Filmmaker To Create Egypt Documentary Through Social Media

On February 11, Egyptians celebrated in Tahrir Square after Hosni Mubarak stepped down from his role as president. Jigar Mehta was watching the celebration on television, and he noticed many people in the crowd filming the celebration with their mobile phones.

“I thought, crap, if they’re recording this, they’ve probably been recording for the last 18 days,” he says about the demonstrators who began protesting January 25.

This was a particularly interesting to Mehta, who is a Knight Fellow at Stanford University and former New York Times video journalist currently working on ways to develop what he calls “participatory reporting.” After the initial celebration, he developed a project that he hopes will result in a crowdsourced interactive documentary about the 18 days of protests that led up to the revolution.

The project, #18DaysInEgypt, asks people who witnessed the protests to label what they recorded of them on Twitter, Flickr and YouTube with specific tags. Eventually, Mehta will put the entries together to create an interactive narrative. He hasn’t decided whether that narrative will involve a timeline, place the viewer at a specific location to observe what is going on, create a customized video depending on what the user wants to experience (Arcade Fire-style) or something else. For now, the biggest hurdle is collecting the content, a project for which he is soliciting help from partners in Egypt.

Throughout the protests in Egypt, social media played a role in conveying information to the rest of the world — even during the period when Twitter, Facebook and much of the Internet were shut down. YouTube paired with curation startup Storyful to highlight important footage. Twitter teemed with updates from Egypt, and Google launched a speak-to-tweet service that enabled users to send tweets using a voice connection. Projects such as IamJan25.com and HyperCities Egypt helped gather images and tweets surrounding the events.

“We all know what happened at the end, but there are a lot of interesting turns that this story took,” Mehta says. “I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg of what was shot during those 18 days.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, Maggie Osama