ABSTRACT
The point of departure for this chapter is a reflective account of the making of a
short, analogue video (Stansted, December 2000, six mins) and a longer series of
digital shorts (Mumbai Tales, December 2008, in progress, 30 mins). Both videos are
about global cities (Sassen 1991), or ‘mega-cities’,1 and the novel user experiences
these suggest. While both started as parts of research projects that investigated par-
ticular conditions of the global city (in the first case, mobility, in the second, water
scarcity), their making generated footage that acted as a field for further investiga-
tions, revealing aspects of the city that were not part of the researcher’s initial think-
ing. In this way, the videos began to act as the originators of ideas rather than as
simple tools for conducting research. This chapter will focus on this dual aspect of
video used for fieldwork.
