Digital technology is impacting the business of documentary production with force. Playback spoke with several documentary producers to discuss the opportunities and pitfalls uncovered by the new image-gathering technologies.

Montreal-based Lewis Cohen has entered his most recent documentary, Road Stories for the Flesh Eating Future, at this year’s Hot Docs. Produced using a Sony VX 1000 digital camera, Cohen is thankful for dv.

‘I would not have been able to shoot the film, under the circumstances that I did, without digital video technology,’ says Cohen.

Before discussing the advantages of the binary systems, Cohen wants to be very clear. For him, film is not dead. ‘It’s just gorgeous compared to any video. You almost forget how good it is.’

Cohen will be shooting film for his next project, a documentary on Canadian super-poet Leonard Cohen. Even so, Cohen (the filmmaker) will continue to employ the digital technology for his interviews.

‘Doing interviews on film is a whole different style. A mag of film is basically 10 minutes on 16mm. I think your interviewing skills have to be a lot more honed than mine are. [Changing rolls every 10 minutes] breaks the momentum of the interview. With the digital camera you have a two-hour tape – at least a one-hour tape.

‘It’s not going to mix seamlessly, that’s for sure. But I think [the mix] can be interesting – as long as you’re disciplined about what you’re shooting on video and what you’re shooting on film. It’s sort of like two different worlds, so it’s okay if they look a little bit different,’ Cohen says.

‘There’s just a whole sense of freedom that you don’t have in other situations. You get rid of the need for a professional cameraman, you get rid of half the equipment and half the weight, and you’re renting the stuff for a quarter of the price,’ Cohen explains.

Digital technology has also opened the door to smaller, more easily concealed cameras. Like most documentary makers, Cohen sees hidden camera work as a potential ethical mine field. Despite this, Cohen loves the potential of these micro-cameras.

‘I have this little fantasy of having a little camera in my hand. I wouldn’t actually want to have one implanted. But something really tiny and you just open up your hand and point it at something you like,’ he muses.

As for the deluge of digital channel applications, Cohen is confident it will increase the amount of documentary production. However, he fears ‘it will drive down the price of a broadcast licence’ and create a need for larger funding partnerships.

Peter Wintonick, another documentary filmmaker, has been in the business for 20 years. Most famous for his doc on Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, he too is feeling the effects of the digital revolution.

Wintonick speaks regularly on digital technology and its impact at conferences and festivals around the world. He also employs dv for his interviewing.

‘In documentary practice, access is important in your relationship to the subject. With the new technology [the unimposing hand-held mini dvs], it’s less intimidating,’ Wintonick explains.

Nick de Pencier is the cinematographer on the docs his wife, Jennifer Baichwal, directs. Their latest film, The Holier it Gets, debuted on tvontario last month and is featured at the Hot Docs festival. The doc was shot high in the mountains of India. Short of employing a team of sherpas, they never would have been able to make the documentary without digital technology.

Size and weight, de Pencier concurs, are the major advantages of digital. The cinematographer is also impressed with the quality of the picture.

‘When everyone was shooting Hi-8 and calling it broadcast-quality, it really wasn’t,’ he points out, explaining that the digital picture is.

De Pencier does not see price as a big factor. He believes the size and weight will prompt even high-budget docs to employ the more compact technologies.

Richard Elson, the Academy Award-nominated director of The Colours of my Father: a Portrait of Sam Borenstein, also has a documentary (What If…A Film about Judith Merril) at this year’s Hot Docs. He agrees with de Pencier: ‘It [dv] allows people to go ahead very quickly, which is critical for documentary. But the final cost, I don’t know if that changes much.’

Elson employed a digital camera on his Judith Merril film. ‘If we hadn’t been able to shoot in dv, the film would never have been made. When we did our interviews with her, we didn’t have funding. So we shot the interview with her in dv.’

Elson, who is currently in production on several projects, has his own advice for documentary makers who wish to combine digital video and traditional image-gathering techniques.

‘You have to be very careful how you treat it in post. If you do that, there will still be a distinction, but it’s not necessarily a perceptible one,’ Elson says.