Troubles in the Editing Cabine: producing a DVD for a patrimonial event

Based on video-recorded data gathered in the editing cabine of a national television network, this presentation will examine the production of a DVD edition from the live video capture of an important patrimonial event. It will examine short interactional sequences where the blurredness of images is discussed and reflexively negotiated amongst three participants: the editor, the script person, and the realization director who captured the images during the event. These participants are to (dis)agree on the visual properties of what they are looking at, and we will see that blurredness is something that evolves and can be made more or less visible and/or accurate.

Professional video activity is a growing domain of inquiry,(Laurier, Strebel and Brown, 2008; Broth et al., 2014) that is of interest for cultural studies when focused on actual practices. It can eventually be distinguished from personal and private video uses by looking at the stabilized coordination modes and scripted ways of doing hierarchical positions as they are remobilized in situation. But more importantly, the destination of these productions, an unknown but important public, might be considered in the way blurred, non-blurred, and appropriate ways to see is playing a role in the way the participants work together to define a reasonable quality for their work.

The sequences will allow us to reflect on the intersubjective, constructed dimensions of visual practices in a professional setting. Seeing together and the various implications in terms of work, hierarchical positions, and re-negotiations will be examined, as will be the notion of the social construction of reality through the idea of mundane reason (Pollner, 1987) and the prism of actual practices that can be finely described.

Broth, M. et al. (2014) Studies of Video Practices : Video at Work. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315851709.
Laurier, E., Strebel, I. and Brown, B. (2008) ‘Video Analysis: Lessons from Professional Video Editing Practice’, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9(3). doi:10.17169/fqs-9.3.1168.

Pollner, M. (1987) Mundane reason: Reality in everyday and sociological discourse. New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press (Mundane reason: Reality in everyday and sociological discourse), pp. xviii, 179.