Craig Hight

Making-of Documentaries on DVD: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Special Editions

“M aking-of” documentaries, those films (and television programs) that purport to document the production of another text, have a long history dating from the beginnings of cinema itself (Arthur 39). They are an increasingly standard feature of feature film production, and there is no doubt that this documentary subgenre has developed the potential to offer distinctive and unique insights into the nature of contemporary filmmaking. This article discusses the “making-of” documentary (MOD) subgenre in the context of its increasing appearance on DVD cinematic releases. This discussion is intended to add to the growing body of literature focused on the reshaping of audiovisual media (in this case, the documentary genre) by computer-based media. The MOD has enjoyed a new life on DVD, becoming a standard feature particularly of the range of supplementary materials included within so-called special edition discs. As a medium, DVD (digital video disc, or digital versatile disc) has been marked by a rapid rise from its origins as an alternative to the Laserdisc format. It is now established within the entertainment mainstream, increasingly marginalizing VHS video both in domestic rentals and as the standard for home video libraries. The medium dates essentially from December 1995, with the agreement between competing manufacturers of a format, but its mainstream dominance really began with the release of the million-selling Titanic in August 1999 and The Matrix in the following month. Each of these discs achieved sales that convinced studios as well as consumers of the future of the technology. The rapid adoption of DVD technology by consumers is closely associated with efforts by the home electronics industry to develop the market for home theater systems. Writing in 1998 in reference to domestic video, Klinger noted, The attempts of home theater advocates to create a new film culture in the domestic sphere rest partially on selling their customers the distinctiveness of their machines and the experiences they can bring while touting the owner-operator’s ability to master this universe of superior technology and sensation. This discourse accompanies the penetration of corporate enterprise and consumer culture into the home as it is refashioned into an entertainment zone. The public image of home theater that enters the domestic space is unambiguous in distinguishing it as a commodity that confers privilege, even nobility, upon its users. By characterizing home theater in relation to heightened sensory experience, media industries and consumer magazines attempt to create an aristocracy of culture in the much-maligned domestic zone with its “antiquated” television set and passive viewers. (11)

Debating Reality-TV

France has recently seen the arrival of locally produced reality-TV programming in the form of a series called Loft Story, which borrows heavily from the formula used by the various national incarnations of Big Brother. In this French variation of the reality gameshow, eleven (inevitably young and attractive) people volunteered for 70 days to share a sealed loft which is under constant surveillance by a large number of cameras. The objective of these volunteers was to successfully pair off with other contestants, in the hope of surviving weekly elimination votes to become one half of the couple who ultimately win a dream house. Full Internet coverage of events in the loft was complemented by nightly summaries on one of the private television networks. Local reactions to this new series followed a familiar pattern; huge ratings in the wake of publicity over a number of erotic incidents between a number of the contestants, and a steady stream of protest from those who were outraged at the programme’s premise and warned of serious implications for the quality of French television and culture. Apart from the vocal complaints of critics and commentators, and token warnings over the programme’s content from France’s broadcasting authority (CSA), the loft-studio itself attracted direct attacks from bands of protesters who attempted to storm through lines of riot police with the stated aim of ‘liberating the hostages’ (contestants) and saving French viewers from the indignity of viewing the tasteless spectacle. There are obvious differences between this French reaction to this latest addition to the reality-TV stable and those exhibited throughout other nations—the most obvious being a wider context of debate over whether or not France will be able to preserve some sense of cultural identity in the face of a globalized cultural ‘invasion’ that is typically represented by French intellectuals as a form of American cultural imperialism (and the

