“Cote fenetre, cote couloir” Upian’s new webdocumentary (online since the 8th of September) is a co-production with French train national service, the SNCF. This is a strange mixture between documentary (it explains what happens during a train journey and how many people need to work to make it an efficient service) and fiction (you can follow the story of two young girls that are on board of the train). Effectively it is what is normally called a docu-fiction. Its form is very simple: two windows, on one you follow the point of view of the two girls and on the other one you follow the logistics  point of view of SNCF.

cote fenetre

If the script is at time quite cheese (but I suspect the audience are young travelers – which by itself is not an excuse because who said that they need soap opera lines!) what I think is interesting in this form is the use of sound to give prominence to one of the two videos, and the exploitation of points of view. Effectively the interface that is used in “Cote fenetre, cote couloir” is a simplification of Figgis’ movie Time Code.

time code

If you remember Figgis did split the screen in four narratives which were playing at the same time – but only one sound track was dominant, allowing you to follow it properly while your brain was also following the other three plots from the side of your vision spectrum. Figgis also had an interactive version of Time Code, that he was performing at festivals, where he was doing the mixing of the narrative strands live, deciding each time which narrative would be dominant at each point and effectively constantly switching points of view.

What Upian has done is to go from four to two strands, but the clever part is to give direct control to the audience. A simple but effective logic: switch point of view when you like it by simply clicking on the video… Try it, it works quite smoothly. I am maybe not fascinated by the SNCF as a topic, but I think that this simple structure could well be used in lots of double sided situation: the justice system (barrister versus incriminated), school life ( teacher versus pupil),  daily life (parents versus kids), politics (dictator versus normal people) etc….

What seems at the moment as a compromise between interactive fiction, interactive documentary and interactive corporate marketing could well be exploited in activists i-docs, or in lots of other fields!

On Tuesday 2 August, SBS will launch the online documentary and interactive website, Goa Hippy Tribe (sbs.com.au/goahippytribe).

SBS commissioned this documentary project, releasing it first on Facebook – using the social network not as a marketing platform, but as an original content channel. In this way, the audience was able to follow the documentary in real-time and engage with the director, influencing his work.

Goa Hippy Tribe explores two of the major social revolutions of the past fifty years – the hippy movement, which changed the way we lived, and Facebook, which has changed the way we communicate. The project is about people who shared a common space and time on the shores of Goa, India, during the 70s ‘hippy revolution’ and how they re-united after more than thirty years, via social media.

SBS’s interactive website, sbs.com.au/goahippytribe, is distinctive in theme and form – featuring video interviews with the original ‘tribe members’, plus factsheets, music tracks, video extras and photo galleries, which become unlocked as you navigate your way through the site. This innovative story telling technique allows users to actively control which parts of the documentary they wish to view, rather than passively viewing, as they would with television.

Aysén Profundo is an interactive and multimedial documentary about
trades, traditions and typical life in Patagonia.

We invite you to a journey to the inside of our country.
We invite you to aysénprofundo.

Explore the project at: www.aysenprofundo.cl

artist: Pablo Ocqueteau, Philine von Düszeln, Claudio Vergara, Cristian
Saldia, Rodgers Hermosilla, Mauricio Osorio, Javier Encalada, Leonardo
Ocqueteau

I was pleased to notice that long standing interactive video director Martin Percy has produced such interactive space, using a temple in Bali. Bali Temple Explorer is a video walk into a space where you can turn, zoom, listen to prayer as if you were moving within a video. It does not use a 360 degrees video (as used in Out My Window) but it gives the opportunity to link within video (rather than just photo). And now that it is there… what do I think of it?

When I tried to walk around it I actually got quite bored… interesting how “being” there is not the same thing as “clicking” there… there is no immersion, no reason to make such a decision…no incentive. The absence of narrative structure – when there is no reason for the exploration – makes things quite hard for the user… On the other hand the interface offers the option of a map that gives reassurance and some sort of scale to the explorer…

I also noticed that there is at times the option of having a commentary… this is where I think it starts to be interesting – as you have all the usual documentary language (shots, edits, music and commentary) mixed with the interactive options (moving away from there, going left, zoom in)… and I found that quite powerful. It would be interesting to explore that route more… a sort of idoc where you can follow a narrative and then just turn your head and follow someone else… a mixture between video and game logic…

To be tried…

Description:

Welcome to Pine Point was meant to be a book… it is now becoming a cross-platform project… and an interactive documentary produced by the NFB of Canada.

