Technology, Justice, & Creative Practice
Welcome to The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network
Desktop Cinema Workshop
On campus in the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece
The intensive Desktop Cinema Workshop, conducted in April 2022, was a methodological seminar for creating documentaries in a computer environment. Desktop Cinema is a type of cinematography that one finds more and more frequently in festivals and film platforms, as it provides a unique way to present how the world is experienced through the screen and the digital networks with which we come in daily contact.
Through utilizing files and visuals that we produce as users or that have already been posted on the internet, desktop cinema can be a new way of analyzing and understanding today's world. This format is of particular interest for anthropology students who want to do research in a more interactive and multimodal way, enabling the creation of participatory / collaborative relationships in research.
The workshop was conducted at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly in Volos on three days - Saturday April 2nd, Thursday April 7th (during class time for “Digital Storytelling and Multimodal Anthropology”) and on Saturday April 9th. The workshop was run by Constantinos Diamantis, a documentary filmmaker and MA in Visual Anthropology, with the help of undergraduate student Ilias Marios Chaliamalias.
The workshop presented all the necessary steps to learn how to create a desktop movie, from script writing to final export. The workshop began by presenting a complete desktop video which we will gradually deconstructed in the editor interface of DaVinci in order to demonstrate how a computer-based film can be composed from scratch. We also held an opening screening of desktop films on Saturday April 2nd which other members of our community (~25 people) attended.
The workshop was addressed to undergraduate students of the course Digital Storytelling and Multimodal Anthropology of Prof. Papailias at the IAKA department, but opened through Facebook call to the rest of the University of Thessaly community. Three students from the new department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries also participated. Ultimately, 14 students participated in the full workshop. From this workshop, four short films were created that were screened at our Community-Facing event in May.
Organized by Penelope Papailias
Facilitated by Constantinos Diamantis
Workshop assistant: Ilias Marios Chaliamalias
