Social Justice Documentary: Designing for Impact

Explores current methodologies for assessing social issue documentary films by combining strategic design and evaluation of multiplatform outreach and impact, including documentaries' role in network- and field-building. Includes six case studies

The Urban-rural Dichotomy in the Indonesian Documentaries Nona Nyonya? and Untuk Apa?

The media play a pivotal role in the democratization process in Indonesia and this is among others apparent in the surge of films, both fiction and documentaries that have been produced after the end Suharto\u27s decades of control over the media. It is important to note, however, that compared with fiction films, the documentary genre remains rather unpopular in Indonesia. Indonesian documentary films struggle to depict stories of the subaltern and those living in the “periphery” in order for them to be seen and heard by the greater masses and by those in power – the ones in the “centre” or Jakarta. This paper discusses the connection between urban and rural voices and its impact in the documentary films Nona nyonya? (Miss mrs?, 2008) and Untuk apa? (What\u27s the point?, 2008) produced by Kalyana Shira Films, an organization well-known for its work on gender issues using film as medium. Departing from the notion that the film industry itself is still largely Jakarta-centred, this article focuses on the way urban settings and voices are used to create rhetoric, and the impact of the domination of these urban voices over the rural ones

Hamilton Human Rights Film Festival

This is the 1st Human Rights Film Festival in New Zealand since 2008, the Hamilton Human Rights Film Festival, was launched the weekend before WINTEC's School of Media Arts annual Arts Festival SPARK 2014. The films reflect an international need to understand Human Rights issues of many kinds that create difficulties for individuals and people within many different societies. The Festival included two documentary films from New Zealand "Tatarakihi: Children of Praihaka, 2011" and "The Pa Boys, 2014", a film from Russia "A Bitter Taste of Freedom, 2012", Palestine "Al Bier, The Well, 2013, Guatemala "El Oro o la Vida, 2011", Germany, "ErdeHolleHimmel, 2014" and Aboriginal Australia "Murundak: Songs of Freedom, 2011". Many of these films were shown in Hamilton and New Zealand for the first time

[Review of] Elizabeth Weatherford, ed. with Emelia Seubert, Native Americans on Film and Video

This is an extraordinarily impressive and thorough compilation of primarily documentary films made by and about Native Americans. The Museum of the American Indian, the Heye Foundation and Elizabeth Weatherford and Emelia Seubert are to be commended for their effort and industry. Native Americans on Film and Video grew out of a major exhibition, The Ancestors: Native Artisans of the Americas, where more than one hundred and twenty-five films and video tapes were shown by the museum

Summarization of Films and Documentaries Based on Subtitles and Scripts

We assess the performance of generic text summarization algorithms applied to films and documentaries, using the well-known behavior of summarization of news articles as reference. We use three datasets: (i) news articles, (ii) film scripts and subtitles, and (iii) documentary subtitles. Standard ROUGE metrics are used for comparing generated summaries against news abstracts, plot summaries, and synopses. We show that the best performing algorithms are LSA, for news articles and documentaries, and LexRank and Support Sets, for films. Despite the different nature of films and documentaries, their relative behavior is in accordance with that obtained for news articles.Comment: 7 pages, 9 tables, 4 figures, submitted to Pattern Recognition Letters (Elsevier

Listen to Nice

In describing Humphrey Jennings’ wartime documentary propaganda film, 'Listen to Britain' (1942), a film with an overtly poetic sensibility and dominantly musical soundtrack, John Corner asserts that ‘through listening to Britain, we are enabled to properly look at it'. This idea of sound leading our attention to the images has underpinned much of the collaborative work between composer and sound designer, Geoffrey Cox, and documentary filmmaker, Keith Marley. It is in this context that the article will analyse an extract of A Film About Nice (Marley and Cox 2010), a contemporary re-imagining of Jean Vigo’s silent documentary, 'A propos de Nice' (1930). Reference will be made throughout to the historical context, and the filmic and theoretical influences that have informed the way music and creative sound design have been used to place emphasis on hearing a place, as much as seeing it

Uskottavaa dokumenttielokuvaa rakentamassa : Tarkastelun kohteena dokumentaarinen Shoot me! -elokuva

Opinnäytetyöni kirjallisessa osassa pyrin selvittämään vaikuttamisen keinoja, joita tekijä käyttää hyödyksi dokumenttielokuvan teon eri vaiheissa. Tämä on samalla kirjallisen työni näkökulma. Tutkimuskohteena käytin ohjaamaani Shoot me! -dokumenttielokuvaa, jonka myös kuvasin ja leikkasin. Dokumenttielokuva kertoo luovuudesta ja sen uhista. Dokumentin päähenkilönä toimii valokuvaaja ja graafinen suunnittelija Harri Tarvainen. Shoot me! -dokumentti valmistui keväällä 2010. Lähdekirjallisuutena käytin dokumenttielokuvien tekemisestä ja moodeista kertovaa kirjallisuutta, jota rinnastin oman dokumenttini pohdintaan ja tutkimiseen. Tutkin dokumenttielokuvan tekemisen eri vaiheita ja pohdin, mitä eri vaikuttamisen keinoja tekijällä on käytössään. Tutkimuksessa selvisi, että vaikuttamisen kannalta on tärkeä tehdä hyvä ennakkosuunnittelu, onnistua kuvauksissa ja luottaa omaan intuitioon jälkituotantovaiheessa.My bachelor’s thesis consists of two parts. The work part is a documentary film called Shoot me!. In my analytical part I aim to investigate different ways of influencing when making a documentary movie from the director’s point of view. My study focuses on a documentary film called Shoot me! which I directed, filmed and edited. This documentary is about creativity, but also and the threats of creativity. The main character in the documentary is a photographer and graphical designer Harri Tar-vainen. The documentary film Shoot me! was completed in the spring of 2010. The literature I used for my work is about making documentary films and modes, which I assimilated with the information into my documentary. I studied different stages of making documentary films as well as discussed the directors’ ways of influencing in the production of documentary films. In my study I found that when making documentary films that aim to influence it is im-portant to make a good plan, succeed in the filming stage and trust your own intuition in the post-production stage

3D UK? 3D History and the Absent British Pioneers

The recent television ‘rediscovery’ of a small cohort of 1950s British 3D films (and the producers who made them) has offered a new route into considering how the historical stories told about 3D film have focused almost exclusively on the American experience, eliding other national contexts. This article challenges both the partiality of existing academic histories of 3D, and the specific popular media narratives that have been constructed around the British 3D pioneers. Offering a rebuttal of those narratives and an expansion of them based around primary archival research, the article considers how the British 3D company Stereo Techniques created a different business and production model based around non-fiction short 3D films that stand in contrast to the accepted view of 3D as an American feature film novelty. Through an exploration of the depiction (and absence) of these 3D pioneers from existing media histories, the article argues for a revision to both 3D studies and British cinema history