GUEST POST BY RICHARD VICKERS

24.hours.in Tampere (http://www.24-hours.in/) is an interactive documentary project exploring new opportunities for participation, collaboration and the potential democratisation of documentary production. With reference to Dziga Vertov’s seminal 1929 documentary film ‘Man with a Movie Camera’, the aim is for the project to document the city, the people that live there and their daily lives.

The initial 24.hours.in Tampere prototype was produced at the Tampere Art Factory International Week, hosted by TAMK School of Arts & Media in April 2011. I ran an interactive documentary workshop, working with students from TAMK, to produce a collaborative, participatory, experimental documentary project centred on 24-hours in Tampere.

At TAF Tampere
The workshop participants were encouraged to embrace Vertov’s pioneering avant-garde approach to filmmaking, utilising camera phones and available devices to capture “life caught unawares”.  IMP students Jani Ilomaki, Robert Niva, Vaidotas Ambrozaitis and Guanjun Liu strolled the city, capturing scenes of everyday life, the cleaning of the streets after the long winter, going for lunch, political elections; providing a fascinating insight into aspects of everyday life in Tampere for viewers wide and far.

At ISEA, Istanbul
I presented the initial project and a paper on the democratization of documentary at the International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA) in Istanbul in September, the project was very well received by the audience and the feedback was fantastic.

Trent Pancy, Richard Vickers, Anna-Kaisa Nässi, Erika Kim

At MindTrek, Tampere
In September I returned to Tampere to attend the Mindtrek conference and demonstrate the 24-hours.in Tampere project. During my visit I had the opportunity to once again to work with IMP students, Anna-Kaisa Nässi, Trent Pancy, Vesa Rantanen, Erika Kim and Tuomas Mikola enthusiastically taking on roles as documentary filmmakers. It was a fantastic opportunity to get more footage of life in Tampere, adding more video content to the project and continuing to build up a collective view of the city.My colleague at the Lincoln School of Media, James Field, has continued to develop the infrastructure for the project and since my first visit we have implemented FFmpeg on the server to automate the encoding process of the videos.

At Youth Award Festival, Graz
Despite a few technical problems the new content was added using the online submission and encoding system and the updated version of the project is now viewable online. The project was recently presented at the EADiM Academic conference in Graz, Austria during the World Summit Youth Award event there and continues to gain lots of attention around the world.

To VIEDOMEDEJA, Novi Sad
The most recent good news we have received is that 24-hours.in Tampere has been selected for the 15th International Video Festival VIDEOMEDEJA, in Novi Sad, Serbia that will take place in December http://videomedeja.org/

Kiitos to everyone who has been involved so far, there is still more video footage to add and the project is in continuous development, we hope that more students from TAMK will become involved with 24-hours.in Tampere – an interactive documentary!

Best wishes from England, hope to see you all soon

Richard 

Richard Vickers
Lincoln School of Media
University of Lincoln
United Kingdom

www.24-hours.in
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