This interactive documentary tells the story of a city that has been totally destroyed in the last ten years. Although the documentary is fundamentally linear (you can only press the next/previous tab and click on some photos) the quality of the narrative, and of the combination between graphics and video, is outstanding! A real piece of craft work… and maybe a good example of Lev Manovich’s “deep remixability” applied to the new media documentary world.

Here is how the project is described in its Press Release:

Toronto, January 26, 2011 – Imagine your hometown never changed. That no one ever grew old or moved on. Part book, part film, part family photo album, Welcome to Pine Point unearths a place frozen in time and discovers what happens when an entire community is erased from the map.

Welcome to Pine Point is the first online interactive documentary from internationally renowned Vancouver-based creative team The Goggles (Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons), produced in collaboration with the NFB’s director of digital content and strategy, Rob McLaughlin. Inspired by Simons’ childhood visit to a mining town in the Northwest Territories, Welcome to Pine Point is accessible through NFB Interactive, the NFB’s online portal, which showcases an evolving collection of innovative, interactive stories exploring the world—and our place in it—from uniquely Canadian points of view.

Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons are award-winning authors, artists and creative directors. They have spent most of their professional lives telling stories in compelling new ways, creating unique books, magazines and television spots. They are most known for their award-winning work with Adbusters Magazine.

Find out more:

Watch Pinepoint online

My comments:

For me Welcome to Pine Point is both a success, and a disappointment. The story is strong, hence one wants to watch it all, the graphics are very beautiful, it is sticky and playful. Basically: it works! This should be enough no?

Well… the only problem with it is that it is fundamentally linear… so… what does it say about interactive documentaries? Does it confirm to us that linear narrative is the best way to communicate stories, or does it just prove that linear is easier to do? I obviously think that interactive narratives are possible… so that is where my disappointment comes from: Pine Point was meant to be a book… and I think you can tell. There are elements of interactivity in it, but that is not its strength. Its strength is a grabbing story, fantastic use of graphics and animation, and a good music track… it sits on the web, but does not use its interactive possibilities at its full.

Still worth watching it though…

Description:

GDP is an attempt to react to the global economic crisis that has hit everybody in the last two years. The National Film Board of Canada has a long tradition of social documentary but this time it has launched a very ambitious project: the country’s first bilingual web documentary, a pan-Canadian project that bears witness to the far-reaching effects of the crisis in the lives and communities of Canadian people. Until September 2010 over 200 short documentaries and photo-essays, each about four minutes in length, will combine to create a mosaic of how Canadians are experiencing this crisis.  Under the direction of documentarian Hélène Choquette a team of eight field directors and eight photographers browse the country to document how Canadians cope with the crisis that is shaking convictions and lives.

Users/viewers are also encouraged to participate online with comments and photos as GDP wants to “tell the collective story of a country in transition”.

Find out more:

Browse GDP – Measuring the human side of the Canadian economic crisis

Read about the project

More about the NFB of Canada

My comments:

I think it is remarcable that the NFB embarcs in such an ambitious project. This type of docu-web is important for several reasons:

1. it shows the potential of this form: the depth and breath of docu-webs is potentially much larger than a linear documentary because it is expandable at will
2. GDP involves a big team of people and shows NFB’s financial commitment to the docu-web form
3. the collaborative side of the project (people are asked to participate) is potentially the best suited way to portray a nation… who else could do so, if not the people themselves?
4. the topic of GDP – a nation in crisis- is not only relevant but important: could this sort of project help in energising people? Can it help to regain a positive attitude?
5. social documentaries tend to take a position… while GDP is more a mosaic than anything else… what are the political and social implications of such approach?

If I am quite impress with the project itself, I have to say that I find its navigation quite confusing… One can browse by stories, maps or themes but once you start watching a video the interface is not very clear: how do you move from here? where are the stories of the same theme? How do I find my character again? How do I get out of the main map? I have been reassured though that the project is being re-designed so… hopefully those little problems will be solved soon.

My last comment is about the audience: who are the browsers of GDP and what do they get out of it? If would be very interesting to have some user feedback on this type of project because what matters here is to know how such a social topic is received and by whom… Is this just an interesting portrait of a nation or is it a social tool for involvement and change? How is it used? Does it create a debate? what is the level of involvment?

It would be great to have a comment on this by the producers of GDP….

Description:

Havana/Miami is the follow up (in terms of format) of Gaza/Sderot: life in spite of everything. The production team seems to be the same: Arte Television is hosting the web-documentary conceived by Upian (Alexandre Brachet). The  French producer is Serge Gordey from Alegria who is the Executive Producer and Alex Szalat from ARTE France  is the leading Commissioning Editor. The idea is similar to Gaza/Sderot: to follow a number of people leaving on two sides of a conflict (political or religeous). Those videos are broadcasted on “normal” tv (on a full lenghth documentary), but also used to populate a website  where one can browse through people, topics or timeline.

