Hello.
I'm Simona Manni and I'm here to present the paper
"Designing structural participation in a participatory film on mental health"
which has been part of my PhD research taking place
at the Digital Creativity Lab, University of York.
In this research, we have started from the perspective of participatory filmmaking,
a practice where professionals filmmakers pass on skills to community members,
especially from underrepresented groups, acting as facilitators.
Through this practice, community members can produce their own media pieces
that are centered around issues close to the lived experience.
Participatory filmmaking is centered around the values of voice, dialog,
transformation and content, trust and co-production.
And it's about empowering communities, especially when they're stigmatized
and marginalized, to take ownership of representations about themselves.
In mental health this is is a practice
that can be very fruitful to counteract stigma, and this helps
creating
new representations of mental illness that are free from stereotypes
that are often endorsed in mainstream media.
This research is centered around my practice as a participatory filmmaker,
so I've been a participatory filmmaker for around ten years,
working with communities to produce participatory
accounts of mental health, mental illness and recovery.
In this study, we looked at merging the practice
of participatory filmmaking with interactive documentary.
In fact, interactive documentaries or i-Docs are films
where the audience can choose which materials
they're going to watch, in which order or that can adapt to certain data
about the audience.
i-Docs have been praised for their participatory potential.
This is because, thanks to narrative nonlinearity afforded by interactive
media, interactive documentaries could allow for more storylines
to co-exist for the audience to insert their own input
in the film and even add materials that are not necessarily filmic form,
so for instance, images, still images, sound and text.
I-docs can be responsive,
can adapt to the data or conditions of the audience's watching.
They are often praised for being able to increase empathy and having immersive
qualities, often putting the audience in the shoes of certain characters.
All of these qualities make interactive documentary,
possibly even more suitable for participation than traditional film,
however, the participatory potential of interactive documentary depends
on how participation is designed.
Nash has divided
participation in interactive documentary as minimalist and maximalist
and also taking into account Literat's theories,
we can see that minimalist or executory participation
is the most common in interactive documentaries, and it's when there is
a structure that has been created by professional designers,
and then there is space for the audience to input content.
But the audience is not really able to be an author in the sense
that it's not able to influence the structure of the documentary.
Maximalists or structural participation, which is a lot more uncommon,
means that there is equality in decision
making between professionals and nonprofessionals,
and participants are able to inform the entire structure of the documentary
, not just the content that populates it.
Our study has been about how can we make a participatory I-doc,
which is structurally participatory?
And this is because in the practice of participatory filmmaking in mental
health, it is of paramount importance that participants can author the entire film.
And in the case of interactive documentary,
this means both the structure and the content.
In order to do this, we used an existing film as a case study.
This film is called Stepping Through,
and it's a film
that was made in 2016 with five men with experience of mental illness
about isolation and recovery.
It's a film that was co-produced and included many different perspectives.
In my Ph.D., there was a preliminary study which looked at the limits of Stepping
Through as a linear film, and througho
the de-construction of the film with participants,
it showed that there were several expressive needs
that were not fully accommodated by the film being linear
and making the film nonlinear , that is interactive, could have made space
for more storylines, more perspectives and more complexity in the representation.
So from this preliminary study we moved into the second study,
the one that we are talking about in this presentation,
where participants created a design
for an interactive version of Stepping Through, taking part in 40 co-production
workshops between October 2018 and February 2020.
The result was an interactive non linear film, where participants
created a structure which is based around encouraging empathy,
building and self-reflection in audiences, which were the main authorial
aims for this group of participants.
In this presentation and in this paper, we're not talking about the film itself
and its qualities, but rather the process that got us there.
So how did we create a structurally participatory process
that allowed the creation of a film that was completely authored
by the participants?
This is a reflective study
where we looked back at a very long process
and we identified principles that were in place
that allowed the process to be structurally participatory.
The first principle is circularity and adaptability of the process.
What we did was creating a process that was very flexible and responsive
to the needs of participants.
