I-Docs and New Narratives

Abstract


 
 
 Digital media make it possible to move from a conventional storytelling medium to other avenues that allow open stories to be told, maintaining the traditional basis of narratives while also adding other elements that enrich and deepen storytelling innovation. Therefore, it is important to analyze how the characteristics of digital storytelling work together in order to create meaning through new narratives. Recent documentary projects show how new ways of telling stories involve new ways of relating meaning and form, multiple platforms, and strong interaction and engagement from the side of the viewer. Interactivity and participation change the way in which a story is told and received, thus changing its nature as a narrative. To delve deeper into this field, I will analyze Highrise. The Towers in the World. World in the Towers, (http://highrise.nfb.ca) by Katerina Cizek. This is a complex project produced by the National Film Board of Canada, a multiyear, many-media collaborative documentary experiment that has generated many projects, including mixed media, interactive documentaries, mobile productions, live presentations, installations and films. I will develop a textual analysis on part of the project, the interactive documentary Out My Window, by focusing on its ways of meaning-making and the specific narrative implications of the relationship between meaning and form. The project is ambitious: Cizek's vision is "to see how the documentary process can drive and participate in social innovation rather than just to document it, and to help reinvent what it means to be an urban species in the 21st".