What is open space documentary- how might it differ from conventional documentary?

Open space documentary is essentially a documentary without borders. Whereas traditional approaches to making a documentary come with certain guidelines and rules, open space documentary is, well…. open. It allows your imagination to run wild and tell a story in a way you deem appropriate. Open space documentary doesn’t restrict your creativity to certain length, structure or even platform. It can be a video, an audio, a photo essay, a website, pretty much anything you want it to be. Open space documentary is the entanglement of pure creation and storytelling.

Not so long ago, I found myself on a projections festival in West Footscray. Dozens of short videos were projected in hidden places around the neighbourhood. They were just short silent video pieces scattered around the place at night, but each and every one of them told a certain story in their own unique way. There was no voice over, no narrative, no dry facts, no structure, yet it was still a documentary. An open space documentary.

How can concepts from Open Space be applied to your project?

For our final project, we are working on a series of short videos based around a community centre in West Melbourne. To be honest, our project seems to be within the borders of traditional documentary. We are not planning on throwing a camera in the water or interviewing a dog. We just want to tell people’s stories,  communicate our idea and showcase the West as a friendly, accepting and rather underrated region. It’s more of a good old documentary than a daring artsy experiment. And to be honest, I prefer it this way. Maybe I am not artistic or sensual enough, but my understanding of a good documentary lies entirely within the more or less traditional approach.

Of course, we will apply some of the open space concepts. Firstly, as I mentioned above, we are going to make several episodes each exploring a different story around the community centre. Secondly, even though we are planning to include a lot of interviews, we want to make them voice overs rather than face to face conversations. And lastly, we are definitely going to experiment with different frames and shots as well as various colour palettes. We want our final project to be interesting and unique and without going into plain weird.

Why are some stories untold?

Millions of stories are happening at this very moment all around the world and they have been since the dawn of times. There are over 7 billion people in the world and every single one has many stories to tell. Every person IS a story. And not only that, objects, places and animals have their own stories too. How would it ever be possible to record and tell every single story there is? It would not. Most of the stories get lost in time under the seal of silence never to be heard again. As sad as it is, it’s true. Most of what ever happened in the history of human beings is forever lost. The least we can do is try and preserve as much as we can, although it will never be even comparable with the vast amount of lost, untold stories.