Something’s been bugging me for a while: is Banksy’s film Exit Through the Gift Shop a hoax or not? I saw the film when it came out and loved it. I heard some rumblings questioning its authenticity, but didn’t think too much about it. While I was in Windsor, a bunch of the artists went to see it, and most didn’t like it. Their reason, more often than not, was that it was a self-celebrating fake documentary. So there were a few discussions about what exactly might have been faked – but no one knew for sure.

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Or, SRSI methodological debriefing.

As you may recall, I shot a bunch of documentary footage over the summer as part of Broken City Lab’s Storefron Residencies for Social Innovation. When I was wrapping up there, I started writing some posts about how the documentary-tech side of things went. However, with a summer and fall full of huge life events, I never posted them, and indeed work on the post-production for the doc ground to a halt. I’ve been getting back into it though, and figured I’d post these with some updates.

As my equipment setup wouldn’t have been possible even three years ago, the thoughts below may be helpful to those exploring video DSLRs for documentary production. Others may want to hit snooze, but there ya go.

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Right now I’m working on a documentary about artists in Windsor, Ontario.

There, I said it. I’m not sure what manner of resistance has taken hold of me, but I’ve found it difficult to actually post about this, despite having resolved a couple months back that I wanted to blog about the whole process. Part of it is when you want to post about something important to you, the standards go up from the usual “write a bunch of shit that’s on my mind and post it, quick” to something more involved that butts right up against your already constrained free time, as your time is already full doing the thing that’s important to you. Something like that.

Let me bring you up to speed. This may take more than one post as I’m going to post something today, that’s for damned sure, but I don’t have long to do it.

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Take a look at this rather good half-hour doc about Detroit from Al-Jazeera’s English station. This one is hosted/narrated by Avi Lewis. It’s a little too newsy and focused on the auto crisis for my tastes, but it’s pretty excellent. Isn’t Grace Lee Boggs a total champ?

Not that I’m a massive Nader fan, but he apparently has a point about GM using bankruptcy to move its operations to China, which is actually fairly scandalous. Anyway, take a look.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Konami cancels Six Days in Fallujah video game. “Despite the active involvement of dozens of Marines in creating the game, critics said that Konami was capitalizing on a war whose wounds were still fresh.” This is a big shame. People still see video games through the lens of escapist-exploitative-money-making, and not as a medium with a lot of potential to teach about the real world. I still remember playing Balance of Power) as a kid.

We need more documentary games!