Richard Lachman
“But it also may be possible to go even deeper for some visitors to a site. Some visitors might, you know, rather than a one hour show that they see, might spend three or four hours or might have visits over the course of three or four weeks with a particular story. That is a different way of telling that story. So I think there is still a vital role. There are just maybe many different vital roles that an author might have, and one of them might be, you know, a more traditional form of thinking of what that story is and another might be orchestrating. It might be conducting. It might be allowing and sitting back, putting the pieces together to allow something, to have something that is quite different than what the fixed version might be.“
Joel Ronez
“The best project is a project where you have an author point of view. A singular point of view of an author, who has a will to do something. So even on the participative projects: If you do not have an author, it is rubbish. So, you know, I do not believe that the web is a media of (..) I do not believe to the intelligence of the crowd. No, I strongly believe that you have an author and the author has a point of view. There is a creation process which is something very intimate, very personal. This is not something you can delegate, or you can just underestimate.”
Susanna Lotz
“I mean, if it is a big production there are many authors. And there shouldn’t be any problems. And of course, there will not be any problems of having a squeezed role or a minor role for authors in interactive documentaries. They are completely essential, and they are needed more than ever.”
Paul Levinson
“No, unless the author is very lame and has no talent. Because, sure, the traditional author likes having complete control over writing the documentary. But even in the interactive documentary, talented authors can figure out ways to express their voices, building on what viewers and people are contributing to the documentary.”
Sarah Wolozin
“I think the role of the author is definitely changing. I would not use the word threatening. I would use the word possibility. I think ultimately as a documentarian you are a storyteller, right? So, and you want to use new technologies, and you want to go where the people are. If the people are on the computer and they are creating their own videos, and they are interacting with their media, then it would make sense that the author would also figure out how to really maintain an authorial voice in some way. And what I mean an authorial voice (.) It can even be how you create roots and paths through your stories.”
Bjarke Myrthu
“I think authorship is still really key. And I think you have to sort of keep control of your story and decide which key points people have to go through and see and create the whole sort of cinematic experience. You have to stick to that. But there is (.) Unfortunately, at least for me, it is not really possible to really give a set definition of when you have enough control, or when you are not enough of an author. It depends on the project, and it is really like a case by case scenario. But it is something that I think most people that are authors realize, once they start working when they lose too much control. I think basically you have to have a narrative. I mean, if you break your project so much that there is no longer a narrative, it is no longer really a story either, and you are not an author anymore.”
Katie Edgerton
“I think the role of the author is as important, if not more so. I think it might be authorship in a different way than we traditionally think of it. I think designers are authors, for instance. And the design of an interactive documentary, the way the interface is laid out, is critical to understanding the narrative message. But I think there has to be a key narrative point and there has to be an authorial vision, for a lack of a better word, or else it is going to be a sea of information. I mean participatory projects are so exciting and there is so much potential there. But there has to be some kind of curator, or some kind of path through all of the information. And that is created by a person or multiple people all on the same page. But I think the author is incredibly important in this new world. And it is not just directors as we think of them. They are designers, they are developers. There is a lot more potential for different kinds of authorship.”
Jigar Mehta
“So, you know, I think there is a couple of interesting things about the director, right? It is the responsibility of the director to shape the story world, to be able to guide the participant through them participating in the story. Or is it about them creating a very tight narrative? And in that very tight narrative giving you a little room to have some interactivity? And I think both of those things are valid.”
Jean Baptiste Dumont
“So I think it is important that the author keeps an eye on everything. And now everybody is looking who has to do what and we still have to find a good structure to work. Producers do not really know what they have to do. The author neither does not know on which level he can work and I think it is important that one creative person keeps an eye on everything, because now there are more roles than before. And I think that an interactive project has to be seen as a whole and not as a sum of different other parts.”
Brenda Longfellow
“Sometimes it is more implicit than explicit in terms of how you negotiate through the web documentary. But there is usually a kind of controlling intelligence and imagination that works behind this. But I think collaborative documentaries -“the man with a movie camera global remake” or“18 days in Egypt”, where you have people of communities posting information – I think that is a wonderful model, a really interesting model. But they are still designed and there is still, I think, a role for people who are initiating these projects and theorising these projects. So it is changed, but I think there is still different ways to think about authorship. And documentary is very different than fiction. I mean it is not that you are controlling every aspect of what happens in front of the film. There is always spontaneity, there is always collaboration. You are always working with communities. People are giving you a lot of stuff and what happens in the real world is always much more surprising and unpredictable than what happens on a film set.”
Arnaud Dressen
“I think the role of the author is not written, because there is really a lot happening. If you look at creation for example: That is becoming a very crucial and important subject today. The role of the author is critical, because in a way a creator is also an author and he knows where are the good answers. So I think the role of the maker, of the author, is not threatened, is actually more important than ever.”
Authorship — Importance of author/Authorial vison/Point of view
18 Codings
Jesse Shapins
“I do not think that the author is at all threatened and I do not think the author is at all losing narrative voice. I think that what is changing is that authors need to have much more force, frankly, to have confidence in expressing narrative voice in interactive formats. I think the biggest mistake I often see in the field is that people that come from a traditional filmmaking background feel like their authorship perspective - their kind of intense rigour around editing, pacing - that that does not carry over and I think it is incredibly false.”
Judith Aston
“Authorship is very, very important. However, authorship can be distributed. So, you could have (.) I have no problem with an interactive documentary that does actually represent the viewpoints of one author. But if that was all we had, I would have a big problem with that. So I also have no problem with interactive documentary work that has distributed authorship, where you have multiple authors in a dialogue.”
William Uricchio
“I think right now what we can see is there are a lot of different models of authorship, a lot of different models of storytelling and some of them require a strong narrative voice, a strong backbone of story. But we also see things where that is not the case. Where scenarios were arranged, framing occurs, where actually the users can generate that narrative. So I think really this will manifest itself down the road in something like different genres of interactivity. A genre that leans a little more heavily towards traditional authorship. And again in terms of the films shown here at IDFA this year, I mean, Alma would be a great example. It is a very linear story and a compelling story told by someone with a limited interactive component. But it is really, really compelling. On the other side, we have these wide database-like environments. Environments for a user to really move around in. Those often are less compelling as stories at their own risk because I think users do need some constraint, some structure.”
Sandra Gaudenzi
“So I think both visions of authorship are still possible. You can still in interactive documentary have, you know, an author which is a narrator. But you now have another option that you did not have before, which is to have an author that becomes an architect and a facilitator and maybe not a narrator anymore. And this is something new.”
Vincent Morisset
“I am interested in proposing something, where I guide and I accompany the spectator if I am saying (.) And you just create that connection. So in my work, I am still interested in kind of keeping a certain control over it and just give this sense of freedom and certain interactivity. But I know that I am still controlling the pace and the story.”
Ferran Clavell
“I think that the author is not losing anything. They have the control of the product because they are creating it, but it is good to let the users some freedom to explore, to participate, to interact, to create even around this content. But the control is always on the author’s side.”
Florian Thalhofer
“Well, I think that the author is still very important. He is the key figure in making a documentary. He’s the person that goes out into this difficult, messy world and collects the bits and pieces that the author thinks make sense to discuss. But the author of the future is not the person who decides what the reality is. He does not create a full picture that he gives to the viewer and the viewer can just take it in. So the author of the past was much more, or the author of the current time, is much more a person that is like a priest that gives you his idea about what is right and what is wrong.”