WINTERPORT, ME, Jan.18 -- Independent documentary filmmaker Kent Bye is combining the filmmaking and Internet mediums by using the principles of open source content development. Working out of the basement of a log cabin in Maine, Bye has recruited volunteers from all over the world to help transcribe his documentary interviews. He is publishing these interviews on his website and collaborating with academic advisors from across the country in creating The Echo Chamber documentary.
The Echo Chamber investigates how and why the mainstream media failed to be more skeptical during the time period leading up to the war in Iraq.
Bye recorded the five months of ABC, CBS and NBC television news leading up to the military intervention, and then interviewed over 40 journalists, think tank scholars, journalist professors, media critics and other established experts in order to get inside perspectives on the acknowledged pre-war failures of the media.
Bye has recruited volunteers from across the country and as far away as Germany, United Kingdom and Canada to help transcribe his documentary interviews. He plans on "open-sourcing" the textual content of the interviews by publishing them on his Echo Chamber Project website so that his advisors and the larger blogging community can contribute their insights throughout the post-production process.
One secured academic advisor is Dr. Andrew R. Cline who is an assistant professor of journalism at Southwest Missouri State University. Dr. Cline has committed to reading through all of the interview transcripts and has agreed to make all of his comments and feedback on-the-record through his own Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal blog or Echo Chamber Project's Blog.
Bye is actively recruiting more academic advisors and producers to participate in this transparent post-production process of open source, investigative documentary filmmaking. He is using his Echo Chamber Project blog to help coordinate these post-production activities and to brainstorm the best way to integrate the Internet and Filmmaking mediums.
In one recent blog post, Bye wrote about how the principles of open source can help a documentary film accomplish the following things:
- * Recruit volunteer help for post-production tasks
* Develop film content throughout the post-production process
* Recruit post-production expertise
* Market independent documentary films
* Create new economic competitive advantages through meaning creation
* Handle complexity and defy media logic
* Integrate objectivity and subjective judgments
* Reach new audiences
Bye has also outlined the following four steps that need to happen in order for an independent documentary filmmaker to establish institutional authority within a larger web logging community:
- 1.) Interview people who already have institutional authority within a certain community.
2.) Open source the interviews by transcribing and posting them on this website.
3.) Mail the interview transcript and audio CD to the interviewee so that they can verify the transcription.
4.) Find an established, third-party institutional authority to verify the transcripts via the interviewee or via the video & transcript. Once verified, then this third party vouch for this project within the community that they have established their credibility.
Bye is still establishing the institutional authority of his Echo Chamber Project Blog. He has completed the first stage of this process by interviewing over 40 established experts with a certain degree of institutional authority. He has posted some of these interview transcripts on his website, but he is still going through the interviewee and third-party verification process.
Bye is planning on completing his documentary sometime between the Fall of 2005 and Spring of 2006 depending on a number of variables. He hopes that the transparency of this post-production process will help establish a certain amount of institutional authority within the political and journalistic realms of the blogosphere.
For More Details: Visit http://www.echochamberproject.com
Contact MetaThought Productions at Kent@KentBye.com or 207-223-5566