Don’t mess with the Malang - Ethnographic video DVD online conversion challenges
Résumé
At the turn of the century, Jean Arlaud and Annie Mercier, two French ethnographers filmed in Pakistan. Their object of study was the transmission of technical and artistic knowledge in the making of trucks. They spent several months in Islamabad, before September 11 disrupted the representation of this part of the world.
Once a 90-minute film was edited, many ethnographic rushes were not used to complete the film.
Jean Arlaud and I therefore decided to make a video DVD using the commercial models of interactivity: film and multilingual menus, scholarly making of, ethnographic short films. Today the DVD format is almost obsolete. The challenge is to adapt this experience online, with new compressions and new constraints.
This paper will deal with choices made at the time to enhance the reality of fieldwork, experiments made on the field, as well as challenges of changes in distribution in order to benefit from past visual experiences.