The field of digital documentary: a challenge to documentary theorists

Documentary has always responded, in an often dynamic fashion, to the possibilities afforded by new technologies. The adoption of portable camera and sound equipment, for example, gave documentary film-makers the means to experiment with innovative approaches to capturing the socialhistorical world, helped to reinvigorate interest in the genre amongst a new generation of practitioners and reintroduced its potential to audiences. The relationship between documentary and digital technologies, however, offers the potential for a far more extensive and permanent transformation of fundamental aspects of documentary culture. The possible changes are many and varied. They involve a transformation of the very materiality of texts themselves, as their constituent elements are transposed into computer files able to be easily accessed, distributed, combined and manipulated for a variety of ends. Those who we might refer to as following “conventional” documentary forms are increasingly experimenting with digital-based means of capturing footage and a new palette of post-production techniques, resulting in the stretching of familiar documentary modes of representation into new directions. The production base of documentary culture itself is broadening as digital platforms foster far more direct, if not yet fully democratic, forms of participation, especially from the ranks of groups we might have previously consigned to the relatively ‘passive’ role of audience members. Both professional and amateur film-makers are also exploiting the varieties of forms of interactive, crossplatform engagement through DVD and the World Wide Web, as well as using these media as new avenues for distribution of more conventional documentary texts. All of these developments can, somewhat clumsily at this stage, be grouped under the label of ‘digital documentary’. Collectively, they offer the potential to change the nature of documentary practices, aesthetics, forms of political engagement and the wider relationship of documentary culture as a whole to the social-historical world. Such a shift poses a considerable challenge to documentary theory, which has emerged in discussion around a canon of cinematic and, to a lesser extent, television texts produced from a relatively well-understood collection of audio-visual technologies. If we return to Bill Nichols’s well-known three-part definition of documentary (Nichols 1991) – involving a community of practitioners within a particular institutional context, familiar modes of documentary representation and a set of assumptions and expectations of audiences – it is possible to argue that the digital transformation of each part of this definition suggests a radical shift in the basis of documentary culture.

Primetime digital documentary animation: the photographic and graphic within play

Abstract The increased use of digital-based animation techniques within primetime television documentary series needs to be viewed in the context of a number of challenges to the documentary genre emerging from a more competitive television broadcasting environment. Since the 1990s television producers looking for a more cinematic and popular aesthetic have integrated computer-media imaging (CMI) and computer-generated imaging (CGI) into documentary practice, layered into a text either in-frame or in-sequence. Patterns in the ways these animation techniques have been used can be grouped into three key modes: ‘symbolic expositional’, ‘graphic vérité’ and ‘invasive surveillance’. The development of these modes has expanded the means of (television) documentary representation, and been closely associated with the emergence of more playful and layered mediations of social and historical knowledge.

The Hobbit hyperreality paradox Polarization among audiences for a 3D high frame rate film

The 3D high frame rate version of Peter Jackson’s first Hobbit film was touted as offering one of the most realistic and engaging movie-going experiences to date, its innovative projection technologies promising to greatly enhance viewers’ sense of immersion in the fantastical world of Middle-earth. However, our empirical research suggests the specific combination of technologies in The Hobbit had paradoxical perceptual and experiential effects. Whereas the groundbreaking hyperrealistic aesthetic enhanced both spectacular and narrative immersion for many viewers, a significant number experienced this same visual aesthetic as unconvincing and distracting and as undermining suspension of disbelief. In this article, we identify key factors contributing to polarization among Hobbit viewers on aesthetic grounds and offer empirical insights into how emerging cinematic technologies may be reshaping film spectatorship.

Automation within digital videography: from the Ken Burns Effect to ‘meaning-making’ engines

A key feature of entry-level software tools is the emergence of various forms of automation to allow quick and easy generation of short video material. Higher level forms of automation are prevalent particularly at the prosumer or entry-level end of software culture, and illustrate how software culture serves more broadly as a realm for the evolution of hybrid assemblages of human and nonhuman. This paper addresses a number of patterns of automated practices within software-based videography, including the Ken Burns Effect and the emergence of mechanisms we can identify as ‘meaning-making engines’. These enable the harvesting and curating of networked material into a variety of cultural forms, encouraging both individual and collaborative practices that engage with all manner of data structures (including video). This part of the digital ecology is still in its early stages but nonetheless features experimentation with and expansion of ‘meaning-making’ practices that have implications for the nature and ‘evolution’ of user-generated culture (and for emerging documentary practices).

An unexpected controversy in Middle- earth: audience encounters with the 'dark side' of transnational film production

This paper addresses local and global audience understandings of a sequence of events that exposed the play of politics and power underpinning the transnational production of a globalised entertainment product – Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy (2012–14). More often obscured by processes of commodity sign production, circulation, and desire, the clash and confluence of global and national ambitions became subject to often heated public discussion and debate during the New Zealand Hobbit labour dispute and in its aftermath. In this paper, we draw on findings from a large-scale online Q methodology survey of pre-viewers for the first Hobbit film to document how differently located audiences made sense of these complex events, their local ramifications, and potentially global implications. We argue that the interests of global capital were able to prevail materially and discursively through the construction and naturalisation of a concordance of interests between Warner Bros. and the neo-liberal New Zealand government. Furthermore, while geographical, political and professional proximity to the context of production provided some respondents with access to alternative discursive understandings, competing forces of fetishistic desire and obfuscation undercut the willingness of most others to seriously contemplate any criticism of the social and material conditions of The Hobbit’s production, lest it ‘spoil’ a longed for consumption and cultural experience.