The stories of young lives in these two cities are told through short (2 minutes long) video chronicles. The individual subjects (12 in all), are filmed by a team in Havana (Cuba) and a team in Miami (USA). These episodes do follow six people from each of the two cities over three months, starting on February 22nd, 2010.

Internet users can follow these stories via an original non-linear interface. They can watch, and respond with video, photo or written comments. Users can also send videos to friends and embed them into their own blogs and social media sites.

Find out more:

Watch the web-documentary the programme:  http://havana-miami.arte.tv/

More web-projects from Upian

My comments:

I think Upian does some of the best web-documentaries around. Gaza/Sderot was a first in its genre: a way to use interactive media for what it is best at – linking. One can link people, ideas, lives… one can create that association that is just enough to leave some thinking space to the user. The hope is that while browsing between the lives of people from Miami or Havana (or Sderot and Gaza) one takes the time to reflect, to understand… and even to mature a point of view. The ability to propose information in such way that a point of view can be created is the magic of interactive media: it replaces the user in a responsible seat, a seat that demands a certain level of consciousness.

If I think that the interface of Gaza/Sderot was somehow more poetic and fluid (or was it the novelty effect?) I feel that Havana/Miami manages to integrate people’s comments in such a way that they become an integral part of the documentary. Normally comments are just on the side – they are an add-on that you do once you have finished viewing, but here the comments link back to the programme in a fluid way – so this encourage people to comment on the go and to really react to what they are seeing without fear of jumping out of the narrative.

While I was browsing I noticed that some users have send videos, and that those do sit at the same level of the “official” videos of the programme. I can only encourage this approach: slowly slowly the narrative is becoming authored but also opened and participative. This might be a clever model to keep some quality and editorial control while opening up a little the narrative itself.

Extremely well done, powerfull topic and… somehow important and meaningfull…

Description:

As part of the collaborative documentary Virtual Revolution , a 4×1hr series about  the history and consequences of the web, BBC2  has launched a “3D documentary explorer”. The idea is to allow an interactive viewing of the series content, and therefore to create a new way to browse the content creating a totally different experience than when watching the linear series.

As a viewer you can either watch the programmes on TV (or on iPlayer) OR go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/3dexplorer_start.shtml and view most of the series online but in a 3D environment where one can jump off at any time from the video content and  browse related websites. Effectively what BBC has designed is a clever visualization tool that simplifies navigation in and out of the video stream and allows you to jump in between segments of the video itself. A glorified DVD navigation with the added bonus of web links.

Find out more:

Try yourself the 3D explorer

Look at the linear documentary Virtual Revolution (or at least to some documentation about it)

My comments:

Is this an interactive documentary or a clever visualisation tool?

I have to admit that I was quite sceptical when I tried it out. The film starts with the opening shots of the first episode, but one can at any time skip to another part of the documentary or jump to websites linked to the content that one is watching. This means that one is constantly moving from video content to web content. At first I thought that the paste of the video was too different from the paste of the web browsing. When you start watching the episode you do not feel like browsing out of it. TV editing is made to keep you inside the story – and not to allow you breaks of freedom out of its narrative.  But after a while I liked the idea of having a topologiacal view of the whole content of the series.

In a way the 3D explorer is any TV producer’s dream: a way to show you all the research that has been made while doing the documentary itself and still keeping you tuned to the author’s linear documentary. Is the explorer also responding to the viewer’s dream? I do not know… probably not mine… What I am searching in new media is a way to show some of the layers that compose any reality. I like the idea of representing the multiple. Here the 3D explorer adds layers of information to the video stream… is this enough? Are we not back to what used to be called ‘enhanced interactive TV’ – where interaction was only used to give extra information, but not alternative narratives, or depth of dimensions?

Well… I suppose it is a first step. But we stay in the informational layer of “associated data”. Nothing is shown about the users that have collaborated to the documentary via the crowd sourcing process that the BBC has experimented with. Nothing is said about the multiple other ways in which the history of the web could have been depicted. There are no doubts, no other possibilities, no other paths… just some clinical extra information to support the argument of the film.

Behind a sexy visualisation tool that gives a 3D effect to the story a strangely flat view of reality emerges: a reality that is supported by objective data, a reality that gives more of the same and does not consider “the rest”, or the “possible other”. Maybe the documentary explorer is not that 3D after all… which is a shame, because something was there… somethig could have emerged…

This is an incredible networked journey through interviews of scientists, artists and creators that allows you to effectively create your own documentary out of a database of interviews. Since the theme is that “everything is connected” the interface allows you to link – and see your path- between ideas, concepts, topics and people…

Really worth browsing- great topic and great design!

