I think I am turning academic, I really think so...

In this 15 minute reflective film I consider how I might develop the documentary film form into a method of “writing” with video to articulate a more complex understanding of the world. My professional career and more recent academic practice has led me to consider two strands in my practice as a film-maker: (1) the meaning of evidence in the use of documentary video; (2) the value of documentary video as a creative academic research tool. Currently I am examining these aspects by considering the application of ambiguity, stilling, and silence in my practice-based doctoral research project: a worked-through example of an original historical investigation which began as a broadcast project but has developed into an exploration of the creative use of documentary video across a range of platforms. I will suggest that by moving away from the limited formulaic, traditional constructions of broadcast documentary practice, film-makers can adopt the more complex notions of truth familiar to artists and academics operating within a post-modern framework marked by competing narratives. The current challenge I face is to let go of my own broadcast training and conventions and view the material in new ways which are informed by the rigour of scholarship

Integrating Professional Media Practice Into Undergraduate and Postgraduate media courses

This paper presents comparative research recently undertaken across universities and HE institutions in England investigating the extent and effectiveness of involving students in corporate video projects commissioned by ‘real-life’ clients. Increasingly media production departments in HE are requested by in-house departments, external public services authorities, charities and corporate organisations to undertake media productions on their behalf. As the culture of commercial enterprise develops in the sector there is pressure to undertake work of this nature, making additional demands on limited resources. However it can also be seen as an opportunity for staff and students to develop new skills and knowledge. We were interested to uncover the level of this activity, understand some of the tensions that can arise and also propose ideas for improving the management of projects which cross the boundary of enterprise and learning

The Scholarly Studio: Developing a new aesthetic of the multi-camera television studio as an academic research tool

This paper examines the potential to develop live multi-camera screen production methods as a scholarly tool. Drawing on experimental work in broadcasting in the 1970s and early 1980s, exemplified by The Journal of Bridget Hitler (BBC1981 – dir Philip Saville), and recent developments in multi-camera live-streaming online and to cinemas (http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk), the paper asks if we might develop a novel screen production method as a tool to research, review and disseminate knowledge across a range of academic disciplines. Whilst single-camera production methods have long been used for experimentation by filmmakers and scholars, there has not been an equivalent exploration in form using multi-camera or ‘live’ television studio facilities, which have tended to be regarded as the site of more populist fare. Whilst this may be due to the limitations of access and gate-keeping by broadcasters, in the past two decades, television studios have been built as teaching facilities in a number of universities in response to staff and student interest in industry-focused media production. However, we have not seen the significant use of such facilities for research and experimentation. We need to return to the experimentation of directors such as Philip Saville in the public service protected environment of the 1970s to find an openness to non-naturalistic studio production and a hybrid form which might lend itself to academic inquiry. This paper surveys the history of experimentation in multi-camera and live television studio techniques and forms, and questions why there has been so little attention paid to exploring the creative possibilities of the medium in recent years. It asks whether the shift to online and mobile platforms, combined with the technology of live-streaming and the trend towards “live” and “event” experiences, offers the opportunity for new audiences and new understandings in the academy beyond the constraints of mainstream broadcast media, and posits an agenda for the construction and debate of a new aesthetic of the television studio, led within Higher Education, which might inform the way we apply screen production in research-led learning environments

Crossing Platforms

A "video paper" (also presented March 10 2008 Bournemouth University). This paper is a video presentation of my practice as research as I continue to explore a new reflective language of documentary which can serve as an academic form of expression. In this video paper I am using the newly available digital tools and platforms to reflect on a television series I produced 20 years ago for BBC2. The television series looked at the art and design associated with London Transport and other travel companies in the early 20th century. Now I have re-discovered the production files and tapes and I re-work the ideas and images of that series to produce a very different digital version of the analogue broadcast "content". Extending and refining an autoethnographic approach which I have been developing in previous "academic" videos, I consider why and how I made the television series. Taking the form of a journey through the poster art, station design and the street furniture which made London itself a form of content for reversioning on posters and teatowels, I critique the concept of un-mediated "content", considering the cultural and commercial context of city design in the 1930s in conjunction with the social, economic and cultural forms of digital media today

A Midsummer Night's Video Dream - a video paper

Video Paper A Midsummer Night’s Video Dream Federico Fellini said “Film is a dream for the waking mind”. Steven Spielberg has recently expressed interest in experiments into plug into the nightly cinema in our skulls. In this video paper I use my performative practice as an academic film-maker to explore and document connections between our sleeping and our waking minds and consider how this could be developed academic video practitioner. What might be the constraints which would influence “academic” or “professional” directions in developing this idea? What might be the different directions for each trajectory? And how does this illuminate the different discourses of consciousness in my own life as an academic and a programme-maker? There is a well-rehearsed and significant body of theoretical work relating dreams to art, literature, and film but very little practice exploring this territory. Recently in popular culture film makers have begun to explore lucid dreaming (Waking Life, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Good Night) and comparisons have been drawn with interactivity in Second Life. Using a performative methodology I reflect on how the practice of personal image making could contribute to understanding and analysing the process of creativity in the production of the moving image. I also ask how I might roll out the research to develop it as a nation-wide interactive video practice experiment which could be disseminated through television and the web as a popular culture “dream night” experience for a wider audience

