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The 6th edition of the international co-production seminar will take place in Sofia, and is open to all English, French, German, Austrian, and East European professionals, including those from Baltic and Balkan countries, as well as to all Scandinavian decision makers. Participating producers are selected on the basis of a submitted project. This project must correspond to one of the five themes proposed by Sunny Side of the Doc:
History / Science / The Environment / Social or Political Issues / Arts & Culture. The projects must be vouched for by a television station, or by a funding agency, or by a distributor. They should also be in the development stage and be of potential interest to professionals at Sofia during the “Side by Side’s”.
The pitch sessions will be theme-based, and limited to the participation of professionals working in each of the proposed subjects. Each pitch will be no longer than 14 minutes, with 7 minutes allocated to pitching and 7 minutes to fielding questions. During the "Side by Side’s",which are completely separate from the pitch sessions, participants can register for personal appointments with buyers, commissioning editors and decision makers. As in our previous Rendezvous, a large number of coffee breaks, lunches and evening events will allow you to freely organize your own meetings and appointments. Submit your projects no later than February 10, 2009.
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For more information visit sunnysideofthedoc.com
NEWS
DocPoint - Helsinki Documentary Film Festival / January 20-25, 2009, Helsinki, Finland : docpoint.info
History Makers / January 29-31, 2009, New-York, USA : historymakers2009.com
Realscreen summit / Feb 1-4 2009, Washington DC, USA : realscreensummit.com
PARTNER
REELISOR documentary networking - Reelisor is the new cooperation platform for the entire European documentary film business : reelisor.com
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Documentaries produced specifically for the purpose of dissemination on the Web are only a recent phenomenon. Their established format is based on a short running time, a tendency toward fiction and an interactivity that gives the Web user greater freedom to explore the story. Nevertheless, an economic model for the web documentary has yet to be discovered, and its future remains uncertain.
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| "Voyage au bout du charbon", a rich contextual navigation |
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The dissemination of documentaries on the Internet dates back to 2004, when vodeo.tv launched its video-on-demand (VOD) platform. This service included full catalogues of previously released (mostly on television) documentaries, which Internet users could watch on their computer or on DSL television, such as Free TV or Neuf TV. On vodeo.tv the web documentary is presented in its most traditional and linear fashion, just as a documentary conceived for television. Therefore, the main advantages of its transmission on the Internet are the lack of constraints placed by the programming schedules of television channels, and the ability to achieve a global visibility. The economic model of a website like vodeo.tv depends on the payment of films by the Internet viewer. According to Frederic Pie, vodeo.tv’s founder, there is no reason why this should change any time soon: "Even today’s major web portals, with all their advertising revenue, cannot consistently pay the production costs for a film longer than 13 minutes,” explains Pie. “Therefore vodeo.tv absorbs the expenses related to the technical transmission of films on the Web and VOD revenue is shared in accordance with the number of Internet users who pay to view a documentary." The success of vodeo.tv is still minute in comparison to audiences gathered by television, even for premium television channels, which boast around 70,000 customers, mostly subscribers with pre-paid packages. The limited success of the VOD platform has nevertheless attracted the attention of the important media group Le Figaro, which announced its acquisition of Bank Audiovisuelle, the company that produces vodeo.tv’s VOD service through its digital technology subsidiary SkreenHouse Factory.
New experiences in contextual navigation
In addition, there is a generation of documentaries that are being disseminated on the Web that are more innovative and better adapted to their new medium. These documentaries seek greater interactivity within the documentary and propose a mixed use of video and photo media.
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Gaza-Sderot, another way of seeing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
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An example is this kind of web documentary is "Thanatorama", which in poetic fashion pushes us to meditate on our own death and on what will become of our physical shell after our passing. This web documentary uses the stars, the twilight of our life, as a metaphor to propose a quasi-initiatory journey into the content of the film. A similar narrative style, that is both austere and complex, is found in the recent web documentary "Voyage au bout du charbon" (Journey to the edge of the coal mine). This interactive documentary takes us on a journey of discovery to the mines of China’s Shanxi Valley. Directed by the journalists Samuel Bollendorff and Abel Segretin, and developed by 31 Septembre and Honkytonk Films, this web documentary accomplishes true harmony by mixing ambient photos, video interviews, and an enticing soundtrack.