Description:

What have you left behind? is a web documentary that allows the user to browse through 130 testimonials of people of all countries around the theme of loss, changes in life, moving to a new country and discovering new cultures. As Mariana Mota explained to me:” What have you left behind – a story of nomads by nomads-  is a collection of stories by people from many places in the world. 32 notebooks were sent to people in and from different parts of the world with the question “What have you left behind?”. The person was supposed to fill in a page and give the notebooks to another person. A month later 22 the notebooks returned with over 140 testimonies from people from different cultural, educational and social backgrounds. A website was made with a tactile and hand-made aesthetic using pixelation animation.”

The design of the website is making an effort to keep the textuality of the notebooks by keeping the original texts and their handwriting. The user flicks from one page to another one discovering written testimonies of people around the worlds about their experience of moving or changing their lives. In this sense I would consider it an interactive documentary – as it permits the discovery of written fragments wished by an author and arranged around a common theme. There is no narrative involved here – as each notebook contains its own narratives. The user browses through different testimonials (which makes it an hypertext documentary for me) but he/she can also leave his/er own testimy by collaborating online.

Find out more:

click here to see the project http://www.whathaveyouleftbehind.com/

click here to learn more about the author, Mariana Mota.

click here to read  the project’s blog.

My comments:

I find this project quite sweet – maybe because I can easily relate to the topic of foreigness, moving country or learning about  new cultures. The interface of the website is fresh and clean… the fact that there is a hand that hand draws a map – showing us where the author of the fragment that we are reading is coming from – gives it a human touch… and somehow makes it quite personal.

I am unclear though if this is an interactive documentary or a digital visualization of a collection of thematic writings… I suppose there is a thin line between the two. There is no video and no sound involved so the experience is very much the one of reading manuscripts via a digital screen… The added bonus of being able to collaborate via the internet -and sending a personal text- gives the project a participative flavour that could in theory open the documenting experience to a larger audience but… does it work?

I turn the question to you… does it work for you?

Description:

Capturing Reality is an incredible documentary about documentaries and film makers. Thirty world famous documentary makers were interviewed to give a flavour of a genre that is way too often unknown. The film was produced by the National Film Board of Canada and was directed by Pepita Ferrari.

But for me the cool thing is that out of this huge database of interviews and film clips the NFB has produced a website that is a very sleek web-documentary.Obviously I am only reviewing the web-documentary here, and I leave to you the joys of watching the feature film (or buy the DVD).

Find out more:

Browse the web-documentary Capturing Reality

Read about the linear documentary Capturing Reality

Buy the DVD of Capturing Reality

My comments:

The web-documentary of Capturing Reality starts with a nice mosaic interface that says straight away what the project is: a browse through interviews of well-know people. By roll-overing on the different portrait of the interviewees you discover their name and the topic of their grab. You then just need to click to select the grab you want to watch.

Once you are watching the grab, an algorithm calculates a play list for you of the other grabs that fit with the topic of the one that you have selected. I quite like the fact that by default the play list will just play, meaning that if you do not select anything the interviews will follow each other without asking you to “be active”. On the other hand you can always “do something” by moving to other topics, or by jumping to other grabs of the same character – the one on different topics.

The interface and the navigation do run very smoothly on this web-documentary – with the professional add-on of a background music that kicks in each time that you are outside of a grab. Everything is done so that you have a feeling of continuity… and the grabs are so breathtaking that it is difficult to switch off. This being said Capturing Reality has a very classic and sleek style: it is not trying to be innovative, nor trying to challenge the user. If what you want is just to concentrate on the interviews (which in this case are a great asset) then Capturing Reality makes it the best possible experience. If, on the contrary, you are looking for an experimental web-documentary about documentary film makers then… contact them and propose them another interface!!!

From my side I am interested on the repetition of the navigation options that are offered to quite a few web-documentaries (Capturing Reality, 6 billion people, Gaza/Sderot, Miami/Havana etc….): the database of interviews and videos are tagged by topic, character, place and sometime time. The user is therefore asked to choose between “do I care about this person, or about this topic”? And then – I suspect this comes as a second thought- the user has to choose between “what else happened in this place” and “what else happened in this time line”? I wonder if those choices are of the same sort… My guess is that the first choice is emotional (what attracs me) and the second one is more practical (how do I get to the next part, what else can I see). What puzzles me is: in how many other ways could we browse this archive of videos? Are there other logics, other paths, that would involve us in a different level than emotional and practical?

