Development Cooperation Handbook/The video resources linked to this handbook/The Documentary Story/Distribution as a another story

The challenge of distribution

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In a sense the story of how a media product is distributed can never be a part of the story of the product itself, because it has to be completed before you go for distributing it. But this is really a deficiency of the story. Because distribution is the main challenge. Everything gets sense only as far as distribution is a success. So how can we miss in the story the most important part of it?

In many cases the logic of distribution dictates all the terms to the logics of production and postproduction. In such cases there is no real sense to tell the story of the distribution because it is first pre-conceived and then super-imposed on the whole product.

But in our case it is different. We had a research to do which was independent from any distribution logics. We follow an organic thread that we did not know where it will lead to. We did not know if we will get the right answers to our search. Then we did not know is we would have been able to rearrange the whole answer in a meaningful product. And surely we do not know now if we would be successful in the distribution effort. So we need to put the distribution challenge at the core of our story. But how to do it?

In a sense we can do narrating how the product was being shared and broadcast as it was being developed through internet (the Wiki and the YouTube channel). But as the editing is finalized we need to narrate how we used internet for promoting the access to the resources and how we contacted media distributors for airing it in the normal television channels. So we need now to keep on producing and editing this portion of the story until the end. Possibly including in the documentary also “the faces” of the distributors. And this would be very much in line with the documentary approach. Where we wanted to put the faces of all projects. Where we wanted to avoid the “God voices” and put the stakeholders voices. Where we wanted to substitute the false plenteousness of “news neutrality” or news “objectivity” with the truth of the subjectivity of ongoing discourses and the humility of ongoing dialogue. A documentary which does not pretend to present “facts” to a passive viewer. Instead a documentary which is an ongoing “act” inviting the viewer not to be passive but put his subjectivity also on board of this action. And respond to our appeal with a choice of responsibility. And that is the meaning of “Vrinda” that we want to convey with this product.

Community as distributor

We have always been aware that distribution of the documentary was the main challenge. We had been confronting the main media stereotypes and assumptions and so it was sure we were going to face a lot of obstacles in distributing the videos on the major media channels.

At an initial stage of the project we did already reached the Television and the version broadcast in Italy by RAI1 had been a successful breaching of the usual news formats. We did managed in Italy to bring to the general public the main concepts of "world development agenda" and "international cooperation for the removal of extreme poverty". But the message had been "watered" with pietistic moralism in the edition finalized in autonomy by Francesco. And the whole issue f international cooperation was finally marginalized in a sort of "cultural" third page. We instead wanted to bring it to the forefront of the policy issues presented in the news. And we wanted that the viewers after watching the reportage, had the possibility to learn more and eventually take a stand, assume responsibility, and participate.

That was thew reason we had decided to utilize Internet as our main broadcasting channel. In the ⇒ TVP Channel we uploaded separately:
⇒ The Development cooperation stories
⇒ The development Cooperation Issues
⇒ The interviews in English, in Italian and in Hindi
⇒ The stories related to the specific MDGs
⇒ The backstage dialogues
⇒ The draft version of the Episodes edited for a television distribution

In a sense the "Episodes" are not meant to be broadcast on the Internet but on the television. The interactivity of Internet enables a personalized way of moving through the video resources and the viewer can chose her/his own itinerary through the video playlists and decide what to see first. On the other side the interactivity of Internet, left to itself without a unifying thread, let the viewer to be as alone as a client in a supermarket, who has to choose between the different items, but is not in a process of "dialogue" with the producers, nor in a process of community with the other "clients". Rather then a "clearing house" we wanted a "village feast", where there are shelves with goods, but one can also find a unity of purpose and a shared identity. So before and after the interactivity we felt the need to create a unitary "story" of the whole event. That story has been threaded in a narration and had been articulated in the "episodes of the documentary". But it could also take the form of a "book" or a "film". In any case something that has a thread that leads the story and gives unity to the various experiences. Including the experience of exploiting the interactivity and the ubiquity of the Internet.

The other reason why television was conceived as a strategic media in spite of its being already, in many senses, an "old medium", is that bringing the product on to the TV screens was the challenge of exposing to the general public what our group of author wanted to communicate. It is like bringing to the public theater of an innovative cultural and political message, that was initially framed in alternative circles, but that would have made not much an impact if confined only within a closed group of alternative thinkers unable - or unwilling - to give testimony of themselves to the wider community.

So one the draft episodes were ready the challenge of distribution started and the story itself got enriched with the ongoing efforts finding the distribution partners and getting the products on the television palimpsests. And here is again where we looked at the potentiality of Internet to enable grouping and team work.

We created a Google+ community specifically dedicated to distribution, and we started building the partnerships for distribution and broadcast of the edited episodes. Which we continued to edit as the story of the documentary moved on in overcoming the distribution challenges. Thanks to the feedback from the distributor-community and of the users of this Wikibook, we got new ideas for improvement and customization of the documentary for specific target audiences.

Wilma, who was the first of the members of the producing team to share the efforts for distributing the documentary posed an important question. But which broadcaster would be interested to distribute on the "small screen" something that is being already "aired" through the Internet? I had not thought to it, since for me these are different medias and surely is interesting to make a film of something that already has been seen in theaters and read in books. Internet and TVs have different audiences and are seen through a different relational pragmatics. They can well coexist. But the mentality of Television is generally very narrowly confined to self centered stereotypes and they want to be "the news", which for them often means "the first" (as if the whole people were watching the whole palimpsest of all the televisions all the time!) .

I suggested her to challenge this self centered notion of the televisions, And actually present to the television the fact (that was true) that we were narrating (in the telvision) the story of how a group of people had created an Internet channel and a wikibook on the International Cooperation of development. It was the story of that adventure, which we collected in the videos and that we were presenting to the TV audience for the first time. True ... but then I needed to move ahead quiqly in finalizing the draft editing of the episodes (still based in the development stories collected on the ground) with the "story of the story", that was our own adventure, as I had scripted in the wikibook but not yet inserted in the episodes. True, I had to do that, But I wanted to do it along with the ongoing challenge of distribution. Was it possible?

After a first check, Wilma decided to contact one of the Directors she interviewed ( see the short Days of Miracles and Wonders, Bluindaco@2013) at the backstage of Biografilm Festival, an important Italian Documentary Festival focused on Lives/Biographies. In particular, she remembered of Slavko Martinov, the Director of Propaganda, a disruptive and shocking documentary of 2012 that, even if already published on the web and available for free to everybody, is now almost virally requested at the main International Documentary Festivals, and on International TV channels as well. How is it possible? After discussing with Slavko, Wilma realized that Tv broadcast does not worry about the Internet because their audience doesn't know about the Internet. Only what's on their screen. Each territory decides how it will treat the film and we can enter discussion about exclusivity right as well. Normally a distributor or sales agent is taking care of this. So our issue now seems to be that of finding out a good sales agent or distributor. There are many, we just need one we can trust or go to broadcasters ourselves if we find out what the deals are. Wilma is investigating about that.

See also

⇒ The Vrinda project Documentary

On Youtube ⇒ Utilization of collected resources for TV broadcast

⇒ TVP Community for distributing the media products
⇒ The challenge of distribution
On Wikipedia ⇒ Distribution (business)

⇒ The Vrinda Project Channel

The challenge of distribution

⇒ Community as distributor
On Wikipedia ⇒ Distribution (business)