Mindful documentary

In the practice of documentary creation, a videographer performs an elaborate balancing act between observing the world, deciding what to record, and understanding the implications of the recorded material, all with respect to her primary goal of story construction. This thesis presents mindful documentary, a model of a videographer's cyclical process of thinking and constructing during a documentary production. The purpose of this model is to better support documentary creation through systems that assist the documentary videographer in discovering new methods of observation, ways of thinking, and novel stories while recording the world. Based on the mindful documentary model, a reflective partnership is established between the videographer and a camera with commonsense reasoning abilities during capture and organization of documentary video collections. Knowledge is solicited from the videographer at the point of capture; it is used to generate narrative or contextual shot suggestions, which provide alternative recording path ideas for the videographer. Thus, the system encourages the videographer to reflect on the story possibilities of a documentary collection during real-time capture. Qualitative results of studies with a group of videographers - including novices and experts - showed a willingness to take suggestions during documentary production and, in some cases, to alter the recording path after reflection on shot possibilities presented by the system. Moreover, suggestions often had increased influence on the recording path if they were not taken as directives but as catalysts, i.e., prompts to expand thinking about the documentary subject rather than explicit shot instructions.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Barry, Barbara A. (Barbara Ann), 1967-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Glorianna Davenport.

• Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/32497
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/32497

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/32497