Description:

This web documentary was made in 2008 by French production company Honkytonk Films (and more specifically by directors Samuel Bollendorff and Abel Ségrétin). Interestingly it was first First released on French news portal lemonde.fr and has then successfully toured the most renowned Documentary Film Festivals of this world…

The documentary wants to make public the very poor working conditions of Chinese coal miners and investigates on the daily death that occur in those mines – deaths that never get reported by the media.  Following a montage of stylish photos linked by an explanatory scrolling text, you are positioned in the role of an investigator that travels in the coal region and meets local people.

Your journey begins in Datong which is located just a couple hours away West from Beijing. You travel from there all around the region and visit its major coal mines, from the “best” state-owned complex to the worst private coal plants.

In and around the coal mines, you get the story first hand from the mingong, the rural migrants traveling their country looking for work.

At your own pace and will, you meet them and learn more about how they live in this valley of death and pollution, sometimes even literally bumping into them as they leave their home for their night shift, in the frozen winter of Northern China.

Ultimately, you might discover China forbidden mines in which happen most of the accidents.

Find out more:

For information and credits about the project click here

To view the documentary online  click here

My comments:

This humanistic/current affairs documentary is a very successful example of how interaction can be a tool for immersion in a factual story. If any of us did not care about what happens in remote China, it would be quite impossible to not feel concerned after meeting the people that Journey to the end of coal presents us. At first the quality and beauty of the photos acts as an incentive to see more… then after a few screens a text invites us to interview the person that is on screen. Here again, sheer human curiosity acts as an incentive to learn more… and before we know we feel part of a journey that tells us about what we did not know.

As I was browsing through the project I could not help trying to understand the interactive structure behind it. After a few instructions I found myself on a photo of a train station where a text gave me a unique option: take the train to Shanxi. I clicked. A video started with some credits, but it is on another photo with scrolling text that I was presented with my next two options:”visit the state mine complex” or “go look for coal miners”.   This ramifications of choices sounded very much like a branching narrative where even interviews with people are lead by selecting a question out of a choice of two or three.

Now… I normally dislike branching narrative (with a few exceptions, like some of Florian’s Korsakow films) because they always leave me with the feeling that in real life I would I liked a different option, and that tends to frustrate me. Why should I select between things I do not care about? While in linear movies a sort of inertia makes me watch even things that I do not care about, in interactive films the moment I loose curiosity I stop interacting – and this is the end of the film. So… why was I not irritated by Journey to the end of coal?

I suspect it is a mixture of things:

1- the photos are elaborated and grabbing

2- the informational text about China’s coal miners is interesting

3- the compulsory branching choices often give the feeling that those are the two or three question that the reported asked while he/she was filming and, although they are maybe not the one that I would have asked, they seem quite natural and legitimate questions… so they are not irritating

4- the lives of the people that one meets are so extremes, that one cannot but sympathise

5- the topic is very interesting, and I knew nothing about it

Branching narratives (that I call hypertext mode in my PhD) have the disadvantage of not allowing a creative participation of the user. All you can do is normally to choose between pre-selected choices and it is therefore a type of interaction that that is one way: you are selecting an option but you cannot change it nor affect the final project. But I am noticing that this type of interaction works quite well when one is browsing through other peoples lives. Florian Thalhofer’s Love Story Project and Journey to the end of coal are two successful applications of branching narratives… and I think that it is because they have one thing in common: they put us in front of people that we do not know, but that we are interested in. Our human curiosity works as an incentive to go ahead and our natural shyness welcomes the given choices (even if limited) that allow us to meet those strangers without having to thing about “what shall I ask”.

I would be glad if other people could give me their comments on this…

Description:

Diamond Road was a there hours documentary about the diamonds’ industry produced in Canada in 2007 . The producers, with the collaboration of Ryerson University (Canada) decided to do an online version of it in 2008.

Diamond Road Online was designed to create a  be personalised experience where the software suggests videos to the users keeping track of the videos selected by the viewers themselves . The authors call it a “community documentary”. Here is how they man by it (quote from their FQA’s website):

“Most documentary films can only be watched – you sit down at the theatre or in your living room; everything is geared to the filmmaker’s perspective. Unless you’re at a screening where the director stands up and takes questions, it’s usually one-way communication.

This is where you come in. The raw material is here: over 8 hours of documentary clips and growing. You can just watch if you want, but you can also jump in and become a contributor and editor of the documentary:

* Rate clips and discuss them in DRO’s community forums
* Sequence short stories that show your point of view on the issues
* Submit content: video responses to the material you’ve watched, a short video you’ve created about diamonds, photographs, short text articles, animation – anything you can think of.

