A Short Film About War

A Short film about War is a narrative documentary made entirely from information found on the worldwide web. In ten minutes this split-screen work takes viewers around the world to a variety of war zones as seen through the collective eyes of the online photo sharing community Flickr, and as witnessed by a variety of existing military and civilian bloggers.
As the ostensibly documentary film plays itself out on the left side of the screen, the right side logs the provenance of images, blog fragments and gps locations of each element comprising the work, so that the same information is simultaneously communicated to the viewer in two parallel formats – on one hand as a dramatised reportage and on the other hand as a text log.
In offering this tautology, we are attempting to explore and reveal the way in which information changes as it is gathered, edited and then mediated through networked communications technologies or broadcast media, and how that changes and distorts meaning – especially for (the generally wealthy minority of) the worlds users of high speed broadband networks, who have become used to the treacherously persuasive panoptic view that google earth (and the worldwide web) appears to give us.
A short film about War was developed with help from New Media Scotland and Alt-w. Script by Jon Thomson, Alison Craighead & Steve Rushton