collaboration

In 1926, Dziga Vertov filmed 'Man with a movie Camera'; a collection of video footage that recorded the ordinary urban life of soviet cities. The shots were meant to document the activity of a full day, and were collectively unrelated so that the overall film held no storyline. Instead, the short clips formed a database of media that were edited into a silent documentary. The film was entirely experimental and remains famous for the range of cinematic techniques used to capture the shots; some of which were invented in the making of the film. These include: double exposure, freeze frame, fast motion, slow motion, close ups, Dutch angle and split screen etc.

The global remake of Vertov's documentary was initiated by Perry Bard and premiered in 2008. It is an ongoing video project which invites the public to participate in the re-filming of the original 'Man with a movie camera'. Each participant can choose a scene to interpret and are asked to create their own version of the selected footage. Their updated versions are uploaded to the Global remake database, located at ___________________ Everyday a fresh version of the entire film is produced on the website using content retrieved from the database.

Individuals who contribute to the project are acknowledged with their name added to the website. However, all material that is uploaded to the database is placed under the public domain. This means that participants cannot claim authorship over their contributions.

Deptford TV is a collaborative project that documents urban change in the Deptford area, over the course of its regeneration. The project is licensed under the creative commons and GNU public license. It invites members of the public to contribute feedback on the changes to the area and film-makers are encouraged to provide footage of the area. Any contributions to the project, are stored in the Deptford.tv database. This allows people access to the work, which is available to re-edit and re-distribute. The project began in 2005 and has allowed the audience to become producers. It is referred to as a form of 'shared media practice' on the website:

The 'Life in a day' and 'Britain in a Day' films are examples of a "Participant Observer" model of collaborative film-making. For this model, there is a concern for personal experience and so participants are usually free to choose what they shoot. This often leads to a huge variety of stories being told, and the 'Participant Observer' model strives to capture the richness of this variety. As documentaries, they are grounded in experience since they are shot at the grassroots. The model relies on the multiplicity of contributions to create the final outcome.

Projects that are open and invite multiple participants to contribute fragments to a whole. The fragments on their own may not carry much worth but as a whole with other contributions they have creative value and energy that convey the project.

The HIGHRISE project focuses on the standard of living in highrise building blocks and explores the diversity of individual stories contained within them.

In the collaborative film-making workshop, we were instructed to collect short footage of the university, with a focus on architecture. We shared the video clips within small groups, and began a selection process to find the most interesting clips provided within the group.

Using final cut Pro, we arranged the selected footage on a timeline and used experimental techniques on each frame. Our completed version was offered to other groups within the class, who were invited to edit and re-distribute what we had worked on.