After we realized that the Walker Close Community centre wasn’t going to lead us anywhere, we started brainstorming ideas on how to save our project. We had some radical ideas like completely abandoning our initial topic and focusing on the museum but after deep and throughout reflection, we decided not to give up just yet. What we came up with is, to be honest about our experience and include it in the documentary. We planned to base our documentary around the community centre, we thought it would be the ‘destination’ of our project. Now it will only be one ‘stop’. I know it sounds confusing and I’m bad at metaphors, but please let me elaborate.

We were going to make a more or less traditional documentary on how the communities are formed and supported in the Walker Close Community centre. Now, we are turning it into a full-on open space piece. We are changing it into a participatory approach and we plan to be honest about what we are going through as a group. There were even talks about including our conversations and footage of us on-set to the final cut, but we’ll see how that goes. More importantly, we are going back to the roots, which is emerging communities. We thought we found the community in the community centre but turns out it’s not there. Would have been too easy I guess. Instead of covering our mistakes we are going to be honest about it and turn our project into an adventure of the search for the community.

I went back to week 7 reading and looked at the concept of open space documentary again. As I was reading these lines, it became more and more apparent to me that what we were planning to do with Walker Close community centre wasn’t an honest open space documentary.

Our theoretical model of open space documentary invokes collaboration, multiple iterations, decentralisation and migration across media platforms and through distinct communities. This theoretical framework – a way to understand and locate how open space documentaries differ from traditional fixed analogue forms and present some new possibilities for rethinking documentary theory – engages relational aesthetics, collaborative public art theory and landscape design theory.

Michael H. & Zimmermann P.

We were thinking about making a pretty little film with happy undertones and nice outlook. We were concerned with the final piece being clean and pretty and not with pushing the boundaries of traditional documentary approach and exploring something new. I have to admit, I do that a lot- I just want the outcome to look good enough for me to get an HD, and it doesn’t matter if I learned anything new or not. This semester the tables have turned. This time our film will definitely not be professional looking, but I know that I’ll learn plenty.

When talking about the new directions our film will take, we were heavily inspired by this video:

Thankfully, our position is not nearly as drastic as this guys but it is somewhat similar. We just faced a major crisis in our project and we are running out of time to make it right. I was really inspired by his honesty and bravery to expose his problems to the world like that. I have great respect for people who aren’t trying to be someone they are not just to keep up a reputation. So, we decided to adopt his approach and turn our project into an experiment. Grab a camera and a mic, go out and ask people on the street: where is the community? We have a much better chance of getting an unbiased answer from random people on the streets as opposed to a failing community centre. So this is what we are going to do. Go out and search for answers rather than expect to find them all at one location while filming our little adventure. This minor setback is only a push for us to continue the investigation, and we will NOT let it drag us down.

Cited:

De Michiel H., Zimmermann, P. (2013). ‘Documentary as an Open Space’, The Documentary Film Book, Palgrave Macmillan. 356-65