The omnipresence of the images and sounds comes from the fact that Samuel Bollendorff travelled as a reporter to these coal mines, bringing along his traditional Leica camera, as well as a digital camera as backup, and which eventually served to shoot the videos. Abel Segretin, Radio France International’s correspondent in Beijing, accompanied Bollendorff and brought along his own radio reporter equipment. The confluence of these different media produced a particular sensation, that of a miner’s life in another century -frozen in time. The lightweight nature of their equipment was well suited to the difficult, even clandestine, working conditions. Having completed the reporting, converting the different images into Flash media requires a long post-production period spanning several months, possible in large part to a 20,000-euro CNC grant. "Our guiding principle was to put ourselves
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in the shoes of someone in their twenties who is tired of traditional television,” explains Bollendorff Samuel, “someone who does little to no reading, and gets most of their information online.”
Encouraged by his first success on lemonde.fr, Samuel Bollendorff started another web documentary in November 2008 in partnership with France 5 Education. His latest project is dedicated to exploring obesity and our bloating humanity, and the journalist expects to do some experimenting. "My idea is once again to explore the meaning that things take on depending on the media that is implemented. This creates cracks in the script in different ways that I find interesting," says Bollendorff.
Constantly in search of an original narrative form, in which the viewer is no longer an idle bystander, Bo Travail created the interactive documentary "Gaza/Sderot, la vie malgré tout" (Gaza/Sderot, life despite everything) for Arte’s website. The project uses multimedia capabilities, similar to today’s most sophisticated Internet search engines, to offer the Web user the option of entering into the daily life of a Palestinian or an Israeli at any given time. In this web documentary each visitor can, according to his or her personal wishes, expectations, opinions and experiences view the images of particular interest and build his or her own reflection. Even if the path of the Web user is guided by the fact the writers / directors structured the project by episodes, the intention is to forfeit considerable space to the viewer’s freedom of choice.
The Web Documentary becomes communal
Through the Web Documentary, or docu web 2.0, not only can the viewer become an active participant, but he or she can also access and participate in a creative commons. A recent example is the project "Twenty Show", aired on the social networking website MySpace, and soon to air on the television channel Arte. Twenty Show originated from the idea of remaking "Hitler? connais pas !" (Hitler? Doesn’t know!) , a 1950s film by Bertrand Blier, in which a
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| Twenty Show on the website of Arte TV and on Myspace |
group of young people aged 17 to 20 were gathered a studio and asked to share their ideas. But a simple remake of the French director’s work was of little interest to Arte. So Bruno Nahon, the project’s producer, re-pitched a more innovative idea based on a powerful symbol of self-expression among today’s young people: the video blog. The idea was to create a story from video blog sequences in which four teenagers talk with each other, and post their exchanges on the community portal MySpace. The sequences were then edited into a 90-minute documentary to be broadcast on Arte. Of course this meant adopting visual codes particular to blogging, and casting off those of the traditional documentary film. A string of statements by young people made directly into the camera were cleaned up and cut down and condensed into sequences. Nahon called on four young directors, who could relate directly to the subjects they were filming. At the end of the Summer of 2008, and during the next eight months, around fifty videos, each no longer than two-and-a-half minutes, were broadcast on MySpace; from these videos a documentary film will finally be aired in the Spring of 2009.
The Internet buzz around Twenty Show was immediate. Over 300,000 video blogs from Twenty Show have been viewed to date, with an average of 4,000 visits per day. And the reviews are favourable. MySpace has notched more than 1,200 comments, with 25 young people replying via their own webcam videos. "The fact that this documentary is completely scripted, and is played by young actors does not bother Web users in the least,” says Nahon. “People generally feel that the scenes reflect their reality." In order to enhance the film to be aired on Arte, some of the comments that were received will be integrated into Twenty Show’s script. These comments will be expressed by Mia, a character that plays an important role in the film, and a fifth character that will be integrated into the story for the same purpose.
