The future of documentaries 2:
How documentaries survive in the snack culture age
LEE ji-seon Editor
Imagine which images you will look at when you enter a search word of ‘subway scene’ in a search engine. There is something in common shown on people’s way to school filled with really packed people and on exhausted employees’ way home. It is smart phones that appear without very few exceptions from the first to the last. Of course, the people who read books (classified into rare species) sometimes appear. However, they are the photos produced for a kind of book-reading campaigns.
As the supply of wireless internet networks in public transportation ranging from subways to intra-city buses have accelerated, smart phone users got to enjoy various contents easily by using travel time. Actually, you can easily look at the many people who concentrate on their smart phones putting on earphones including watching soap opera clips or entertainment highlights without distinction of sex or age when you take a full subway early in the morning. Like snacks that you can enjoy being free of time and place, lifestyles or culture trends that you simply and easily culture life in a brief space of time like commuting hours or lunch time are called Snack Culture. This word that is somewhat unfamiliar to you was first introduced as the fashion phenomena that the fashion SPA brands, fast food, and eating out culture are easily and fast consumed in ‘WIERD’, the American IT magazine on May 2007. Owing to the snack culture fever, web-based contents including webtoon, web novels, and web dramas have increased geometrically and web documentaries (Hereafter, web docu) have finally appeared.
Changing documentaries, the appearance of web documentary
web docu is considered the interactive trans media content platform that has newly emerged in Europe, U.K., and U.S. focusing on France, Canada, and U.S. since 2000s. The web docu that has now shown the rapid growth and evolution as the new zone of documentaries is also mixed with ‘interactive documentaries’ or ‘multimedia documentaries’. Interactive documentaries are used as the more comprehensive concept instead of web documentaries.
The works of art that informed people of the appearance of web docu and potential for development are <Prison Valley>(2010) and <Journey to the End of Coal>(2008) which were completed for 18 months by David Dufresne(1968∼), a french journalist, and Philippe Brault(1965∼), a photographer and documentary director through cooperation with several experts.
By November 2008, <Journey to the End of Coal>(2008), the web docu directed by Samuel Bollendorf and Abel Ségrétin was posted on a web site.[1] The documentary that describes reality of a mine in China stirred up much interest among about 2000,000 persons who watched it. In the first scene, texts are entered in order and the documentary is introduced. And it informs people that it will investigate Shaanxi, the Chinese mine by setting the users who access to the web site as reporters. In the next scene, the documentary begins in earnest with several options. This docu was designed to set menus in each sequence consisting of video clips, images, and texts and make netizens select them directly and skip the scenes that they do not watch. This point of the web docu is differentiated from the existing documentaries.
Successful factors of web documentary
The successful factors of web docu can be three things as follows: First, it satisfies consumers’ needs. For the documentaries made by ordinary broadcasting companies or big production companies, viewers unilaterally watch the movies as the directors intend. For the web docu, viewers can watch documentaries by choosing them unlike the existing linear viewing method. It means that users who use contents can directly reprocess them to satisfy their taste.
Second, it’s the expansive reproduction of contents based on communication and the viral effect. As it is the web-based contents, young generations much more consume them and interactive communication can freely be done. In addition, it can get the maximum promotional effect at low cost because sharing opinions in real time through SNS and secondary process of contents can easily be done.
The final successful factor is definitely the short and strong impact. <Journey to the Kung Fu World>(2017), the first UHD web docu of Mountain TV in Korea was produced as 8 7 minute-length episodes. It made a record-breaking showing of 120,000 views when it was opened in TV Cast and won the excellent prize in the diversity sector in the broadcasting awards ceremony arranged by the Korea Communications Commission last spring. Chivalry of the maniac code made people fresh and short and fine quality screens caught their eyes.
<Reply Noryangjin Fish Market 1971~2016>(2016) by SBS Video Mug treats the problem to move into a new market building of the Noryangjin Fish Market as the documentary consisting of 5 5 minute-length episodes. It made headline by receiving more than 1,000,000 sharing values.
Owing to the web docu fever in Europe, the web docu field began to be to the fore in Korea. Several documentaries got remarkable results as mentioned above. And the vitalization of the projects to support the production of web docu by holding seminars related to it proves this. It is still the opening stage. So there is a certain wistfulness because the short documentaries are provided based on web rather than interactive elements are done for consumers.
What web docu implies in the snack culture age
As DMC Media[2] summarized the trend of the recent content market as digitalization, mobile-based industry, and convergence, it analyzed more than half of mobile data traffic is utilized in the consumption of video contents. Especially in Korea, it is expected to have excellent growth potential of domestic mobile video contents in the future as it has found that mobile video traffic is greater importance.
Consumers tend to prefer to short but in-depth contents by utilizing their remained time through this transition. And this is web docu’s competitiveness. Web docu needs to develop to make active interaction possible by considering needs of consumers who prefer to interactive communication. And this is the part that can lead to the creation of business models of the new zone by combining it with different platforms.
However, the creators that produce web docu need to agonize about documentaries because they should consider cooperation with various fields and approach multidisciplinary bases including journalists, photographers, web designers, programmers, project managers, interactive editors, HTML/Flash streaming technicians, and interface developers. And the details that should be considered become the many entry barriers because the contents considering organic narrative structures can create a synergy effect.
For documentaries, the unpopular genre in the theater district, it is difficult to build the continuous reproduction system of the creation and distribution process and the number of movie screens is not absolutely enough. Web docu has commercially been competitive to be an alternative business model in the meantime. Web docu that attempted to be cross-media has survived hard today suggesting a new paradigm of creation and acceptance in the rapidly changing snack culture age.
[1] http://www.lemonde.fr/asie-pacifique/visuel/2008/11/17/voyage-au-bout-du-charbon_1118477_3216.html
[2] DMC Media, 「The present condition and prospect of the mobile content market」