For documentary lovers IDFA (Interanationl Documentary Festival Amsterdam) is like a sweet shop full of wanderful temptations… and for the interactive documentary festival lover it is  a bit as a treasure hunt… where lots of jewels can be found, and they are spread here and there in the city. Could there be a better excuse to visit such a wonderful town as Amsterdam?

I went to IDFA just for DocLab (the new media part of the festival), where fifteen idocs have been selected to illustrate the best stuff around this year. Follow the link to see their selection. The man behind DocLab is Caspar Sonnen: as early as 2008 he understood that the idoc genre was here to stay and to expand, and he created DocLab – that is still one of the best places in the world to spot and discuss interactive documentaries.

But there is more than fifteen idocs at DocLab: there is an exhibition space dedicated to idocs experiments and installations - Expanding Documentary – lots of talks and live presentations of projects by their authors, and also a forum where a few interactive projects are pitched in front of commissioning editors and potentially funding partners (this is the match making part of the festival).

So… what did I come back with in my DocLab goody bag? The jewels I found through my own teasure hunt are of different nature: people, projects, ideas and debates got all mixed up in my DocLab reward bag, and this is why it is so difficult to give them an order. I shall try.

First: simulating reality, rather than representing it, can be very powerful – but it needs an aim

I enrolled to, and tried personally, the experimental 3D VR project presented at the Exploding Documentary exhibition: CAPE. CAPE is a virtual walk through a 360 video world of Brussels where a virtual character guides you by hand. This is a bit difficult to explain, so I shot a video to explain it better.

The plot itself is just a tour around strange places in Brussels, but what is interesting is the possibility of being catapulted physically in another reality and adapt instantly to such virtual real/physical space. How can this technology be used in documentary genre? I could not help but linking it to Nonny de la Pena latest experiments – such as Hunger in LA (to be launched at Sundance Festival in Jannuary!).

Second: interactivity needs to be meaningful and project-appropriate

I finally met Casper Sonner, the guy beyong DocLab. He is the sweetest and most competent person I have met in this field for a while. With a typical Dutch casual and relaxed style he manages to hold together demanding guests, technical issues, introduction speeches and last minute panics. When introducing the idoc genre said something that made me laugh: “interactivity is like salt: it does not get better if you put more of it”. This is so true! How many projects are currrently adding features just because “it is possible”? Should we first not question what we want to create – as an experience, as a meaning- and only then decide what sort of interactivity is appropriate to convey such message/feeling? This brings me to my thirds point.

Caspar Sonnen at DocLab 2011 – photo by Sandra Gaudenzi

Third: the art of mobile Apps – interactivity as a way to perceive our environment differently

Barcode.tv had a double presence at DocLab: there physical installation where one could pick up white plastic objects in a room and barcode them to trigger a video (it was not working when I tried it and, to be honest, I do not think that as an exhibition it was particularly meaningful) and there was a Live presentation and debate of the project by David Carzon (Arte) and Hugues Sweeny (NFB). If you go to http://codebarre.tv/en/#/en you will see a sentence: “objects are like mirrors- they reveal who we are”. This ambitions project starts as a mobile app, and  only later became a website. The aim is to make you look at what is around you with different eyes. If you pick up an object (the act of selection is already a step towards awareness) you can then either barcode it by photographing it with your phone, or type its name into the  interface. This will spring up a video linked to the category of object you have selected. A pool of 30 artists created a 100 videos for barcode.tv

Carzon (ARTE) and Sweeny (NFB) presenting at DocLab – photo by Sandra Gaudenzi

When I first tried Barcode on the web I could not see the point of it – probably because the videoclips are not clearly connected with the object you have picked up (it is linked to the category of objects – so if you take “shoe” it will put it into the “clothes and fashion” section, and you’ll might watch a video about umbrellas…which might be a long shot from your original expectation). I think this is a floor in the project. But on the other hand I can see how, as a phone app, it makes total sense: it uses technology not to learn about things, but to see them differently. This type of idoc is not trying to inform us, but to get us out of what we perceive (or do not see anymore) all around us. This is quite powerful stuff! My next point goes exactly on the opposite direction…

Fourth: Proposition One or the art of immersive video.

