WHAT ARE DOCU-TUTORIALS?

Docu-tutorials are 90-180 minute documentary-tutorial videos on topics in philosophy, culture, & politics. As with cine-essays, the visual side of docu-tutorials involves a film/video collage of sequentially-unfolding moving image archives and new creations conjoined with voiceovers elucidating the topic at hand. Differences from cine-essays include that docu-tutorials may be composed of one or multiple cine-essays that are then combined with additional visual and voiceover material, while large portions of docu-tutorials might be in the form of lectures (so long as visuals other than the instructor speaking constitute a significant part). 

For example, you could plan your docu-tutorial to combine:

1) A 10-minute mini-cine-essay released for free on YouTube, which might also serve to promote the docu-tutorial later on
2) An 80-minute feature length cine-essay that is an expanded version of the 10-minute one. 
3) An additional 90 minutes of nine 10-minute lectures on the larger, more contextual aspects of your topic (which would be designed to bring all of these elements  together in tutorial form). 

CALL FOR DOCU-TUTORIALS

We invite existing and would-be filmmakers and professors/teachers to contribute written or filmed docu-tutorial proposals, or completely finished docu-tutorial works to our editorial team. Please send proposals, examples, and resumes to us at info@publicsphere.org. We accept submissions on a rolling basis. 

HOW DO I MAKE A DOCU-TUTORIAL?

1) Compose an academic-style, essay-length, philosophically-informed piece of writing on a topic that could also function as a course.
Given that most people speak about 150 words per minute, 10,000-25,000 words total is adequate for a 90-180 minute docu-tutorial. 
2) Record yourself or someone else delivering it with high quality audio, preferably a Shure MV20 or SM7B, or something relatively close to that quality level. 
3) Superimpose a video collage composed by you and/or a collaborator on top of the already-recorded voice track, and if you like, include periodic sections where you are shown delivering the text you wrote, as in a conventional video course, in between ongoing sequences of collaged archival clips with the ongoing voiceover still proceeding.
4) Add some titling, intro, outro, and sectional text, and we will add a Public Sphere logo and intro language.

As with cine-essays, the first thing you will do to create a docu-tutorial is to assemble a suitable script. Ideally, the relationship of form and content will be one that deforms the latter while maintaining the best aspects already established with the former. Public Sphere does, however, invite innovative approaches to form as well, we just ask that you think of it as say, a written academic or intellectual text in film form, not a complete aesthetic abstraction or overly personalistic cultural object.

FINANCIALS

Public Sphere combines several 24/7/365, subscription-based, always-on, live linear digital TV channels with an Amazon Prime-style TVOD library (transactional video on-demand). Cine-essays and docu-tutorials are available for 30-day rentals so that participants do not have to wait for a scheduled item on the 24/7/365 channels to reappear. Full access to the 24/7/365 channels is $9.99/mo or $89.99/year, broadcasting a rotating, scheduled selection of our cine-essays and docu-tutorials, allowing Public Sphere members to preview them prior to renting or to just watch collectively as part of an international, simultaneous viewing public.

PLEASE NOTE

Just as Public Sphere prefers only a portion of our docu-tutorials to be made up of lectures visualizing the instructor, we also minimize those exclusively explaining one theorist. For docu-tutorials especially, we ask that this approach amount to no more than half of the finished content. We prefer that that the filmmaker/instructor is the one doing most of the thinking, and that a docu-tutorial should primarily be their own intervention, not an account of someone else's. In short, as we see it, the filmmaker / instructor functions as the grand synthesizer of many thinkers, assembling their concepts and ideas alongside their own, but only to impart their own unique angle on the topic rather than representing someone else.