online documentaries | Docs on Screens

In more than a decade at Channel 4 heading up factual multiplatform content, Adam Gee commissioned many multi-award winning productions, including Embarrassing Bodies and the Big Fish Fight. After a stint launching All 4’s short form video service, he is now commissioning for Little Dot Studios, who have earned astonishing viewing numbers with their flagship Real Stories documentary channel. A regular guest speaker for my digital engagement class, Adam excels at spotting trends and keeping ahead of the game in a dizzying, fast-changing media landscape. I chatted with him about his work finding new pathways for documentary filmmakers.

Carol Nahra: Can you tell me about your role at Little Dot?

Adam Gee: I was brought in last summer to commission the first original content for Little Dot’s Real Stories, their documentary channel, which is the biggest of their portfolio of channels. It’s a very pure form of commissioning in that I was given a blank sheet, a pot of money and instructions to fill up the blank sheet with stuff that would fit properly onto the channel. So I set about basing the brief on the data underlying the channel. The data makes it really clear both who your audience is and what they actually like. This does not constrict your commissioning, it just shows where the most fertile territory lies.

CN: What kind of films do you commission?

AG: One of the things that characterises Real Stories is by and large they are uplifting and inspirational and have a feel-good vibe about them. And that is probably to some degree a product of the time – I think people are quite up for hearing things which are uplifting about humanity. So I commissioned eleven documentaries in the second half of 2017. I’ve just started on the next five. They are very varied subjects which range from restorative justice to proxy marriage to social media addiction and all things in between. They also range from traditional observational documentary to things that are much closer to the border of factual entertainment. And to some degree they have been done in the spirit of experimentation, to see what fits happily onto the channel which has been built up on acquisitions, what people find an easy transition to if they’re watching the 60 minute, relatively high budget documentaries which are the foundations of the channel.

“There are plenty of places you can go to make documentaries about ISIS or fetishes and this doesn’t need to be one of them.”

CN: What don’t you commission?

YouTube is the core online presence of Real Stories and there are certain subject areas which are vulnerable on YouTube to being demonetised or slapped with an 18 certificate – in other words, are vulnerable to being made invisible. So I was careful to stay a long way inland from those borders so the investment wasn’t at risk in that way. There are plenty of places you can go to make documentaries about ISIS or fetishes and this doesn’t need to be one of them. My favourite part of the brief is the slide that says what we don’t want at the moment. And that reads pretty much like my Channel 4 job description – sex, drugs and rock and roll. I’ve been there, done that, got the t-shirt and am happy to move on.

CN: Who have made the films?

AG: By and large these commissions have been done with small indies and individual filmmakers. I have made a real effort that they not be the usual suspects. So when I read down a list of the commissions to date, the first ones were directed by the founder of a new BAME-owned company (Andy Mundy Castle, Brittle Bone Rapper); a woman returner who’s coming back from a career break (Debbie Howard, Absent From Our Own Wedding, below); a woman who has been in Holloway prison twice for gang-related offences but is now on the straight and narrow (Nicole Stanbury, Sorry I Shot You).

A number are first-time commissions. Taken as a whole, they are quite a weird and wonderful bunch that are really talented and have delivered without exception. At a tight tariff like the UK online video one, if you’re not going to take a risk on emerging talent then, when will you ever?

As well as straight-forward commissions, we have experimented with something a bit more like completion funding. Travelling on Trash is an example of this – constructed out of contemporaneous social video material. So the ability to have some flexibility of approach like that is also very interesting and helpful.

CN: Looking back on your time at Channel 4, what is your perspective on where multiplatform commissioning is in the UK right now in terms of health?

AG: I think the focus in the UK, as everywhere else, is on the online video wars – surviving and with a bit of luck thriving on this global battlefield. Multiplatform filmmaking is somewhat on the back burner because online video is so much the business imperative. There is still some really interesting stuff being done but it’s on nothing like the scale that it was in its peak in the UK. That said, it is still a powerful form and I have no doubt more juice will be squeezed out of it in due course.

CN: What are you most proud of from your days multiplatform commissioning?

AG: I think the thing that particularly stands out would probably be Embarrassing Bodies, because it was such a perfect blend of entertainment and public value. And the integrated roles played by television and interactive media were totally hitting the sweet spot, so that people were engaging with their health in a way they didn’t normally. At its peak, there were 70 million visits a year to the web site. It was the number one competitor to the NHS online, and, more importantly, it was also the number one referrer. So there is this sweet spot between popular TV and interactive media which Embarrassing Bodies perfectly typified – the TV prompting emotion and action, the online giving the opportunity to act on them immediately. It was also a great platform for experimenting because it was on such a massive scale.

CN: Do you envision a time when public service broadcasters will return to that kind of experimentation?

AG: I think multiplatform television is far from played out. It’s a very powerful combination of media. I have no doubt that at some point people will return to it and fulfil its full promise. I’ve seen some really good stuff in the last couple of years, but done on a more modest budget. And in fact the things that I’ve seen in recent times have come from perhaps unlikely sources such as LADbible, for example, which did an ambitious campaign around plastic pollution which was really imaginative and cost effective.

CN: Moving on to online video. Can you tell me what you learnt from your time at Channel 4 launching short form video?

