Creative documentary practice: internalising the Systems Model of Creativity through documentary video and online practice

The process of documentary making which is the subject of analysis here was conducted through the low budget video and online productions of Using Fort Scratchley and Fort Scratchley a Living History (www.fortscratchley.org). The new contribution to knowledge generated through this self-reflective research considers my creative documentary experience against a number of creativity theories, models and processes. This practice-led research took a reflective empirical approach, using the Practitioner Based Enquiry methodology (Murray & Lawrence, 2000). The analytical scope of the research is comprised of practitioner ‘data’ collected across four production years; including a reflective journal detailing the making of the cross-platform documentaries, the documentary production paperwork and the documentaries themselves. Using Fort Scratchley, commissioned by Newcastle City Council, runs 53-minutes in length and employs oral history interviews that capture the military, maritime, coal mining and Awabakal usages of the Fort Scratchley site situated at the mouth of the Hunter River in Newcastle, Australia. The oral history interviews and additional archival material were re-worked, extended and prepared for delivery through an online data-based called Fort Scratchley a Living History. The online documentary permits minimal interactivity as the media has been presented through five pre-set tours: Awabakal, Coal Mining, Military, Maritime, and Theatre. The production of these two Fort Scratchley documentaries provided a research environment that interrogated the effectiveness and appropriateness of a particular confluence model of creativity, the Systems Model of Creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999), a Group Creativity Model (Nijstad & Paulus, 2003) and three staged creative process theories (Bastick, 1982; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Wallas, 1976). In employing these models and theories, which can be seen as complementary, the research investigates the assumption that they could be readily applied to documentary production practice. The analysis of data reveals the layers of complexity within these theories; layers that account for collaborative practices as well as explaining a practitioner’s intuition and embodied knowledge. In particular, this exegesis discusses and analyses how these creativity theories can be used to demystify creative documentary practice by deconstructing how I mediated external contexts, knowledges and skills, and drew on internalised and previously embodied knowledge throughout the production processes. In conclusion the exegesis argues that it is necessary to revise the System’s Model of Creativity in order to more clearly situate creative practice inside a system.