The BBC’s “Digital Revolution”

Think ‘documentary filmmaker’ and you conjure up images of the Maysle Brothers working away in thier Soho loft cutting Gimme Shelter at 3 AM.

Not that that was such a bad film.  It was great.

But documentary filmmaking has, until now, been the purview of a small corps of elitists (not that there is anything wrong with elitism), most of them employees of organizations such as The BBC or NBC News (before they wiped out their doc unit), or CBS (before they wiped out their doc unit).

Get the idea?

But now, The BBC, a remarkably progressive institution for one so old and established (and here we show again the positive value of not having to worry about ratings), has embarked upon a unique experiment in documentary filmmaking – the open platform doc.

We are all aware of the value of open-platform software codes – places where anyone and everyone can contribute their bit to building the codes and tweaking them all along the way.  So much better than a few boffins (to use the British term) labouring (to use the British spelling) away in some until room at Microsoft.

Open platform is also the basis of Wikipedia.

Now, The BBC brings open platform to documentary filmmaking.

(Well, nearly open platform – but we’ll deal with that in a minute).

The Beeb is supported by a license fee – that is, a kind of tax that everyone in the UK with a television set (which is pretty much everyone, but may not be for long), has to pay a yearly fee of around $250, all of which goes to The BBC.  That means that The BBC has an annual income of about $4billion.  That’s a lot.

But it also means that all of the content that The BBC produces actually belongs to the public, who paid for it.

What a novel concept.

(Note.  All of the photos that NASA takes are also in the public domain and belong to you! Go get some if you want. They’re free).

OK.

So what The BBC has now done is to open up that archive of material (or at least a small portion of it) to the general public and asked them to participate in the making of a documentary about The Digital Revolution.

You can see the project here.

Can The BBC create a kind of Wikipedia for documentary films?

We’ll see.

And while I applaud the effort, I think it is still a bit conservative and controlled for my taste.

There are, after all, millions of video cameras out there (out there … or here), and while the BBC stuff is nicely shot, why limit contributors to what The BBC has done?

This is a bit like creating an open platform novel (not a bad idea), but limiting contributors to only paragraphs from ‘established’ writers.

“Hey!”, says one JK Rowling, unemployed single mom who likes to write in her spare time, “can’t I make up my own stuff?”

Nope.  Just stick to what we’re offering here.

So while The BBC ‘gets’ it, it still remains, shall we say, nervous?

Come on, Beeb.

Be Bold.

Great idea, this WikiDoc, but open up the process all the way.

You never know what you’re going to get.

*and many thanks to the BBC’s new Chief Creative Officer, Pat Younge, for turning me on to this concept.