It was exciting and a pleasure to set up the factual short form video service on All 4 for Channel 4 because it was to a large extent a matter of range-finding creatively, developing a distinctive editorial tone and voice. Also, it was an exciting area because, as I mentioned earlier, it is by its nature on quite a tight tariff, so it’s a great place to take risks with new talent and new approaches.

CN: And as you’ve shown in my classes you were really gratified by the number of people watching the content.

AG: It quickly became apparent what a large canvas one had to play on. The last piece of content I commissioned for All 4, when Channel 4 put it onto social media on Facebook, got 124 million views in ten days (Naked and Invisible, above). And that really underlined what kind of scale you’re playing on. I see the same kind of thing now at Little Dot Studios, where we have conversations with indies who have licensed their films to the Real Stories documentary channel. And when they come in they often seem as interested when you tell them “Oh, you know that film you let us have three months ago – that’s had another million views”. The money they get as a result of that is a nice cherry on the cake, but the increased exposure seems to fire them up just as much – getting more eyeballs on something they’ve poured blood sweat and tears into rather than it languishing in a cupboard or buried deep in a website or catalogue.

Adam’s latest commission, Vanished: The Surrey School Girl, can be found here.

Interested in documentaries? Live in London? I’ll be teaching an evening doc appreciation course in June and July at the Crouch End Picturehouse.

It’s been a busy three years for Charlie Phillips since we last spoke, not long after he became Head of Docs at the Guardian. With so much changing in the land of online documentaries, I thought it was time for a check in with him about how the Guardian has evolved. Here’s an edited transcript of a recent conversation.

Carol Nahra: Talk me through what has worked and what hasn’t at the Guardian?

Charlie Phillips: In the early days we were trying different things out and we were initially doing shorter docs than what we’re doing now. Everything was around 10 minutes or something. It was always my hunch that what would work better for us would be to do stuff that you needed a certain investment in it. Films that were more like 20-30 minutes, and it was signposted that it was going to be really compelling. You’d have to sit back and concentrate and give it time to watch things through. If you made that promise to people that it was going to be worth 25 minutes of your time then they are more like to watch it, rather than giving them the impression that you can watch it really quickly on your mobile.

We also shifted from trying to do loads of films – we were initially trying to put them out every one to two weeks – to say it’s better if we do one approximately every three weeks or even four. Then we give it a massive publicity blitz, give it loads of love, make sure it’s the best it can be.

CN: How do you do that?

CP: We put a lot more time and effort into the promotion. We treat them like event releases, which is why you get a massive banner advert whenever we release a doc, on the front page of the site. They’ve got a different player. So it is more of a kind of immersive experience watching the films. It’s different than everything else we put out – so the whole experience watching is different. They’re higher resolution, we chapterise the films. And also it was my belief that this should be a really global strand. So we really doubled down to ensure that we cover as many countries as possible.

CN: How do you define success, and a good recent film that was successful?

CP: For me the main marker of success is that we put out a film that we are proud of and that has told an untold story. We then also want the films to be seen by lots of people. And we get pretty decent viewing figures – our viewing figures are constantly higher than I ever thought we’d get.

The film we did about Qandeel Baloch has done exceptionally well. Over 200,000 just on Youtube alone and a couple of hundred thousand more on site. That was a pleasant surprise, because it’s primarily a non English language, it’s about what would be a remote place. It’s about a feminist, almost entirely told through social media video and graphics. In some ways the aesthetic of it is quite scrappy, in a good way. But people really took to because it was about a young woman who was killed because of the politics around her. That was really gratifying for a film which is set in Pakistan, for which only a limited amount of original material was shot, and in many ways is quite experimental. We put in a lot of time and effort working with the filmmaker to get it right – it went through a lot of cuts. That was a Bertha partnership.

CN: Congratulations on the Grierson for Fish Story (Best Documentary Short). Of course that’s very different in tone and feel from everything else.

CP: Yeah that was a really rare one for us because we took it as an acquisition rather than as a commission. But I knew it would work for us, a) cause it’s a brilliant film but b) because it has a relationship with journalism. It is in fact an investigative journalism film, it’s just that Charlie (Lyne, the director) is also kind of deconstructing investigative journalism at the same time and doing it in a funny way. It’s just a brilliant film, and it resonates with people and it’s obviously very poignant and clever. There is a part of the Guardian’s general identity which is about being lighthearted and fun. We couldn’t do a whole strand of films like Fish Story, much as I’d like to, but it’s definitely part of our remit to do the occasional thing like that.

CN: What’s been the biggest surprise for you on this journey?

CP: I think genuinely that people want to watch the films. The hunch that on a news and journalism platform that you could get really good audiences for short documentaries that look like documentary films rather than news reports. I think we’ve shown you can get a pretty mainstream audience for what’s often quite challenging and hard hitting stuff.

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Charlie Phillips writes a new monthly column in The Observer. The Guardian will be screening a number of their films with Doc Heads on 21 February at Union Chapel, Islington.

Docs on Screens

Tag Archives: online documentaries

Little Dot’s Adam Gee: “I have made a real effort not to commission the usual suspects.”

“There are plenty of places you can go to make documentaries about ISIS or fetishes and this doesn’t need to be one of them.”

What’s Up at Guardian Docs?