So now that we all (well, some) of us agree that the radio documentary needs to enter the digital field: What exactly is it that prevents us from taking action? Lack of insight: Many colleages and managers still have not yet understood that the digital revolution outreaches the one when radio emerged 90 years ago. … More IFC 2014: Unblocking Our Brains – So What Now?
“A good pcitures is one that makes the viewer think and feel, that informs and brings a deeper understanding of the subject”, says the London based freelance photographer and filmmaker Edmond Terakopian (UK). The Nagorny Karabach warzone, the earthquake in Armenia, the London bombings, patients of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital – lenses instead of … More IFC 2014: Lessons From Lenses
My Escape (#minflykt, Sweden) is a project about finding escape stories in order to “make a collective memory come to life”, as its producer Robert Barkman puts it. It is a radio, web and social media based crowd sourcing project that inspired hundreds of listeners and users to share their moving stories about their families’ … More IFC 2014: My Escape
Why Are You Taping Me Making Coffee? by Mariannick Bellot (Libération, France) is part of an award-winning multimedia programme on documentary making. Three radio doc makers (Mehdi Ahoudig, Angélique Tibau, Béatrice Leca) are reflecting on their life and work, thus painting an acoustic portrait of a passion that is able to turn journalism into a … More IFC 2014: Why Are You Taping Me Making Coffee?
“It’s Private” is an extensive interview. It is Brett Ascarelli’s (Sweden*) very personal approach to her mother’s friend, a female role model, a former diplomat who still has Kofi Annan’s portrait hanging on the wall. It is a charming piece about non-communication, about privacy, boundaries, about answering the question of who you are. *produced under … More IFC 2014: It’s Private
The Woman on the Ice is a subtle documentary for Third Ear, an online platform dedicated to audio programmes. Rikke Houd (Denmark) tells the story of Karen Roos, a Danish nurse who went to Greenland in 1932 and disappeared nine months later. “The Woman on the Ice” is a slow (and somewhat sentimental) piece on … More IFC 2014: The Woman on the Ice
Eat, Pray, Mourn: Crime and Punishment in Jakarta by Siobhán McHugh (Australia) is about life and death. Maybe overdone in terms of sound and language, it is a striking story about the lynching of Buyung the thief believed to have magical powers, the shooting of Yusli by the police, suspected of having stolen a motorbike, about … More IFC 2014: Eat, Pray, Mourn
In autumn 2008 Agneta Westlund is found dead by a lake in Sweden. The police seizes her husband Ingemar suspected of having murdering his wife. And the nightmare begins. The award-winning documentary Woman Found Dead By the Lake Shore by Hugo Lavett (Sweden) is an in-depth analysis, an autopsy of an error of justice. Striking.
Ben Fawkes presents Soundcloud, “the world’s largest sound sharing platform for music and audio”. The embeddable Soundcloud player is well known (due to its seamless integration into all major social networks), and major radio stations throughout Europe use it for audio-on-demand, podcasting and even user-generated recording purposes.
People of M10, the multimedia project by Nadine Kreuzahler, Jenny Marrenbach and Johannes Nichelmann, rbb (Germany), tells people’s stories from the Berlin tram line number M10. Five-minute pieces of original sound are subtly visualized by black-and-white photo stills (and yet deliberately not showing the speakers); M10 passengers are freely talking about what they are up … More IFC 2014: People of M10
Digezz is a multimedia platform of the University of Applied Sciences Chur, Switzerland, for multi-, cross- and transmedia formats produced by students. Digezz is featuring arts, photography, art design, information graphics, radio and video. Digezz is a platform targeted at young people with a special interest in media and arts throughout German-speaking Europe, at professional … More IFC 2014: Digezz – Teaching Multimedia
The Fighter Pilot by Kathy Tu (USA) is a very fast-paced, chokingly dense piece on modern warfare and on military duty. The award-winning feature tells the story of the young fighter pilot Michael McGee during the Gulf war and of one of his deadly missions. It literally takes us into the cockpit of a US … More IFC 2014: The Fighter Pilot
Lions On Tour by Nicoline Greer (Ireland) follows the path of a renowned Irish rugby team going to New Zealand in 1930 in order to play against the All Blacks. It is an charming tale of a long forgotten sports event, a piece of family history and a touching love story after all. (And of … More IFC 2014: Lions on Tour
Grandma’s War by Ida Karine Gullvik (Norway) is the author’s award-winning story about her grandmother’s shocking fate during World War II. It is an intriguing personal journey into a past beyond collective convictions of nazi villains and Norvegian bravery, a disturbing quest for historic and individual truth.
