New forms of documentary: filmmaking within new media

Abstract

New technologies have always been a great potential for artists, who are seeking “new forms” in art. Today, so called “new media” has a great potential for filmmakers, especially for “non-fiction storytellers,” i.e. documentary filmmakers. With the development of new media, new documentary forms emerged on the Internet. These new forms are labeled such as webdocumentary (web-doc), interactive documentary, database-filmmaking, transmedia, non- linear documentary, etc. All of these new documentary forms are done by utilizing not only the computational and telecommunication capacities of the Internet through softwares and apps (applications), but the prevailing use of the Internet as one of the major medium of daily life as well. Today, more and more people are watching and following new forms of documentary on the Internet (especially young generations, who are born into new media). New media documentary, with its distinct features, not only enforce documentary filmmakers to think, imagine, design, and develop documentary projects within new forms, but also enable them to make documentary in different ways. In short, it offers new forms of representation and production for documentary filmmakers. In this paper, I will discuss the distinct features of new media documentary such as its openness to non-linearity in storytelling and interactivity in experience (watching and navigating in a web site); its capacity of a wider distribution; its potential for a more collaborative production. I will elaborate these features in a critical approach to understand what is really ‘new’ in new media documentary.