ABSTRACT
This research looks beyond linear, hierarchical television documentary to a new practice of telling factual stories by offering a strategy that transcends limitations of time-based storytelling. Through the development of oral history interactive documentary prototype, 26 Days: The Battle of Coral Balmoral, Leonie Jones explores the interconnection between oral history, documentary film, and the emerging field of interactive documentary as an interdisciplinary creative practice for telling factual stories of war and trauma. This inquiry aims to bridge a gap in current factual broadcast storytelling that can suffer from a lack of informed, documented strategies by offering a collaborative and three-tiered storytelling system operating in a spatial and temporal environment. OHID creative practice provides a framework that builds storytelling arenas for ideas and plots to unfold freely, run parallel to each other, or be completely contradictory. In so doing, OHID breaks authorial codes, whether political, social, geographical, or institutional and encourages collaboration that empowers marginalized communities to present many and alternative versions of their experiences. As a means of factual, multi-narrative storytelling, this approach is designed to meet participants’ need to speak and be heard on their own terms and in their own words.