Condition One is a technology (a technique of shooting with special lenses and a software to edit the rushes and author it for tablets) that is being launched and marketed at the moment. This is not a project per se, but a new way of presenting 180 degrees video (might be 360…I am not sure) where the user can navigate immersive video via his/er tablet or iPad. Imagine a gigantic image of which you only see a portion – the size of your iPad. In order to see the rest of the image you need to move your iPad around. This is supposed to make you feel part of the action. If you are not getting the concept – as it is quite complicate to explain it- do have a look to a part of the presentation that I recorder while I was there:

Now, this is a use of technology that is not trying to show you what you do not see, because what it is aiming at is the opposite: give you the feeling that you ARE there. This is not about changing approach, but about feeling immersed in the action.

They guys at Condition One did the fundamental mistake of using war footage to demo their technology. Show this at  a documentary festival and you switch on a bombshell: is it ethical to let you navigate into a war scene full of dead bodies? is the role of the filmmaker, and the editor,  not to select for the audience what should be seen? and if the filming is done at 180 degrees, then what is the point of having a cameraman – as there is no framing to be done? Wowww… the debate got quite animated!

But as Caspar Sonner rightly pointed out when you are browsing through the scene on your iPad you are effectively becoming the cameraman, and at this stage what is interesting are the decisions that YOU are going to make: are you going to watch that dead body or are you going towards that kids that needs help? We might have to learn when to use, and how to use such immersive video technology, but what is interesting is that along the path we’ll might learn even more about ourselves! Speaking about ethical decisions, which ones would we take if we were there?

This again points at the fact that technology per se is meaningless, it is its context of use that makes it useful, or not. And with “context” I move to my next point…

Fifth: the interface as context

Context is what gives meaning to our acts. Everything is situated. But what creates a context in an idoc?

While Bruno Masi was presenting La Zone, an idoc about the ghost area around Chernobyl, I could not help noticing that  his project made much more sense to me while he was explaining and introducing the videos, live, than when I was navigating through it on the web. The reason is clear: Masi was aurally expressing the context of his work, and therefore providing it, a context that is lost in the project itself. The three levels of navigation that are offered to the user are guiding through layers of videos, but they do not explain why such videos are crucial and how they might be meaningful within the global narrative. Arranging content into three levels gives videos an order, like in a map, but not a purpose nor a meaning.

As Sweeny and Carzon said in their presentation, color, font, navigation and interface all give meaning. The interface is as important as the content. And to this I would add that the interface does not only give the tone, the look and the mood of a project, it offers the entry and exit points, limits and possibilities… which effectively is what context is and does…

And finally: from desolated zones to playful cities…

Sixth: INSITU, or interactivity as playful poetry

INSITU has just won Best Digital Documentary at IDFA!!! Congratulations Antoine Viviani!

Interestingly enough this is probably the least interactive of all the projects that were presented at DocLab this year- it is effectively a 90 min movie on urban art performances covering different countries, with three  interactive points. Refreshingly director Antoine Viviani does not see interactivity as a must have, but as a plus that needs to be weighted depending on the topic of the idoc. Since INSITU is a symphony of city poetry –  I sincerely suggest that you watch it online, as it is really so beautiful and subtle as a movie – it generates a dreamy atmosphere that does not call the user to act or change the plot, but rather to dream with it, maybe by listening to people’s thoughts in the tube, by a simple click of the mouse…

INSITU proves that interactivity can be linked to fantasy, playfulness and dream, and does not always be linked to decisions or choice.

