From Sociocentric to Egocentric Place - From Panorama to 360° Video

2021

Advances in image recording, processing and distribution technology bring in new opportunities for documentary filmmakers to encourage action for social causes. Interactive forms of representation in documentary films such as virtual reality practices have particularly drawn strong attention due to their claimed potential for social change through encouraging people to take action. It proves difficult to anticipate particular social effects unless a documentary reaches a huge number of viewers, engage and encourage them to take action. In this context, it is argued that the production, processing, and viewing of 360-degree videos are relatively more affordable and easier compared to more immersive and engaging interactive documentary practices. Thus, 360-degree videos can reach and encourage more viewers who are expected to actively interact with documentary content. In the light of all these arguments, this article analyses two documentary films, Exiled (2019) and Behind the Fence (2016), through a comparative perspective. Exiled (2019) and Behind the Fence (2016) are documentaries both addressing the genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar and the mass exodus of Rohingya to Bangladesh. While Exiled is a traditional one, Behind the Fence is a 360-degree documentary. By analyzing those two documentaries, this article asserts that besides the unique advantages of 360-degree camera technology for non-fiction films, it has also several disadvantages in terms of production and viewing of documentaries. 360-degree cameras might emerge as the proper option for the representation of particular social situations, social movements, conflicts, and actions due to their capacity to record and show from limitless points of view. However, a powerful social effect should not be expected merely due to the usage of 360 video in nonfiction films.

Participations, 2018

In the context of aesthetic hybridizations between films, games and events, the documentary form is undergoing significant transformations resulting in a distinct relationship between content and audience. As one of the keywords, interactivity in its different modes (Gaudenzi 2013) and dimensions (Nash 2014) promises an opening of documentary artefacts to engage users (formerly known as viewers) actively in the process of negotiating individual experiences and perceptions of the world (cf. Aston and Gaudenzi 2012: 128). In this paper, I propose that interactive documentaries can be understood as situations aesthetically affording these negotiations in their own right. Due to their unique conditions of (inter-)action, 360° and Virtual Reality (VR) documentaries constitute a specific case in point that requires further examination. As ‘spaces of possibility’ (Salen and Zimmermann 2004), they are designed to create immersive situations that utilize performative elements to convey situated, multisensory, and embodied forms of knowledge. However, these digital environments are of an inherently ambiguous status just as their inhabitants’ own corporeality and sense of self. In order to enable a critical assessment, this article introduces a theoretical framework for the analysis of documentary situations in current 360° and VR works and the ways they might intervenein our perception (Grau 2003: 13).

Journal of Content, Community & Communication, 2020

With the proliferation of the Internet and the growing popularity of social media, the consumption of misinformation and biased content has become increasingly widespread. Although photographs are better representations of the truth, they are not immune to bias. The angle, the composition, the lighting, the mood and the framing of the photograph can heavily influence the message conveyed through it. The advances in photography, especially panoramic imagery, have allowed for 360-degree images. Two groups of participants were surveyed and shown cropped and complete images from 360-degree photographs. There was a 50% variance in perception of messages conveyed through the cropped and the complete 360-degree images. The latter presented a more accurate and complete picture of what was happening and offered more information to the observers. The 360-degree images conveyed the message with 86% accuracy in one image set and with 60% in the other. In comparison, the cropped frames conveyed the message with 35% accuracy in one image set and with zero accuracy in the other. This indicates a massive increase in the accuracy of messaging and reduction in the bias introduced through the photographic technique and editing. 360-degree photography could revolutionize the field of photojournalism by providing more accurate and unbiased representations of incidents, subjects and their environments.

InVisible Culture, 2010

Doxa Comunicación, 2018

The aim of this paper is to identify some of the narrative resources being used in immersive features to increase in the viewer the sensation of being inside the represented reality represented. In order to do, so we have used a blended methodology based on content analysis and in depth interviews with their creators, to perform a comparative analysis between 2 Spanish projects.

Communication & Society, 2019

This paper offers the results of a content analysis on the level of immersion in 360º video features produced by Spanish media. Unlike other conventional ways of storytelling, this new modality provides the viewer with a sensation of being really immerse in a reality that is only being represented, which favors a deeper and more meaningful understanding of it. Our study is divided in three sections. Firstly, we develop a brief theoretical framework that includes the definition and foundations on which immersive feature is based. From this theoretical foundation, we draw a scale to measure the immersion level of these pieces and we confront our proposal to the qualified assessment of 10 experts. Finally we apply this scale on a sample of 148 360º video features produced by Spanish media between January 2015 and December 2017. The aim is to analyze its use and also to infer some good practices that can be useful not only for scholars researching on this new format but also for practitioners producing it.

This chapter presents a discussion on how the use of 360o cameras could be used for ethnographic work. Suggesting three ways, as visual notes, to share fieldwork experiences and to sense the researcher emplacement in the field, the text presents some preliminary notes on 360o cameras as a research technology.

