zulu culture, as is typified in the participants‘ performance at PheZulu Cultural Village. Although the cellphilms were not specifically targeted at promoting their cultural performance at PheZulu, significantly, it was not dismissing their performance‘s validity either. Instead, the participants used the cellphilms to express other, more personal, aspects of their culture.Participant's cellphilms 1-14 available on disc only

Webfilm theory

Since its inception in 1989, the World Wide Web has grown as a medium for publishing first text, then images, audio, and finally, moving images including short films. While most new media forms, in particular, hypertext, have received scholarly attention, research into moving image on the Internet had been limited. The thesis therefore set out to investigate webfilms, a form of short film on the WWW and the Internet, over a period of 9 years (1997-2005). The thesis was theoretically embedded in questions regarding new media as new field of research, since the increasing visibility of new media had resulted in the emergence of the discipline of 'new media studies'. This context raised issues regarding the configuration of new media studies within the existing academic disciplines of media and cultural studies, which were explored in depth in the literature review. The case studies of the thesis explored and analysed webfilms from a vantage point of actor-network theory, since this was arguably the most appropriate methodology to a research object considerably influenced by technological factors. The focus was on the conditions of webfilm production, distribution, and exhibition, and the evolution of webfilm discourse and culture. The aim was to seek answers to the question 'How didwebfilm arise as (new) form of film?' In the process of research, a number of issues were raised including the changing definition and changing forms of webfilms, the convergence of media, and the complex interdependency of humans and their computers. The research re-evaluates the relationship between human and non-human factors in media production and presents a fresh approach by focusing on the network as unit of analysis. The thesis as a whole not only provides new information on the evolution of webfilm as a form of film, but also illustrates how the network interaction of humans and nonhumans lies at the heart of contemporary new media and convergence culture.sub_mcpaunpub79_ethesesunpu

Netvideo nonvideo newvideo: designing a multilinear nonnarrative form for interactive documentary

This research explores interactive documentary and focuses on identifying how the affordances of video, computers and the network can be used to create a web of relations between shots within an interactive documentary that utilises the multilinear structure of the Internet. The aim of this investigation is to help practitioners who do not understand these affordances to learn what they are, and what is important when making an interactive documentary online. As an outcome of my inquiry I propose that documentary practice is transformed in this multilinear environment, resulting in a reconceptualisation of the term ‘documentary maker’. A practitioner who produces on the Internet is more accurately named a ‘documentary designer’, and I support this new role by outlining the affordances of ‘granularity’, ‘remix’, ‘indexing’ and ‘spatial montage’, and how they can be used to produce an interactive documentary online

Metalinear cinematic narrative : theory, process, and tool

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-218).Media entertainment technology is evolving rapidly. From radio to broadcast television to cable television, from motion picture film to the promise of digital video disks, as the media evolves, so do the stories told over these media. We already share many more stories and more types of stories from many more sources than we did a decade ago. This is due in part to the development of computer technology, the globalization of computer networks, and the emerging new medium which is an amalgam of television and the internet. The storyteller will need to invent new creative processes and work with new tools which support this new medium, this new narrative form. This thesis proposes the name Metalinear Narrative for the new narrative form. The metalinear narrative is a collection of small related story pieces designed to be arranged in many different ways, to tell many different linear stories from different points of view, with the aid of a story engine. Agent Stories is the software tool developed as part of this research for designing and presenting metalinear cinematic narratives. Agent Stories is comprised of a set of environments for authoring pieces of stories, authoring the relationships between the many story pieces, and for designing an abstract narrative structure for sequencing those pieces. Agent Stories also provides a set of software agents called story agents, which act as the drivers of the story engine. My thesis is that a writing tool which offers the author knowledgeable feedback about narrative construction and context during the creative process is essential to the task of creating metalinear narratives of significant dimension.by Kevin Michael Brooks.Ph.D