This is the second installment of the interview with producer and teacher Alejandro Ángel, in which the concept of peripheral narratives and the role of the media today are explained.
By:
Luis Fernando Gutierrez Cano
Luis Jorge Orcasitas Pachecho
Continuing the analysis of peripheral narratives with Alejandro Ángel, he talks about the relationship of content with the user and how it proposes changes in the audiovisual discourse. In addition, it explains the concept of temporal planning of the plots and the influence of Digital TV on the convergence of media.
Alejandro Ángel is a Social Communicator and Journalist graduated from the Universidad del Norte de Barranquilla (Colombia); Master in Design and Realization of Television Programs and Formats from the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), and is currently a PhD student in Communication at the University of La Plata (Argentina).
In his career he has developed audiovisual and documentary production works, he is an associate professor and director of the CrossmediaLab of the Department of Social Communication and Cinematography of the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University of Bogotá, he is an executive producer at Armadillo: New Media & Films and Director of the Creative Commons & New Media Bogotá Film Festival. He is the producer of the transmedia documentary Manos de Luz and co-producer of the Puerto Rican documentary Diana de Santa Fe.
Interactive narratives have open content whose structures will depend on the user's navigation. What does this imply in terms of a new mode of enunciation of audiovisual discourse?
Alejandro Ángel: The main question regarding interactive narratives is how willing we as creators are to cede part of our authorship or our narrative scheme to the viewer; because that's what the viewer is going to find when they see an interactive product: a fragmented product in which he is going to be part of this product and he is going to be the one who gives the creation guidelines. No doubt there will be an initial part that the creator gives us, but the final story will come, above all, from the decisions that the viewer makes, and that I think is something that must be asked as a creator at any given time.
The audiovisual discourse undoubtedly changes. We can't keep thinking in a linear way when we make an interactive structure. We can not continue thinking about a narrative in which there will be a beginning, a development and an end (although there is also), but we must start thinking a little about those old processes of when the French New Wave emerged in which they began to tell us that all narration has a beginning, a development and an ending, but not necessarily in that order as Jean-Luc Godard put it.
How should it begin to be addressed then?
Alejandro Ángel: We have to start hacking the narratives, to realize that they can have different endings, different contents, different contexts. You also have to start thinking that it is not only the narrative processes that change, but also the aesthetic ones. Then, for example, in a product that is designed for the digital environment, things that until now could be normal can change, such as the size of plans or the visual axis towards which they are directed, depending on the interactivity that we are generating in the project.
A web documentary called Solos (webdocsolos.com), made in the Master of Creative Documentary of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, comes to mind, in which the characters engage in a conversation in that digital context, and that is why it is normal that there are planes in which the axis of the visual plane seems to be wrong in a classic and traditional narrative, but in the context of the interactivity that is generated in that platform it is totally valid and necessary. Then there begins to be a whole change not only narrative but also aesthetic.
Scolari also points out that beyond the telling of the story through various media, a transmedia narrative can, in turn, be developed through different languages. In a transmedia story, how does the contribution of each new text occur in the face of the totality of the statement?
Alejandro Ángel: One of the mistakes in which we sometimes fall when creating this type of new convergent narratives, is to believe that the mere fact that there are multiple screens already makes there is a transmedial narrative and what we are doing is transferring content, that is, making crossmedia content, which is when we pass the content from one platform to another, but it ends up saying and telling the same thing.
Actually what we must bear in mind is that a transmedia narrative asks that each new format develop, complement, expand or reduce, in some cases, the narrative of what is being told, that is, that it expands the narrative universe of what we are seeing at any given time. It is important to realize that nowadays formats are no longer formats thought from the media point of view, which was what we thought before in any narrative: that each narrative if it had multiple platforms were all media platforms.
Today we are talking, for example, that a documentary narrative can have a traditional thematic axis, but it can also have a "docu-game" or a play: formats that are not necessarily mediatic, but that to some extent expand the narrative universe and in very varied ways. That play in the documentary can be totally dramatic, while the "docu-game" can have a slightly more humorous tone. There is a counterpoint of the narrative of what is being told and ends up expanding a little the universe of the narrative that is being demarcated.
Henry Jenkins, who is credited with implementing the term, defined transmedia as "the art of storytelling from building worlds to the extent that complex environments are created that cannot be fully explored on a single platform." How important is the concept of timing in the development of peripheral narratives and in converging environments?
Alexander Angel: It is totally important the timing and how the total concept of the product is planned and what the viewer's approach will be. Undoubtedly, having so many universes in a transmedia story, no matter how minimal the number of formats, will always have several contents around it. That will make it not necessary for the user to explore all the content that is created; for example, a film from which emerge a series of webisodes of 30-35 chapters, a documentary, the edition of a book, and a series of contents around.
It is very difficult to pretend that a viewer, no matter how fanatical, sees all the contents, so what you have to try to do in terms of timing, is to define what the contents are, what is the duration of each of them and, above all, how each of them is going to defend itself; that is, that they are self-conclusive products, that if I see the film and do not see the webseries nothing happens because what happens is that the webseries only expands a narrative universe. If I watch the film and watch the web series then obviously I will know much more about the narrative universe, but if I see one or the other there should be no major problem. This applies to any of the transmedia projects that we can know such as Matrix or Harry Potter.
In this sense, in a context of Digital TV and media convergence, how to improve narrative results and optimize user/viewer participation and interaction based on productions focused on peripheral narrative proposals?
