Nina Jones

• BA (Hons) Video

I am a film practitioner who has been working in the industry for over 14 years.  I spent several of those years working as a freelance filmmaker running my own company and progressed quickly to becoming a feature length documentary film editor.  I have been the editor on 2 international feature length documentaries and on numerous film projects throughout my career.  My industry experience plays a huge part in my research and my skills and understanding of the medium lends itself perfectly to my research by practise.

I am the Film Technician for the Department of Film and Creative Writing and teach practical filmmaking at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

My project investigates ethical decision making when producing a true-crime documentary. In the last 6 years, we have seen an explosion in popularity of the genre, which has led to distributors and broadcasters producing more true crime content than ever before.  My research will question the degree to which filmmakers are considering traditional documentary ethics in light of the genre's increasing popularity by using a variety of audio-visual experiments, culminating in a 60-minute documentary thesis.  Bill Nichols (2006) states that 'documentary filmmaking is more of an artistic practice than a scientific experiment' and goes on to say that 'art recoils from rules and so will the ethics of documentary.' With these distinctions in mind, I will analyse current true crime documentaries to evaluate whether they are becoming more 'artistic' and thus abandoning ethics in favour of adopting the rhythms and structures of narrative storytelling.  Ultimately, I will be asking the question: can true crime be entertaining and on the right side of ethics?