Robert Winston's Superhuman: Spectacle, Surveillance and Patient Narrative

Health psychologists are being challenged by researchers to consider interdisciplinary approaches to health research, particularly around media representations. This article argues that the praxis and research of health psychology might benefit from strategic and interdisciplinary readings of media texts. It argues that insights from current documentary theory are important because they show us how documentary texts are structured and how medical documentary deploys techniques from medicine itself in order to effect certain persuasive discursive shifts in our wider culture. The article takes the BBC documentary series Superhumanas its example and explores this text as it involves media spectacle, medical surveillance of the body and of patients and the positioning of patient narratives of personal experiences with medical intervention.

Pleasure, disaffection, ‘conversion’ or rejection? The (limited) role of prefiguration in shaping audience engagement and response

This article examines the extent to which prefigurative ‘horizons of expectations’ shaped audience engagements with Peter Jackson’s 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (AUJ). Whereas previous research often focuses on examining prefigurative materials, discussions and debates themselves, this article draws on audience surveys conducted before and after the film’s release to illustrate the impact of prior hopes and expectations on post-viewing responses. While Hobbit pre-viewers were often deeply familiar with various prefigurative materials and intertextual resources, AUJ nonetheless retained the capacity to delight, confound, impress and distress viewers in ways that superseded pre-existing structures of meaning. Thus, while our findings illustrate that processes of reception potentially begin prior to and continue beyond initial moments of viewing, they also affirm the need to engage – theoretically and empirically – with the complex specificity and fluidity of actual reception experiences.

Documentary as sense-making

The aim of this special issue is to contribute to debates over the nature of documentary as an expanding set of practices within online, mobile, networked media. Dovey has noted that ‘the digital documentary, in its online form, exists within a pattern of connectivity, interactivity and relationality’ (Dovey 2014, 14). Within a digital ecology characterised by rapidly expanding social practices of documentation, including streams of visual and audio-visual material designed to be shareable within the algorithmic processes of social networks, documentary takes on distinctive new characteristics and roles. Within this environment of expanding ephemera, documentary retains its significance as a discourse and series of practices which ‘make sense’ of digital materials which are aligned with reality, which carry the ‘ethical charge’ of the real. Documentary is refashioned as a number of specific assemblages within networked media; as a curatorial imperative, a rhetorical template for designing pathways through online databases of everyday documents, a discourse to be applied into the design of multimedia sites, and an embedded logic within new forms of software tools available to an expanded continuum of ‘practitioners’. The key focus of this special issue is how we can understand ‘documentary’ as sense-making practices within the digital ecology. What qualities of online media are implicit within this assemblage, what tools are being used, and what patterns are generated? What new forms are emerging which are aligned with documentary as a cultural discourse, and how do we need to rethink the idea of the documentary form? Do we need to reconsider the notion of the producer and of the audience? What roles are generated through these practices, from those collating and creating content to those engaging with the material as completed forms or coherent processes? Each of the articles included here examines the nature of ‘sense-making’ practices which can be associated with the label of ‘documentary’. Ramaswami Harindranath’s article ‘Online crowd-sourced documentary and the politics of veridicality and authority’ considers the truth claims made by crowd-funded documentary content, using 18 Days in Egypt as a key example. Andrew Murphie, in ‘Making sense: the transformation of documentary by digital and networked media’, employs Jean-Luc Nancy and François Zourabichvili to assess the ‘sense of sense’ operating through recent digital and/or networked documentary. Adrian Miles in ‘Materialism and interactive documentary: sketch notes’ undertakes a materialist analysis of the Korsakow interactive documentary software system to suggest the ways in which its programmatic and generative functions shape distinctive documentary forms. Kate Nash’s contribution addresses the comparative absence Studies in Documentary Film, 2014 Vol. 8, No. 3, 177–178, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2014.964950