The paper argues that the experience of viewing 360° historical scenes, either within the "real" environment of the panorama or contemporary "virtual" environments, arises in part from the attraction of the affecting experience. Tracing a line from ancient Greece and Rome through to contemporary technological innovations in Virtual Reality, we explore an idea that what links all of these experiences is not solely a response to social, political or historical streams but a manifestation of a pan-­historical human desire for the Dionysiac. Using texts by theorists as diverse as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Rheingold, Gibson and Shaviro, we suggest that the impetus for viewing historical scenes within 360° environments is at least partly involved in wanting to go beyond spectatorship and intellectual curiousity, towards presence and intoxication. Attempts to tease out the ideological content of an immersive experience must be done in the context of the craving of audience members for the sensual, the sensational, the being present, and other "illegitimate" forms of impetus to view and experiences. These always already exist alongside and perhaps even before the more legitimate goals of gaining knowledge, historical perspective, education and information. Charlton and Moar explore the idea that this desire for immersion impels us to submerge ourselves in historical scenes. Thus immersion is the link between panoramas and new panoramic experiences afforded by new technologies such as the Oculus Rift. Much has been written about the cultural, political and historical content of Panoramas, with excellent work being published on the history of their development, exhibition, popularity and decline, as well as their cultural and ideological meaning. However, in this paper we will attempt to come at the subject from different angle, concentrating on affects which may be felt during the viewing of Panoramas, and furthermore suggest that these are common to contemporary 360° viewing experiences. We propose to excavate a link between these affects and that experience which Nietzsche describes as the "Dionysiac". In doing so, we echo the aspiration of that stream of contemporary cultural theory which concentrates on the affect of the encounter with the artistic or cultural artefact. This is epitomised in Shaviro's ambition to see movies not as texts to be read but rather considered in a way which "foregrounds visceral, affective responses (…) in contrast to most critics' exclusive concern with issues of form, meaning, and ideology. Film is a vivid medium, and it is important to talk about how it arouses corporeal reactions of desire and fear, pleasure and disgust, fascination and shame" (Shaviro, 1993: viii). Here we suggest that the same might be done with 360° experiences such as the Panoramic painting and 360° VR enabled by the Oculus Rift headset.

Visual Anthropology, 2018

Cameras always seem to capture a little too little and a little too much. In ethnographic films profound insights are often found in the tension between what we are taught socially to perceive and the peculiar non-social perception of the camera. Ethnographic filmmakers study the worlds of humans while leaning on, and sometimes being inspired, obstructed and even directed by the particular non-human and monologic forms of seeing and hearing that a camera can produce. But how would a camera perceive the footage it produces, and what would it think of the various ways we use it? In this textual experiment, I imagine what different cameras might reply to these questions if they could speak. In doing so, I call attention to ethnographic filmmaking as a more-than-human, more-than-collaborative and more-than-dialogical mode of cultural critique. All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.-Andr e Bazin [2005] HUMAN BODIES ON A RED CARPET: INTERVIEW WITH EX1 CS: I would like to discuss the video that we recorded on July 5, 2011, in Abu Omar's apartment in the so-called ghetto of Gellerup, in Denmark. Some of the footage ended up forming the opening scene of our film, Descending with Angels [2013]. It's an intense situation where a jinn is being exorcised from a human body. I wasn't fully happy about the way in which this scene was recorded. In particular, I have a problem with the tripod that was standing in the corner. It intruded into the frame while we were filming. I would like to hear your opinion-do you have any comments concerning this? CHRISTIAN SUHR is a filmmaker, assistant professor and coordinator of the Eye and Mind Master's Programme in Visual Anthropology at Aarhus University. His ethnographic filmmonograph Descending with Angels [in press] is about Islamic exorcism and Danish psychiatry, and is based on 18 months of doctoral fieldwork with Muslim patients, exorcists and psychiatrists in Aarhus, Denmark. He is the editor of Transcultural Montage [with Rane Willerslev, Berghahn 2013] and a director of the award-winning films Unity through Culture

Global Society, 2019

This scene setting article is designed to take stock of the meaning of immersive technologies for humanitarian encounters, particularly 360 degree video 'virtual reality' film making. Drawing on salient scholarship in realm of the political economy of technology, aesthetics, affect and visual securitisation, as well as a number of notable deployments of VR films as a tool for NGO and IGO project fundraising, I consider the interchange between immersion, emotion and action within VR as humanitarian praxis, and what kind of politics this may produce. In particular, the article considers the UNICEF film 'Clouds Over Sidra' and the African Parks co-sponsored film 'The Protectors' which highlight not only the utility of the technology in creating immersive experiences for audiences and donors, but also some of the broader politics of empathy and authorial control arising from a visual technology that purports to allow audiences a more objective 'see for yourself' style experience.