Innovating the Documentary | Raney Aronson-Rath

Innovating the Documentary | Raney Aronson-Rath

PART 4 -Innovating the Documentary.

William_Vimeo-768x432In his talk at MIT’s OpenDocLab Profesor Urrichio made the argument that historically, documentarians have always been at the forefront of visual, audio and storytelling innovations. I asked about documentarians today — his response is that today gamers and sports are taking the lead but he’s seeing great progress with documentarians….and he’s expects to see even more into the future.

Here’s what director of OpenDocLab Sarah Wolozin calls Urrichio’s visual white paper: http://momentsofinnovation.mit.edu. This is one of the first things I read when considering applying for the fellowship…

And then there’s this: http://docubase.mit.edu. This was created by OpenDocLab and many people in the interactive doc community are starting to comment and weigh in on the different projects. In fact, that’s what OpenDocLab is all about — creating a space for refection and experimentation.

There are two ideas for FRONTLINE that we’re especially interested in — this first is Condition One.  You have to go and take a look to understand what this is. A couple of years ago we met with Danfung Denis, the founder, and he was convinced he and his generation would transform documentary storytelling. We were game to see what he meant and still want to experiment with this for FRONTLINE. We talked through some of the challenges – the edit in particular…but also how and what to film.

And also, take a look at Oculus Rift. If you don’t’ know about this already, you’ll know about it soon…

Take http://techland.time.com/2014/02/21/its-not-just-about-gaming-oculus-rift-could-change-movie-making-too/

At FRONTLINE, we are particularly interested in seeing how we could apply 3D to a visceral situation that we all want to know how it would feel to be inside. We have an idea of how to apply this to a documentary we are currently filming inside a hospital. This is an idea we’ll be workshopping at MIT, and I’ll share more as I go along…

Until then…

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