To the genre of documentaries that become shared projects on the Web, we can also list "Ferry Boat", which consists of funny sketches of everyday life in the French city of Marseilles. The programme is a series of short narratives, each lasting as long as a ferry boat ride, featuring a host of characters and situations with both a genuine and offbeat taste. Since October 2008 this Marseille sitcom has experienced great success on the website of the newspaper La Provence. Ferry Boat is also broadcast every evening at 8:00 p.m. on the local television channel LCM 50. This “Web drama” of everyday life is particularly original in that its screenplays were entrusted in part to a panel of twelve La Provence readers. In the land of bouillabaisse, the local fish soup specialty, hometown actors have found another successful recipe of reality-inspired fiction, which could encourage other Web documentary projects to share production and distribution costs between the Internet, local TV and the regional press. Something to keep our eyes on…
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Sunny Side of the Doc - Do you receive many requests for financing for web documentary projects, or is it still a nascent genre?
 Guillaume Blanchot – The documentary has been trying to find a place on the Web for several years. It’s already been three years since we saw the Voyage au bout du charbon project appear. I think the documentary is one of the audiovisual formats that best lends itself to the Web, as the immediate interactivity of the Internet is a source of added interest for the viewer of this type of program.
Does the production of a web documentary differ from the way a traditional documentary is produced?
What is surprising about the Web is to see how this new medium changes the approach in writing a documentary. The script will in this case be closely related to the interaction we want the Internet user to experience. This reinforces the producer's role as the driving force with the global vision of the project. It is this person who will expertly identify both the technical challenges and define the desired interactivity and mode of dissemination. The technical and the creative peoples are forced to work closely at the very beginning of a web documentary project.
There is a shift in terms of audiences, particularly among a younger generation that no longer makes distinctions between different media. Do they consume the Internet’s offering with the same appetite as television’s?
The traditional models employed for studying media are used to analyzing each one separately. Among the younger generations it is increasingly necessary to think in global terms and in continuity between the different media. In this context I find Arte’s approach very innovative, because the channel does not use their website as a simple guiding post to steer Web users to television, but are instead trying to create programs of interest specifically for the Web.
Has the web documentary found its business model?
If the web documentary has more than less established its format, it is interesting to see that a business is only now beginning to take shape around the genre. Traditional TV broadcasters are beginning to show a serious interest, and so are Internet’s "pure players". We are hoping that the latter will also become the financial backers of webdocs, which they will air on their portals. Even if business models have
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not been established, we think the web documentary can generate advertising revenue that will fuel production.
What are the strongest drivers in the web documentary arena: producers, TV broadcasters, or new players?
They are the traditional producers, such as Les Films d'Ici and Bo Travail, who are responsible for innovative documentary concepts, as well as traditional TV channels such as Arte, Canal+ and France 5. Internet portals, with rare exceptions, have put no money into the production of web documentaries. The only contribution is a share of advertising revenues once the documentary has been posted on a website. However, some websites like Blog Trotter have exploited very meagre resources and succeed in producing and disseminating works somewhere between a documentary and a report on the Web --and they have done so without the help of a TV broadcaster.
Are there any additional financial resources that could be freed up to help web documentaries?
By the middle of 2009, the rules transferred into French law from the European Directive will undoubtedly contribute to the development of these new documentary forms because video-on-demand (VOD) services will be required to provide support to productions, as traditional TV broadcasters have done for over 20 years ...
At CNC, we provide assistance in the writing and production of web documentaries. And, in recent months, we have also begun to accept that the 25% of production costs usually covered by a television channel, in addition to the support given by the CNC, be paid by VOD portals. We can therefore imagine a documentary that receives 15% of its funding from a traditional television channel and 10% from an Internet portal.
Even if VOD services did not experience the success predicted three years ago, we think that other players like Orange are adopting ambitious strategies. Internet portals like MSN and Yahoo! are making it their policy to support diversified content beyond sports, movies and adult programs.
Another development is that news organizations are starting to show interest in the dissemination of documentaries on the Web. The perfect example is of course the recent acquisition of the VOD portal vodeo.tv, which specializes in the documentaries, by the Figaro group. But there is also the example of La Provence newspaper, which signed a distribution agreement with the Marseille producer Strianna for the broadcasting rights of the series Ferry Boat on their website, and of Le Monde Interactive which aired Voyage au bout du charbon. We are also seeing near-documentary programs appear that are funded by just one single advertiser.
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