Intimate connectivities: local dynamic networks in the Big Stories, Small Towns transmedia documentary

Since 2008 the multi-year, multi-platform Big Stories, Small Towns documentary project (bigstories.com.au) has facilitated the telling, recording, archiving and dissemination of auto/biographical narratives in small town communities across six countries through face to face engagement of filmmakers with local people. The resulting works that emerge from the project explore the means by which communities can collaboratively mediatize everyday life. Big Stories, Small Towns investigates the potential for transmedia as both process and product that can amplify marginalized cultures and foster a sense of community or collective identity. This chapter reflects on a history of practice and theory underpinning transmedia production in the Big Stories project. The chapter explores co-creative processes across three of the South East Asian residencies that worked with Indigenous communities in preserving intangible cultural heritage and addressing of mainstream media. The sites are Banlung in Cambodia, Bongkud-Namaus in Sabah, Malaysia and the Raja Ampat regency in West Papua. In each setting traditional stories of everyday life in communities were re-mediated through the process of conceiving of, creating and sharing transmedia works, generating new and creative outcomes that include: methodologies and understandings of local cultures, language and history; and ways of effectively disseminating under-represented Indigenous culture, language and history. Big Stories uses transmedia to document these multi-layered communities and explore complex relations between people, social backgrounds, technology and place. This shifts attention from individual stories towards practices of collective identification and action, creating acts of transmedia storymaking which offer a model of positive deviance that empowers individuals and communities to reject ‘deficit discourses’ that marginalise them and their ways of life.