The process that we used to make, this interactive documentary,
was based on the participatory process that participants already knew, which saw
an alternation of phases which is quite linear, of brainstorming
ideas, creating sound imagery, filming, and then an editorial part
which was usually curated by a filmmaker such as myself, which would put together
the footage created by the participants according to their authorial intentions
and then would check if the film was respectful of participants
intentions and would then repeat this process of editing and check in
until a satisfactory final product would be identified.
In this case, we had to make the process a lot more circular.
We started with an initial writing, sound recording and brainstorming
of imagery phase,
but then we went into an altenration of organizing and planning the filming,
having filming sessions,
reviewing the video footage, editing and reflecting on what interactive design
would be the most appropriate for the filming that we were doing
and repeating these sets of workshops as many times as needed,
instead of thinking that we could go straight from organizing and filming
to creating an interactive narrative and then technical implementation.
We needed many iterations of these cycles
before we could move into the technical implementation.
This was for different reasons:
because we didn't want to overwhelm participants
by having the same activities repeated too often,
and also because we were exploring a structure that
was completely designed by participants and their authorial and expressive needs.
So we didn't know what the structure would be until we started to make it.
And for this reason we needed to double check several times.
Also, this type of filming requires a lot more footage
than traditional filming, and so we needed to go back and analyze
the filming that we had and what footage was necessary
according to how the interactive structure was developing.
Another principle was to focus on expressive needs over form.
So we didn't try to imitate an existing i-Doc, but we rather tried
to imagine a new format.
And this form was based on the expressive needs of participants.
So the process started with quite a long phase where we analyzed
and discussed with participants what they wanted to express,
and what kind of narrative materials they wanted into the film
before even starting to think about the interactive structure.
Only when the expressive needs of
participants were very clear, we then moved into
looking at different i-Docs to find inspiration,
and participants eventually designed their own interactive structure.
The third principle was to create tangibility in the design process.
Both myself
and the participants were not experienced at all in interactive media production.
It was our first experience and as such it would have been too complicated
to start working with software straight away.
What we did instead, inspired also by boundary objects in design, was to use
paper based methods to basically deconstruct the original film
and add different aspects of all the narrative materials
that were represented by cards, by strips of black and white paper
and by colored tape that represented the connection among materials.
The structure was then turned into a digital structure
and eventually became the film itself.
Principle four is to find a balance between process and final product.
In participatory filmmaking, the process is often more important
than the final product
because it's during the process that the empowering
effect of participatory filmmaking takes place.
Here we had to find a balance.
We had to look at the final product and make sure that it was a satisfactory
as possible for our participants so that it would support their expressive needs,
but also making the process as enjoyable and inclusive as possible
so that the process in itself would be valuable for our participants.
Another principle was around acquiring new skills.
In participatory filmmaking a professional filmmaker
passes on skills
to unprofessional participants who have usually never been filmmakers
before, and by taking part in the process, they acquire new skills.
In the design of an interactive documentary
this becomes more complicated
because of there is an extra layer of necessary skills in interaction design
and also implementation that often the filmmakers themselves, such
as in my case, don't have and are not able to pass on to participants.
In order to create this documentary,
we had to work with a technical team, which is co-author of this paper,
and the technical team was working with Cutting Room, a sophisticated tool
which is being produced by my university, the University of York.
And while this tool is quite accessible compared to other interactive design tools
is still not user friendly for a lay filmmaker
and for the participants in this case either.
So what we did was trying to create prototypes on paper, but also prototypes
using a more accessible software such as Klynt.
Klynt wouldn't have been able to support the full implementation of the film
that we were creating, but it was really useful
to create partial prototypes and mini features demos that I could use
to help participants express their wishes to the technical team
and for the technical team to then communicate
what was possible or not possible to participants .
So it was a mixture of creating new partnerships,
but also using a variety of tools according to what we wanted to achieve.
These are the five principles we implemented to ensure that the film
that we were creating was structurally participatory
and that the process itself was inclusive and mindful of participant needs.
Of course, in the in the paper, that is a lot more detail
about recommendations for other community projects that want to try this approach,
starting from participatory filmmaking and then adding interactive documentary
to the process that we hope would stimulate more research in this area.
Stepping Through Interactive is available to the public and can be seen online.
If you're interested in watching the film, please reach out to me at Simona Dot
Manni at.
York dot AC dot UK.