In conclusion: a lot of interactive projects have been presented to DocLab this year. Please go an see their website as I cannot review them all.  What I came back with from this trip to Amsterdam is a lot of fog (litterally!) and the conviction that it is not technology but a carefully balanced syntax between interactivity and context that makes a project work, or not. Interactivity can lead to choice,to dream or to immersion, while context can be provided by a narrating voice or by an interface… but those elements need to work together to build a whole.

Kat Cizek, and her NFB team, have just launched Highrise’s latest baby: One Millionth Tower.

This is the fifth experiment in four years of what is now becoming a networked documentary, rather than a simple idoc. When Highrise started at the NFB in 2008 it was described as a “multi-year, multi-media documentary” but I have to admit that the whole concept was not very clear to me. By the time Highrise launched Out My Window, in 2010, the idea that digital media was not just used to document vertical living, but rather to explore it, started to make more sense to me. But I had to write an article to understand how each of Highrise’s offsprings was not a separate project, but  a new bridge that continued an exploration started before.  I then called Highrise a “relational object”, because it became clear to me that while each project had its own goals, its characters and its interactive logic, as a whole, if you zoom out of it, Highrise looks like a series of pathways that slowly link territories that were not connected before. I suppose it took me time to see this because each project being so totally different (the Thousandth Tower invites residents to document their vertical living, Participate asks people around the world to upload photos on Flickr, Out My Window uses 360 degrees video and allows you to understand people’s lives through the exploration of their flats…) they feel as separate units. In a way they are: they use different technologies, they involve different people and they are made for different purposes. But then, in another way, they also have things in common: they all speak of vertical living and, more importantly, they treat digital media not as a way to document the world but as a way to change it. While Highrise opens up the discussion about our vertical cities at a global level, it also stays focused on its goal: empowering local people to change their environment, if they wish to. Global in scope and yet local in action. Empowering the subjects and informing the world. Macro and micro linked by a narrative thread. Technology used to push the limits, and create the new…

Now… if you see it like this, this relational objects starts to have a life: it creates a dynamic of change and then it moves to its next challenge. Like the rippling effect of a stone launched in water, each wave leads to another one. And yet: it would not have been possible to predict the next wave, as neither Kat, nor her team, are trying to control this living network, the just make sure it can evolve. Seen like that Highrise looks as a fascinating living network to me…

It is with all this in mind that I arrived to London’s Frontline club, on Monday 7th of November, to see Kat’s presentation of their newly launched One Millionth Tower.

This time Highrise experimented with 3D spaces, Popcorn technology and webGL. Why going in such controversial gaming aesthetic when you come from video and documentary? Well… to start with Kat is a documentary maker, but she has a background in graphics and photography – which explains a lot about the aesthetics of Highrise mixing stills and playing with 2D and 3D representation of space. But more importantly One Millionth Tower has a story: the residents of a tower block have been involved into the redesign of their communal external space, they have worked with architects to imagine the possible and then with animators to visualize the possible… this is what is being documented thought the project… and since it is about redesigning space, then they have decided to visualise it “in” space, hence the 3D navigation.

Now… what is it that is visualized in One Millionth Tower? The 3D world that they have created is NOT just the final result of such common production. The animated view of what the space could look like, if there were fundings to build it, is just ONE of the SIX stories that are being told in One Millionth Tower. This means that the 3D world that has been created is more than a standard architectural 3D animation: it is a storyworld. And what does it contain?

This is where it gets tricky, as my computer graphic card is not good enough to support webGL… so I have not managed to experience the space by myself. But here is what I understood during Kat’s demo – and I include a short extract of her presentation for the 58% of people that, like me, rely on already-old-media to study new media!

Extract of Kat Cizek’s presentation of 1MT, London 7.11.11 – shot by me

So… while you are moving with your arrow keys into the 3D space, two technologies are working together:  webGL allows the 3D experience to happen in the browser while Popcorn.jr links the place you are in to the next action script, and to real time data – so that if you are exploring the space at night, Popcorn will link to the real time and weather conditions at the tower block. Popcorn acts as a conductor of your experience – making sure that things do happen to you, as in any good game environment – but it also links you back to reality (real time and weather in Toronto), because this is not a game, it is a 3D documentary experience.