I Cried To Lagos by Natasa Konopitzky and Thomas Gasser (Austria) tells the desperate story of Vincent, a young Nigerian refugee in Austria who had been arrested and brought back to his home country. Vincent hates Lagos, Nigeria, his hopeless and miserable life, and keeps dreaming about getting back to Austria. Beautifully composed (and although … More IFC 2014: I Cried to Lagos
Superstring Sonata by Nikoletta Atanasova (Bulgaria) is a disturbing piece about human trafficking and abuse, about manipulation, fear and breaking dreams. Rather a slow, extensive report, the documentary unfolds its story in an authentic and gripping manner.
Hören, wie die Sterne kreisen (Hear the Stars in Heaven Turning) by Astrid Alexander (Germany) is a documentary on Marianne Kaiser, an 80 years old dominant singing teacher, and her young and highly gifted student Alexander preparing for a highly renowned musical competition. Even if the protagonists remain distant and strangely anemic, it is an … More IFC 2014: Hear the Stars in Heaven Turning
“Fiction is easy, it’s all about ‘Once upon a time’, and it’s imprinted in your DNA. Documentary is what it’s all about”, says Simon Elmes, BBC (UK). Storytelling is a magical process, but the important questions are: Is your story really important, relevant, emotionally powerful, exciting? One example for a gripping beginning is Anatomy of … More IFC 2014: A Story Worth Telling – A Toolbox (Sort of)
#ifc14 Twitter experts: Rhian Roberts, head of development of BBC 5 live and social media guru, and her team @radiodocs set sails for an expedition across the ever-changing sea of social media – in search of a new continent called Social Radio. Follow!
“The only constancy today is change”, says Alan Hall, Falling Tree (UK). His multimedia experiments with Short Cuts (BBC, a short storytelling format in Tuesday’s afternoon programme, see A Tale of a Sickly Whale, Wash Club, Josie Long’s Interactive Comic) explore new ways of making radio visible in the digital world. Other experiments were Why … More IFC 2014: Making Radio Visible
Turning radio docs into web docs, harnessing the digital potential for distribution and why media organisations should go “digital first”: Francesca Panetta, The Guardian (UK), gives insight into three of her projects (“The shirt on your back”, a disturbing piece on the Bangladeshi garment industry; “In flight”, a real-time data driven interactive on the global … More IFC 2014: Digital Fields
According to Chris Brooks, Battery Radio (Canada), Inside Outside Battery is a “landscape documentary or perhaps a place-based feature (unless it’s not)”. It is an iOS or Android app taking to out into the landscape playing all sorts of audio – literary features, songs, current affairs, investigative journalism, historical documentaries, even a full-blown ghost story – … More IFC 2014: Inside Outside Battery
Walking 100 miles (161 kilometers) is a incredibly tough. Interviewing the long distance walker George Foot (76) on his probably last long distance walk, mic in hand and walking backwards, is almost as hard. Alan Dein and Jolyon Jenkins (UK) did it, and their piece Lives in a Landscape: The Longest Walk is a portrait … More IFC 2014: Lives in a Landscape: The Longest Walk
Hans Petter Martinsen used to be a boxer, a drug addict and a gangster beating up people not paying their debts. 53 years old and having found faith, he is about to sell his old house and start a new life, and he seeks forgiveness from the people he once harmed. A criminal life unter the … More IFC 2014: Torpedo in the Sea of Oblivion
“Wood warms up the sound” the American singer and songwriter Raul Midon says, playing his guitar and listening carefully to echo and reverb, to the acoustic atmosphere: Architecture Through Other Eyes is a project exploring how blind people’s perception of indoor surroundings, how architecture sounds and smells and feels (“Sighted people don’t touch things, you … More IFC 2014: Architecture Through Other Eyes
True stories can be told in very few words, Ernest Hemingway said (“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn”). Life, lives, in ads: Deutschland in Kleinanzeigen (Germany in Small Ads) by Martina Schulte (Germany) is a portrait of a society reflected by what there is for sale: Toys reflecting a boy’s longing for a girlfriend, an … More IFC 2014: Germany in Small Ads
The journey has begun, and here we* are, eager to start listening to the best programmes radio has to offer. More (actually much more!) to follow. * = a pocketful of gadgets, a toothbrush and me (see last post).
Attending a conference is like joining a caravan that is about to cross the desert. You know what it will be like – oceans of sand and burning heat -, but once you have actually crossed it you realise there has been much more: Sand and rocks in any color from black and brown to … More IFC 2014 – Crossing the Desert
IFC AudioDocs 