Kevin B. Lee - Tips on Desktop Documentary:

The first desktop documentary we were introduced to was Kevin B Lee's Transformers documentary, where we see someone navigate the online world as they explore the story of controversies with the film. Looking into Kevin B Lee I found a short video from a lecture he did about the format of Desktop Documentary and the benefits behind it. From listening to this I was made aware it was a recent video as he mentions lockdown and how this is something that makes desktop documentary a much more viable choice to present your doc this way, not just for the stylistic reasons but for logistical ones as well. 

In the video he discusses what a desktop doc needs to do, in a nut shell, it's to make a story out of your own screen life. The hardest part of making a doc like this is to remove yourself from the more traditional format and treat it as you would if you were genuinely online browsing things online. This can make things less formatted and a bit more reckless i.e opening multiple tabs, playing multiple videos. The important thing with this though is to manipulate this into a story that creates meaning behind each search and provides the viewer with some knowledge similar to any documentary. 

On top of this he speaks on 'knowing your technical tools', to be able to record your screen isn't necessarily something everyone knows. Luckily for me I am aware of softwares such as OBS which allows you to record anything on your screen, but I also am able to use 'Windows + G' which screen records a window  as if it is a game. These two forms of screen recording are what I will be using for this process. 

Kevin B Lee also mentions the 6 main questions you must answer while making the desktop doc, I will state what these are and go onto answer each one after the documentary is made. The 6 questions are:

What? - What themes, experiences or topics are you looking to explore? Show the process of discovering the topic and the process of learning rather than just explain what it is.

Who? - Who is the story about, yourself or others? 

Where? - What websites or platforms will you use to show the topic? What does each one bring to the story?

When? - What is the role of time in the doc? Do you want to simulate the experience of it being live and happening as we see it?

Why? - What do you want to discover and what does the use of desktop documentary help in shwoing this discovery?

Finally, Kevin mentions that you must 'embrace the glitches', if you are replicating a desktop experience we are all aware not everything goes right, so we must take that into account. He mentions how he started his desktop documentary and it was due to him struggling to edit his doc in a traditional sense. In annoyance he took all his footage and opened it all up at once and the way these files all opened on the desktop looked interesting to his friend who said, 'just show it like that'. This then led to Kevin asking can this be done and if so he'd have to film his own screen. This then led to the style of desktop documentary that many have used since. 


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