Alejandro Ángel: Maybe there is not yet - because so far it is being developed - a unique answer. Obviously telling good stories; in that sense, any of these clichés that we say about how to make good television or good cinema could appear, but beyond that the part of the question that I find interesting is how to optimize user participation and interaction, and for that is what I think there is no answer at the moment because we are still discovering that new viewer, we're actually forming it a bit.
If you look at this moment, the viewer is still a very classic viewer; we talk a lot about the "prosumer" and we fill our mouths a little talking about the "consumer who also produces content", but there are theories on the Internet, such as 90-9-1 that says that out of every 100 users, only one really is the one who creates content. Of the other 99 there are 90 that do not make any type of content or additional interaction and 9 that just start a little that contact with the creation of content through social networks. So, based on that, it's a little bit rushed right now to think that we really have some "prosumers" who are going to do our programs for us.
How are peripheral narratives approached from the creators?
Alejandro Ángel: I think that from the beginning, creators must continue to give much of the narrative guideline of our process to allow that small 1% to make our user-generated content grow a little, but it does not seem feasible that we can today focus everything on this single user to be the content creator because we can stay waiting for him.
Even so, these types of narratives generate an interesting interaction in the spectators; until less than 3 years ago, this type of content was almost inbred: the group of people who were researching and exploring around the topics was the same group that saw, read and commented on them; it seemed that it was something very powerful, but in reality the spectators were not arriving. Today, apart from these peripheral narratives having reached the traditional media, they have taken on a little more echo.
For example, here in Colombia there is Cuentos de Viejos (cuentosdeviejos.com) that has not only done very well from the inbred point of view of internal channel awards but also outwardly: it has had a good receptivity of the public and the transmedial component has already begun to move generating content with users; then it's something that's going to take time, but it's a matter of seeing how it moves.
How can these narratives contribute to the development of digital television?
Alejandro Ángel: Digital television is undoubtedly a huge challenge from an industrial point of view. I always comment on the analogy I once heard that digital television is like a big highway with a lot of old cars passing through it. And it is like this: it is a great highway full of technology and technical quality, but in reality its contents are still very basic, traditional and, even, often refried things that were done previously.
So these narratives can build enormously because we are in an era where a lot of good content is needed because we have where to transmit it through these great highways of information, not only digital but also digital television as such. It is an interesting challenge that will help a lot to small producers and especially to small regional producers to be able to create, with these new formats, interesting proposals that can be accepted within the framework of the needs of digital television to have excellent content and that allow the public to really be interested in being part of this new technological process.
How do these media collaborate in the formation of a national imaginary?, privileging certain aspects of culture and discarding others?
Alejandro Ángel: Something interesting about how these media manage to generate new imaginaries, part of the ease that – as I already mentioned – these new formats allow for the creation of stories without depending on a large medium; this is causing to some extent to be represented a lot of imaginaries that until now were a little hidden waiting for a technological opportunity like this.
This type of new narrative allows the country to be told from many aspects; some channels had previously begun to allow it as Señal Colombia; that if we look at it, it is actually a channel that is plagued - in the good sense of the word - with peripheral narratives because it has allowed us to begin to show what we are as a country in general.
In Colombia do we have experiences in content generation with new formats?
Alejandro Ángel: Yes, Señal Colombia is a channel that is broadly committed in Colombia to the whole issue of convergence; then we have to take it as an example, it shows us a little how this type of new formats can allow us to tell a country in many new ways.
There are also interesting projects such as 4 Ríos (http://4rios.co/), such as Paciente, by Jorge Caballero (http://pacientedoc.com/?lang=en); such as El Capitán Butrón, (http://www.capitanbutron.com/#!index/home), which is more focused on children; The Blue Puddle (http://elcharcoazul.co/) by Irene Lema; among others, a lot of projects that have been emerging little by little in Colombia that already show to some extent not only what we are as storytellers but what we are as a country.
For example, with Picó: la máquina musical del Caribe (http://www.pico.com.co/) by Roberto de Zubiría and Sergio Zaraza and Pregoneros de Medellín (http://www.pregonerosdemedellin.com/) by Angela Carabalí, we see how from these narratives that no longer arise from the center of the country, which was where we normally told what we were as a homeland, the regions and the periphery also begin to be told in an interesting and attractive way, winning even awards at the national and international levels, but above all allowing many other people to access these types of stories that were lost in the pile of stories we have to tell as a country.
What possibilities do peripheral narratives offer for the study of aspects such as network television, regional television, public and private television, open channels and paid channels, community television, alternative proposals, the articulation of peripheral discourses and the possibilities of producing new digital content for information, culture, education and citizenship?
Alejandro Ángel: This pile of peripheral, digital, transmedia narratives or whatever we want to call them, largely allow us to get a little out of the traditional story, the repeated stories, and start telling new stories, regional stories, community stories, a lot of new discourses that to a large extent have never had a voice, but thanks to these new formats can take it without any problem.
In that sense, regional television, public television and community television channels are all spaces that, without a doubt, should quickly connect with this whole issue of digital peripheral narratives and with the whole issue of convergence because that is where they will really be able to survive, telling those stories that are needed, that have much more visibility and that do not have it because precisely their channels are very little seen. Once they begin to connect with the digital environment and therefore with new formats, they will be able to reach many more people and will be able to allow these stories to connect in a more interactive way with all this audience.
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