INPUT Sydney - the last day!

 

The last day of the 2012 conference ended with a party given by next year's host, El Salvador. A group of Salvadoreans living in Sydney made delicious tamales and other treats from their home country, and performed a traditional dance.  

INPUT 2012 seemed to go by in a flash – hard to believe Friday was the last day. I hope we can keep up with folks and report on the great things everyone’s doing via this blog. Message to readers – don’t be shy about adding comments!

For me, Friday was another smorgasbord of TV treats. I began at the session called “Mobile Phones as Witnesses: User Generated Content in the News.” The first program at the session was “You Should Have Stayed at Home,” a CBC production constructed from mobile phone pictures and video taken during the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto, when violent riots took place. The discussion, led by CBC producers Lynette Fortune and Jim Williamson, centered on the ways in which UGC can be verified and held to journalistic standards. Fortune explained that she had met every content provider in person and checked their media against a list of qualifying criteria that she developed.  Another means of verification was to compare several videos of the same event, shot from different angles. More than one camera shooting the same event = truth.

In general, though the network was able to pay only a nominal fee for footage, people were very cooperative and eager to share their media, providing the producers with many hours of recordings. Fortune found the videos first, on You Tube, and then went looking for the people who shot them. In one case she found only a photo of a young man being beaten by the police. After the show was broadcast several people came forward with video of the incident.

The other program presented in this session was “Mega Tsunami: Hidden Perils,” from NHK. The producers of this documentary used UGC to tell the story of the terrifying mega tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011, when the destructive power of water was followed by fires that broke out on the oil-soaked seas.  The video shot by witnesses pointed the producers to personal stories, making the coverage extremely effective and poignant. One member of the audience raised the question of the quality of the shooting, which of course isn’t in the same category as professionally shot media. But the consensus seemed to be that UGC adds an invaluable immediacy to news and documentaries and works best when verified and contextualized by professional producers and journalists.

In the afternoon I attended two sessions, beginning with “To Academic, Too Sophisticated? Delivering Bulky Content.” This session began with another NHK program, “Feast of Exquisite Beauty,” employing a well-known photographer to analyze Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” and try to replicate the painting in a photograph. Through his efforts to recreate Vermeer’s masterpiece, the photographer – along with the audience - discovers revealing details about the painting.  Although it had an annoying (at least to Western ears) “voice of God” narrator, the show helped me see “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in a new and unforgettable way and made me wish that we had more adventurous arts programming in the U.S.

Next up was Canadian Andrea Dorfman’s animation, “Flawed,” a beautiful short piece about personal identity. Unfortunately, the filmmaker wasn’t able to attend. It has long been a basic tenet of INPUT that someone from the production team must accompany the program and I hope this rule will be upheld in the future. Without one of the producers in attendance the quality of the discussion is completely altered, and not for the better.

Finally, I went to the “10 Ways to Involve Your Audience and Use Social Media” session. Here I saw presentations from Switzerland and ARTE that made me very envious. One is a virtual tour of a street in Zurich in which tweets pop up like thought bubbles as the user moves down the street – a lot of fun, and like nothing I’ve seen before: www.360langstrasse.sf.tv. ARTE’s site is the partner site to the program “Photo for Life,” which I wrote about on Tuesday. Exceptional!

So – another great week of debate and inspiration. I’m thankful to have been part of INPUT for the last 3 years. I hope I can apply a lot of what I’ve absorbed here in Sydney to my own work back home.