Everything you do can become part of Diamond Road Online and anyone who comes to the site can watch it! Over time we hope that DRO develops into a site with many different contributors and many different perspectives: a community documentary.”

Find out more:

View Diamond Road Online

Read about it as presented at Siggraph 2008.

My comments:

This is a professional project: lots of videos, good graphic interface and lots of depth. It is  a perfect educational tool  that tries to cover and foresee the needs of its viewers: there is an autoplay function that links videos back to back (avoiding the constant clicking of the viewer, and allowing a certain “linear passivity”) but there is also the option of choosing the next video (giving the active user the possibility to browse as he/she wants). I also like the effort in creating a community with posts and discussion around such a sensitive topic. This gives a depth to the documentary by opening it beyond the footage and the producer’s point of view.

I got a bit annoyed by the need of registering… why should I give my name, gender and date of birth in order to comment and participate to the forums? I suspect though this is a way to make sure that only people that really care about the topic enter the site…

I also wonder who does participate. The names that I saw in the forum seemed to repeat themselves… are they members of the production team? Are they web users that got interested?

And finally I am suspicious about the option of creating one owns movie out of website’s video clips, and to send it to friends (or just to save it and share it with the online community). Is this a relevant option within the context of this project or is it just a fashionable option? I am a firm believer that interactivity needs to have a purpose and I wonder if this option is not just a fancy trendy gadget… Maybe I am a bit too hash here… but who would want to create a movie out of a movie just for the sake of it? Again… please do comment if you have used this project, there is maybe something that I am missing here…

Over all though, this is a substantial and professional project that shows where we are at (in 2008) with video sharing and educational / documentary online formats.

Description:

Graffiti Archaeology is a project devoted to the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The core of the project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of graffiti taken at the same location by many different photographers over a span of several years. The photos were taken in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and other cities, over a timespan from the late 1990’s to the present.

Using the grafarc explorer, you can visit some classic graffiti spots, see what they looked like in the past, and explore how they have changed over the years.

Cassidy Curtis, the author, writes in the “about” section of Graffity Archeology:

The photos themselves are gathered from diverse sources, including my own collection, other photographers, and various graffiti sites on the web. As grafarc.org expands to include more cities, the web is becoming ever more important as a resource for the project. The site has attracted the attention of both graffiti artists and photographers, and a vital online community is beginning to form around it (http://flickr.com/groups/grafarc). This community has become essential for weaving together disparate threads of visual information into a nuanced, structured historical record.

Find out more:

see Graffity Archeology and play with it

My comments:

This website is not strictly speaking an interactive documentary as it has no narrative – if not the implicit narrative of the passing time and its traces on graffiti walls. A little like Photosynth (and the 44th President Inauguration project) this visualisation tool allows us to see the different levels of complexity of a single moment in time, but they work of different latitudes: Photosynth allows the visualisation of a single moment (or a single object) by showing its multiple points of views (a series of photos reconstructs an object in 3D – or allows us to jump from one point of view to the other), while grafarc explorer allows us to go back in time and see the history of an object (or place).

If Photosynth is vertical (millions of points of views of one moment), Grafarc Explorer is horizontal (millions of one moments in time).

Would it not be great to mix the two? Imagine a documentary that could both dissect the moment and explore its history… fascinating, no?

Here is the description of the project (from their website):

This project reports on life as experienced by men, women and children in Gaza (Palestine) and Sderot (Israel): their lives and their survival on a daily basis. Under difficult living conditions and the threat of air attacks and bombings, people do keep on working, loving and dreaming. Life in spite of everything.

In order to document this will to live, short chronicles (2 minutes each) will be shot by both Israeli and Palestinian teams, day after day for two months. These short stories will follow six characters from Gaza and six from Sderot. In this way, we will have a new story of each character every week, and the viewer will be able to follow them intimately for 10 weeks. The stories will be aired via the Internet and users will have a personal, interactive and non-linear access to these contents on the site ARTE France which will include the videos, blogs, forums, links etc.

Gaza Sderot is an original project broadcast by Arte.tv, the official site of ARTE, the French-German cultural television station, in coproduction with an Israeli team – Alma Films/Trabelsi Productions in cooperation with The Sapir College in Sderot, a Palestinian team – Ramattan Studios, a French documentary production company – Bo Travail ! and an interactive production company Upian.com.

On Saturday, October 25th, “Gaza Sderot” won the “Prix Europa” which took place in Berlin.