Film as Research/Research as Film

Colleagues Trevor Hearing and Kip Jones meet up for a discussion about using film as a performative research tool and/or a research dissemination medium

'Edith' - an experiment in developing a new aesthetic of the television studio

Whilst much of the focus within practice-as-research has been on location filming with a single camera in documentary and drama genres, I am interested in how the creative ‘blank page’ space of a studio environment and the immediacy of multi-camera and/or live events might contribute to the complexity, contestation and debate that is the hallmark of academic endeavour. I draw on the work of a previous generation of experimental television producers, writers and directors from the 1960s and 1970s who embraced the non-naturalistic studio play. I use this neglected form to articulate my thinking as a practitioner and academic about how we can communicate complex ideas, narratives and feelings using television studio techniques in an academic context.Can we use television studio drama to model ideas? 'Edith' is an experiment as part of this inquiry. In this case, my practice as research experiment takes a historical mystery, the 1941 flight of Rudolph Hess and thoughts about historiography as a case study to test my ideas about the practice of non-naturalistic studio drama and consider how it might be developed in the future as a useful form of inquiry and expression

The Documentary imagination: an investigation into the performative application of documentary film in scholarship.

The aim of the research has been to discover new ways in which documentary film might be developed as a performative academic research tool. In reviewing the literature I have acknowledged the well-established use of observational documentary film making in ethnography and visual anthropology underpinned by a positivist epistemology, but I suggest there are forms of reportage in literary and dramatic traditions as well as film that are more relevant to the possibility of an auto-ethnographic approach which applies documentary film in an evocative context. I have examined the newly emerging field of Performative Social Science and the "new subjectivity" evident in documentary film to investigate emerging opportunities to research and disseminate scholarly knowledge employing reflective documentary film methods in place of, or alongside, text. This inquiry has prompted me to consider the history of the creation and transmission of scholarship. The research methodology I have employed has been auto-ethnographic reflective film practice. Specifically, I have drawn on images from my previous documentary films and woven them together into a research film to explore the possibility of provocative, evocative filmmaking as a “creative academic research tool”, whilst noting the value of a relevant skill-set to deliver a quality threshold in applying such a method. In this particular instance of filmic scholarship, I have questioned the notion of the ‘B’ roll to illustrate and interrogate the performative application of auto-ethnographic film production. I became interested in the idea of the performative artefact as an expression of investigation when I spent a year documenting the construction of Sir Antony Gormley’s landmark sculptures Another Place and The Angel of the North. Gormley’s statement in the film that sculpture might be thought of as “a witness to life”, has informed my own practice as a filmmaker and informs the film that has become the data for this thesis. The following year when I made a film about a fishing community, Village By The Sea, I began to develop the idea that film or video artefacts might also be viewed like sculpture, as “an inert, benign object that stands somewhat outside time, somewhat outside the span of human life, but that acts as a witness to it” (Gormley, 1998). I have incorporated what Gormley terms this “impulse” into my research by creating a hybrid ‘para-documentary’ using ‘B’ roll footage: an experiment in a performative method that I am reporting on here, and an experiment which obliges the filmmaker to engage with the ethical questions which arise when grappling with the imaginative and the documented. The outcome of the research is described as the discovery of the research experience that while I have been walking around in the world, that world has been walking about in me. Three implications are identified from this outcome. Firstly, that the concept of the Creative Academic Research Tool might be a useful systematic matrix with which to frame the specific traces of a practice-based research and from which to draw more generic outcomes. Secondly, counter-intuitively to the conventions of other media documentary forms that prioritize character and dialogue, the application of the wider angle of the ‘B’ roll filmic technique might offer a particularly powerful evocative tool in Performative Social Science. Thirdly, the documentary sensibility identified in this research, when placed performatively in the hands of the audience, might place the imagination at the heart of the scholarly documentary project

TV Riddles - a practice as research experiment in visual and oral ambiguity

The Anglo-Saxons made riddles about objects and thoughts such as 'sword', 'ice, or 'plough' , teasing the reader and ending with the object asking us to guess "who am I?" St. Aldhelm, the Saxon Bishop of Sherborne was one of the best known writers of riddles. These short films are a twenty-first century updating of the idea in which images are combined with words written by a leading poet, Professor Sean Street, containing clues to an object we are all familiar with. The films test audience engagement and perception of ambiguity in relation to the spoken word, the visual images and the sound design, to ascertain how we respond to clues. This has a useful application in understanding how we make sense of ambiguity through word, sound and image

Interzone 1

A short video response to Antony Gormley's sculpture "Another Place - Cuxhaven