Directed Study Journal - March 14, 2018
FILM WORK
The past few weeks have been leading up to spring break and I've been focused on using some time to work on a draft of the directed study project. My directed study project has been designed for me to complete rough cuts of a number of sequences of the film I'm creating and, at this point, I've got a rough cut of the first 3 minutes or so. This is what I delivered today to be graded. There are a number of elements that I have not yet integrated into the film. I've conducted several interviews, for example, but I still need to go through them and mark the sections I want to use and put them into the timeline. Some of the footage I used for the draft will be replaced by footage I shoot but I wanted to start setting up the way I would tell this story.
The last part of the rough cut I submitted is a title card that will lead into the first several interviews. I've staged it so that the opening sequence has some drama and introduces the topic area with something thought provoking. In the case of the rough cut, there is a section from a TED Talk which asks some pretty controversial questions about data and I'm using that to set the tone of the piece. As I described in earlier presentations, the film sets out to highlight the state of data ownership, value and privacy with an eye toward creating a model for underwriting the social good. After three minutes of intro, we'll wade into the interviews which will be filled out with some more clips and commentary.
In the section that will come after the title card, I've asked my interview subjects to tell me what they do with their devices and they throw a lot of answers out: my banking, send birthday greeting, use maps, set my alarm clock, etc. I then ask if they think they should own all that data. Their answers are followed by a clip of Google CEO Sundar Pichai at the World Economic Forum in Davos supporting the concept of individual personal data ownership. In many ways, the film is meant to be a visual partner of the written thesis and I think this is a good way to pair the two components.
Daniel, one of my interview subjects. I've completed his interview but need to edit it in order to integrate it into the film.
One thing I'm actively trying to avoid is narration as I think that it's a bit too easy just to tell the story through voice over. I'm trying to create impact rather than just the transfer of information. I think it's important that people walk away from the film with an impression; they should have a sense that they want to look deeper into the questions it raises. The film should offer some guidance and I'm working to ensure that it covers as many bases as possible without confusing the issues.
VIEWING
During the past few weeks I've been viewing docs online and on Netfilx/Amazon, etc. There have been several of note that will likely inform the work I do on my own piece. One additional note, I have been also viewing quite a few technical videos on Lynda and YouTube. I've been trying to make some aesthetic choices and so I've watched a number of cinematography, lighting and lens specific videos from NoFilmSchool, FStoppers and some of the other content creators in that space. I've been watching:
"Icarus" - The Best Documentary Feature Oscar winner is a Netflix production and it's pretty much designed in the classic documentary style. The film is about performance enhancing drug use in cycling and combines interviews, archive footage, clips from third parties to create the narrative. The narration is audio from interviews conducted for the film (which I would love to do) but it's incredibly time consuming to work in that style and would not be conducive to working within our constraints.
"Print The Legend" - This is also a Netflix production about the Makerbot founders and the future of 3D printing technology. This doc is interesting from a design standpoint in the sense that it is also very straight forward but the production money was spent in some obvious places: the graphics, the interviews (there are many with the same people, for example, but in a variety of different places. Their access to their subjects seems unlimited), and time, time and more time.
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PROCESS/CHALLENGES
One of the assignments we've had to complete over the break is to create a process/challenge presentation for the project so far. One of the things I've discovered in completing that assignment is that there are MANY challenges to working in a style that resembles "assembling" a puzzle. The first (and maybe most difficult to overcome) is that I am sometimes creating the narrative of the piece using footage that I have "compiled" - a combination of stock footage, clips I pull from streaming services like YouTube and Vimeo and B-roll pieces I shoot myself - rather than footage that I storyboard and shoot as a way of directing what I've written. As a result, there is a lot of consideration that goes into how the piece gets built out. As I build the piece, however, it leaves room for me to create my way out of situations.
Time, however, is the biggest constraint on creating this project. I understand that I need to manage expectations as the goal is not necessarily to create the final version of this piece but to set up a framework and foundation for future work. Having said that, I do feel that I can vreate a prototype that will more than meet the expectations I have for the project.
WRITING
Based on the above challenges, I've started to create the written component of the thesis project alongside trying to build out the film. As I don't have a traditional script to work from, I wanted to ensure that I was going to have a document to work off of. To that end, I've begun to incorporate the research into a living outline.
The first draft of a thesis outline for me to work off of.
READING/RESEARCH
This is the part that never seems to end. As I wrote in my process/challenge presentation, I'm constantly reading new articles, academic pieces, editorials, book excerpts, etc. Part of the challenge is that the momentum in this problem space comes not from academia but business and tech consulting, mainstream media like Wired and The New York Times and a huge variety of other outlets that are not research based but do general reporting on the goings on in this area. Of course there is academic research but, as i say, the majority of what I find are short articles that mention new business concepts, blockchain tech or are introducing the challenges of the space.
Some of the notable items I've been reading for research:
The Decentralized Internet is Here, With Some Glitches by Tom Simonite in Wired! (https://www.wired.com/story/the-decentralized-internet-is-here-with-some-glitches/?mbid=social_fb)
Your Data is Crucial to a Robotic Age, Shouldn't You be Paid for It? By Eduardo Porter in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/business/economy/user-data-pay.html).
Blockchain Could Help Us Reclaim Control of Our Personal Data by Michael Mainelli in the Harvard Business Review. (https://hbr.org/2017/10/smart-ledgers-can-help-us-reclaim-control-of-our-personal-data).
Monetizing Personal Data: A Two-Sided Market Approach by Ahmed Saleh Bataineh, et al. in Procedia Computer Science (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050916302447?via%3Dihub).
Rethinking Personal Data: A New Lens for Strengthening Trust prepared by The World Economic Forum (http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_RethinkingPersonalData_ANewLens_Report_2014.pdf).
These are just a few items. I've also been doing research on some of the businesses that have grown around the concept of monetizing personal data. Some of these companies are no longer operating while some, like Wibson (a blockchain play promising individual profit from data ownership). Ctrlio, Datacoup and Handshake are some of the companies.