Scaffolding community documentary film making using commissioning templates

Abstract

Crowdsourced video is now a viable tool with which broadcasters and communities alike can produce authentic, high quality video content. However, the literacy, language, skills and tools to produce a documentary through commissioning content are currently difficult to acquire. We explore opening up the documentary film commissioning process to community contributors by developing a framework which instructs, guides and informs nonprofessional contributors in capturing the content required for making videos. Through the results of an in-the-wild deployment we discuss how our framework scaffolds content creation, the capture of high quality footage and coordination amongst teams of contributors. We then discuss how this can inform community media creation in the future.