Find out more:

Watch & explore http://gaza-sderot.arte.tv/

Read a Time (2009) article about the project

My comments:

This is a fascinating project!!! For me everything works well on it: the use of mixed media, the interface, the emotional impact and the political meaning if it. By shooting daily on both parts of the israelo-palestinian conflict Gaza-Sderot manages to bring us all “back to normal life”: we see “normal” people dealing with life as they can, with their ups and downs. We get time (2 months) to get attached to them, to have some sort of bond with them.

When the project was shot (in 2008) we could follow the life of those people in a weekly basis, but the site also holds its strength now, was after the shooting is finished. The existance of a blog also allows viewers to exchange opinions and to keep alife the debate that this web-documentary wants to create.

I also particularly like the fact that one can browse those stories using different approaches: time, faces, maps and topics. By doing so one can get attached to a character but also position him/her and check what other people say about the same topic. This lateral linking creates a web of associations that feels very satisfying. Somehow the designers managed to use hypertext interactivity in a fulfilling way: they got the right words and the right linking logic.

I think this project is extremely well put together… and it is very strong. Do you share my enthusiasm?

Description:

Filmmaker-in-Residence is an experiment of film activism done by documentary-maker Katerina Cizek and the National Film Board of Canada. The basic idea is to “put media into the hands of communities in need” – as she states in her film. Cizek has followed for months mental  health nurses going into peoples’ houses, she has followed a HIV team all the way to Africa… and out of hours of recordings she has composed an elegant photo/audio-documentary and several short films. All of those are accessible via her web-documentary (it has also been released as a DVD).

Find out more:

Watch Filmmaker-in-residence.

Read Filmmaker-in-residence blog.

My comments:

Filmmaker-in-residence is a very powerful project. It works well because the topics are very strong (mental illness, HIV, photo activism etc…) but also because it has a strong linear narrative. Although the video use is scarce (most of it is composed of photos and text – with some audio) the navigation is completely linear: you basically can go “next” or “previous” (with the exception of a menu that allows you to jump). The strength of the narrative is such that most people go all the way to the end of it – or at least, I did.

From the point of view of its interactive interest, the project is quite banal. But the photos are great, the text is long but compelling and the navigation is simple and clean. Interestingly enough the project is circular: it finishes where it starts. No surprises that it won the 2008 Webby Awards.

But for me Filmmaker-in-residence is more a tour de force from an ideological point of view than from a technical one. Cizek clearly believes that media needs to go back into the hands of the people that are normally neglected by our society. She sees her project as an alternative model of media-making. Following the tradition of cinema verite and participatory documentary she challenges new media to be even more useful to give back power to the people that are not heard by our society. Filming inner-city health is not about her showing us “the others”, but about giving people a way to exist and express themselves. Media here is used for change, not for voyeurism.

A very courageous project.

Description:

The [LoveStoryProject] is a growing collection of stories and thoughts about love. It started in Cairo in 2003 when Florian Thalhofer and Mahmoud Hamdy asked friends to explain their definition of love.

People from very different cultural backgrounds talk about one common phenomenon: love. Without claiming universal validity, the answers provide a new perspective on your own and the other culture.

The [LoveStoryProject] is a database-driven video-archive that can be viewed in a computer-installation or over the internet. The [LoveStoryProject] is an evolving and dynamic documentary-film. A film that never is the same twice.

Find out more:

The project was edited with the Korsakow system (a software that Florian developed himself to be able to interact with video online – or on a DVD support). For more on Korsakow check: http://www.korsakow.com/ksy/

For other Korsakow movies check wiki page http://korsakow.ca/index.php?title=Korsakow_Films_Online

To see the [LoveStoryProject] go to http://www.lovestoryproject.com/

My comments:

The [LoveStoryProject] does really work for me. Although one jumps from one interview to another with a visual hyperlink logic (click on an image rather than on a text) the curiosity about the topic really makes this exploration rather natural and intuitive. One does not think “do I want to go to the right or to the left” (the type of decision that is difficult to make as a user because one does not actually care about it), on the contrary, one sees a face and wants to know more about him/her.

Probably because it is such an intimate subject – love- curiosity and interest is enough to browse through this project. I really like it.

Description:

Love and Diane: An Interactive Timeline is an interactive TV application based on the
Jennifer Dworkin’s Love & Diane, “a frank and astonishingly intimate real-life drama of a mother and daughter desperate for love and forgiveness, but caught in a devastating cycle. During the 1980s, a crack cocaine epidemic ravaged and impoverished many inner city neighborhoods. As parents like Diane succumbed to addiction, a generation of children like Love entered the foster care system. Shot over ten years, the film centers on Love and Diane after the family is reunited and is struggling to reconnect. Now 18 and a mother herself, Love must reconcile her anger and confront the ways in which her mother’s past mistakes haunt her life. Diane, in turn, makes new choices for herself, seeking to break the treadmill of addiction and poverty.

