BBC3's three-part TV documentaryOur War is also a series of films made exclusively for the web that explores how young people - British soldiers, their families, Afghan civilians and members of the Afghan National Army - are affected by the war in Afghanistan.
The films are produced using footage shot by the people themselves: telling their stories through their eyes. While user-generated content (UGC) is now an integral part of news coverage, where grainy videos illustrate and regularly break stories, documentaries more often limit themselves to small amounts of footage that don't have a polished, even cinematic, look.
But the quality, availability and accessibility of that kind of footage is increasing. How will that affect documentary-making?
Our War integrates UGC with more conventional film-making in many different ways. I hope that detailing these will spark a debate on how this sort of footage can and should be used.
The production kicked off when the Ministry of Defence agreed to grant the BBC permission to use pretty much any UGC taken by British soldiers in the past ten years. This unprecedented access allowed the BBC3 team to gather terabytes of soldier-shot video of the war. The aim was to create a landmark documentary series on the war in Afghanistan within a loosely chronological framework.
The team researched not just the footage but the history of the war; to find storylines, key characters and battles that would tell a story that was both factually accurate and true to the soldiers' perspective.
The result makes for compelling TV viewing (iPlayer only available in the UK). Executive producer Colin Barr says the soldiers' video footage is "another layer of material" for film-makers: interviews, archive, graphics and a narrator's voice provide the all-important context for the raw UGC.
Online, Our War wanted to go in even further with the use of UGC. According to Multiplatform Executive Producer Derren Lawford:
"We wanted to ensure that the audience had the chance to explore what it means to be young and affected by a war, whether you're a soldier, an Afghan, or a young person whose parents, siblings or loved ones are involved in the conflict. Key to this was ensuring that all the films were shot by young people; their stories, their words, their pictures."
The team absorbed hours of UGC footage and BBC-shot interviews with soldiers and came up with 15 key questions that had interesting audio and visual answers, such as:
- What's it like to be shot at?
- How does losing a friend at war feel?
- Why do soldiers film the war?
We kept in-vision interviews to a minimum and mixed the voices of the soldiers with videos often taken by other soldiers in different regiments at different times. If there's an overarching narrative, it's to be found in the whole, not individual films. When it came to telling the story through the eyes of soldiers' families, we provided our contributors with a little mentoring and a Flip camera where needed.
We then cut their footage - including additional material such as family photos - into, for instance, the touching story of Jazz Morley, whose brother has been out to Afghanistan. She never met us but spoke to the BBC team regularly and sent us footage that she filmed for us on her iPhone 4.
Sixteen-year-old Emma-Lee provides a candid account of the ups and downs of growing up in a military family. This was filmed in conjunction with BBC Learning as part of a school project. As well as filming herself with a Flip cam, Emma-Lee was filmed by her peers.
To tell the story through the eyes of Afghans, we had several different approaches.
Commissioning UGC from Afghanistan was more complicated due to technical difficulties - the country's low bandwidth made sending files to London tricky - and the potential risks for contributors.
The recent increased use of UGC from Arab countries in news coverage has led to interesting discussions about whether the duty of care shown by broadcasters to contributors is enough. Within documentary-making, there is little question that any additional risks taken by contributors should be absolutely minimal and well-assessed - the lack of breaking news scenarios and additional time should generally enable producers to plan risk-adverse situations.
So in areas where filming was risky in Afghanistan, a producer went out to assess the risks, meet characters, provide training, and a camera. This was similar to the model used with British families and provided the intimate first-person narrative of an Afghan rock star and a wonderful insight into the Afghan National Army.
Other stories from Afghanistan were found and crafted 'remotely' from London, using the internet and social media. We 'Friended' Afghans on Facebook, Orkut and YouTube; talked to them about our project; targeted groups of bloggers; and asked Afghans who had contacted the BBC News website through the UGC Hub for their stories and footage.
These trails led, among others, to the story of Kamal, an Afghan girl who candidly explains why she dresses up as a boy. Afghan-Canadian Zahira provided us with the wonderful UGC she had taken in Afghanistan. We only needed to ask her for a video diary to use as a framework.
We found other stories we wanted to tell but couldn't show pictures of due to practical considerations or safety issues that required anonymity. So to tell the story of Mahdy, who was trained by the Mujahideen, or Mustafa, who fears Taliban reprisals, we worked once more with BBC Learning, which mentored young people in the UK to produce animations to tell their stories.
Finally, we put together voices of Afghans that we interviewed in the UK with Afghan UGC we had found remotely - a model similar to that used for the soldier films, if broader - to create generic films about growing up amid war.
So will documentaries in future include increasing mixtures of curation, commissioning and creation of UGC-focused content? And how does integrating UGC with editorially crafted content work best?
The short films for Our War are featured at the Sheffield Documentary Festival. Please comment here, or blog or tweet your thoughts, and I will do my best to promote the #OurWar conversation around UGC here and on other platforms. The films are available worldwide, so everyone is free to join.
Silvia Costeloe (@scosteloe) is a journalist on the BBC News UGC Hub and producer of Our War online. She also lectures in journalism at London Metropolitan University. Full credits for the project can be found here.
