Filmmaking instructor, documentarian and 91亚色 postdoctoral Fellow in Documentary Film and Global Health Mark Terry is launching his new book, , at an event on March 13 at the historic Arts & Letters Club (14 Elm St., Toronto). Admission is free and food will be served.
Mark Terry
The 2011 Canadian Screen Humanitarian Award-winning filmmaker behind such climate change documentaries as The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning, The Polar Explorer and the United Nations鈥 series , explores new methods and approaches to remediating the documentary film as an instrument of social change by incorporating geomedia platforms with database documentary film projects.
The result is the 鈥淕eo-Doc,鈥 a multilinear, interactive, database documentary film project presented on a platform of a Geographic Information System (GIS) map of the world. Terry鈥檚 initial experiment with this format, , was adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change along with other UN agencies in 2015. Today, the project showcases more than 400 documentary films from all seven continents.
The Geo-Doc: Geomedia, Documentary Film, and Social Change, published by Palgrave Macmillan, examines the history and theories surrounding mobilizing the documentary film as a communication tool between filmmakers and policymakers. 鈥淓cocinema鈥 and its semiotic storytelling techniques are also explored for their unique approaches to audience engagement. The proven methods identified throughout the book are combined with the spatial and temporal affordances provided by GIS technology to create the 鈥淕eo-Doc,鈥 a new tool for the activist documentarian.
The GeoDoc: Geomedia, Documentary Film, and Social Change
鈥淚 greatly admire the use of practical case studies to illustrate this new documentary format explored in this study,鈥 said Pat Brereton, professor of communication at Dublin City University, 鈥淓specially in light of the growing importance of climate change and the urgent need to tease out the social changes facing our planet, documentary activists like Mark Terry, as evidenced in this volume, have a major role to play in this environmental communications struggle.鈥
Terry recently demonstrated the power and impact of ecocinema while teaching the 91亚色 course, where he invited students from Ecuador, Colombia, Italy, India and Australia to produce a three-minute film telling a story about climate change in their respective countries and communities, which will be included in the .
Terry will host the launch event and be available to sign books.
Courtesy of YFile.