Find out more:

Video: http://www.pov.org/loveanddiane/video/timeline/love_diane_hi.swf
Related: http://www.pbs.org/pov/loveanddiane/

Description:

Chiloe is an archipelago south of Santiago, Chile, populated by farmers, fishermen and craftsman. University of North Carolina photojournalism students captured the life and culture of this colorful island community in a series of narrated photo essays (which can be viewed as silent slideshows or with audio). Chile plans to celebrate its bicentennial in 2010 by building the longest bridge in Latin America, joining Chiloe to the mainland. Will this destroy the island’s culture and tax its natural resources, or will the bridge be the key to the island’s economic future? These photo and video essays showcase personal stories of a life that reflects long standing traditions as well as recent cultural and economic developments. They are stories about a way of life that may soon disappear, and are therefore an important record of our time. The text is offered in both English and Spanish, and the Spanish audio is similarly presented in English as well.

Find out more:

watch and browse Chiloe’ stories

My comments:

Chiloe’ Stories is a good example of clean and effective online videojournalism. The aim of this project is not to use groundbreaking interactivity, but to use digital media effectively to portray the life in some remote islands – a lifestyle  that may change very soon. In this sense I think this project is very successful: it mixes photojournalism with video journalism, it uses graphics and text for the subjects that are more historical… in other words it uses the correct type of media for each type of information. The navigation is clean and easy and the content is wide enough so that one has the feeling of learning something.

A good example of educational material, and a sweet mosaic of lifes and issues that uses multimedia efficiently.

Have a look to Gaza-Sderot: life inspite of everything for an attempt of videojournalism in Palestine and Israel (2008) – but especially have a look to Big stories small town: a very similar project to Chiloe’ Stories (but done in 2008 in Australia).

Description:

7sons is a project by Florian Thalhofer. Yet again Florian has used his Korsakow software (that he has himself created and that is downloadable from the web) to create a hypertext video around the topic of a journey in the desert.

The interface of the project is the one of a main screen -that plays the video- and of three hyperlinks that branch to other video pieces. Following the words on the screen (that can be the name of the next protagonist or an indication of the next topic) one can browse through interviews and nicely edited pieces about nomadic life.

The logic of Korsakow is that the narrative (text order) can be different each time, since it depends on the selections of the viewer.

Find out more:

The project was edited with the Korsakow system (a software that Florian developed himself to be able to interact with video online – or on a DVD support). For more on Korsakow check: http://www.korsakow.com/ksy/

For other Korsakow movies check wiki page http://korsakow.ca/index.php?title=Korsakow_Films_Online

To watch and play with 7sons go to http://www.7sons.com/

My comments:

Althought 7sons is visually quite appealing (nice shots of the desert and very nice music) I am not convinced that the logic of interactivity that the Korsakow software offers is enhancing the topic of the documentary.

The database narrative that Korsakow affords is based on jumping from one interview to the other, of from one edited segment to another,…it therefore pushes the user to “browse” through a topic following curiosity.

While I think that the curiosity holds in topic such as love (see Florian’s “the LoveStoryProject”) I am not so sure that it is sufficient for a journey through a geographical space such as the desert. I found myself stopping the exploration quite quickly as I had the feeling of “not going anywhere” or not “discovering enough”.

It is also to be said thought, that this is one the Florian’s earliest projects (2003) and that his use of the Korsakow system has now really evolved.

(I have not seen this project myself, what you will find here is the description given at Multimedia The leading Edge)

Explanation: Children were interviewed and asked to describe what would be the 12 loveliest things they know, and these were gathered into themes. When reflected upon with the eyes of adulthood, this formed the basis of a personal documentary which attempts to provide emotion and thoughtful reflection.

Interaction: Things that stand out intuitively as colourful or moving or that catch the eye can be touched. Coloured images appear to an old man which represent themes collated from children: achievement, speed, success, caring, play etc. Themes are developed by intuitive clicking. It is possible to experience fairground rides, flying (and crashing) a kite, walking a dog, sledging, bicycle riding and similar events. Choosing symbols of adulthood can bring harsh reality.

Find out more:

Read an explanation of the installation

Read a paper about ‘Global art’ (interactive film) by Chris Hayles

My comments:

I have often read about this project, but I have never been able to see it. If you have seen it, please add a comment!