And what is a 3D documentary experience?

Nonny de la Pena has already plaid with this concept in 2007 when she re-built Guantanamo Bay in Second Life. In Gone Gitmo 3D space was used to simulate a reality to which neither the media nor the public had access to. The 3D space was built by using rigorously documented material and the user would experiment what it is like to be locked in Guantanamo Bay. The interest of the project was that Second Life was used to simulate things that exist in reality, and to reflect on them.

But in One millionth Tower, the reality is still to be re-built. The 3D space contains a mixture of videos and graphics that sometimes speak about the resident’s dreams, sometimes show what their gardens could look like and sometimes leaves you wondering in the in-betweens of stories… wondering what sort of space you are in… trying to make sense of how you navigate and listening to the sounds that subtly guide you toward the next story. I cannot comment at the “user experience” of it, as it does not run on my computer, but by watching it being demonstrated by Kat I had the feeling that, as a space, One Millionth Tower feels a little too artificial. Although a lot of maestry has been used in mixing graphics, animations and videos – which is a challenge in itself! – it looked to me too much as a “container space” rather than an “explorable space”. Somehow I had the feeling that it was there to give me access to the six stories, but that the space itself had no independent life to be explored, I did not feel the urge, or pleasure, to get lost into it. I know this sounds weird, but anyone that likes walking into an unknown city would know about the flaneur’s pleasure found into thinking that a space is rich, rather than directive.

This being said, while Kat was navigating through One Millionth Tower it also occurred to me that although  space is used to navigate through stories (much as in Out My Window, but just here it is a 3D space, and it appears larger than a single virtual tower) in reality the added value of it is in representing a dense and layered space. Let me explain what I mean by it: effectively the stories that are made accessible by such space represent different stages, and times, of reality. While you access time as “present time”, through a video of residents telling you about the absence of communal areas and paths between one tower block and the next, you move to “dream time”, listening and watching animations of what could be built, and therefore you land in “future time” as you visualize a possible space that Highrise is helping in becoming.

Also, different media are been used for different purposes: video documents residents’ ideas, graphic animations visualize a dream, or a potential, and sound creates the fluidity that links the two. All of One Millionth Tower seems to be a metaphor of Highrise as a whole: a space for linking present, dream, and future – a space for action. It is not by chance then that this time it is you, the “external user”, that have to navigate the space. Highrise takes care of making change possible by putting its subject in contact to the relevant authorities, and to the world, through the web, and through you. Now that you are watching you have been “linked”, “networked” to this web of change… what will you do? Browse? Make sense? Escape? This is now down to you…

Kat Cizek started her talk by reminding us Grierson’s definition of documentary as “creative treatment of actuality”. As I sit here thinking of One Millionth Tower I wonder… if the “actuality” is the need to feel entitled to participate in the construction of our own cities… what is the “creative treatment” here?

For me the “creative treatment” in One Millionth Tower consists in creating a space that can visualize our right to action. It is a space that tells the stories of others, but that reminds us that we are in that same space while we navigate it, we are not external to such reality,  this is our world too. As a user experience it might be that this space does not quite work yet, or maybe it works for some and not for others, but what is important here is the message it sends out: we are all connected in creating a space where reality unfolds. Reality is layered, connected and in constant movement: where are you right now in this?

Plof, the wave has started rippling. I do not know where this will lead us to, but one thing is sure: the process has started and we are part of it.

There will be a full presentation of One Millionth Tower on Monday that I will attend so… I’ll right more about it then!

I suggest you watch the video, as it rises a lot of questions… What it made me question is the difference between context of exposure to the piece and type of interaction. It makes a lot of sense to move within a space in order to understand, and experience, the scale of a flat… but really, what is it that we gain? Immersion, I suppose. In “immersion” there is the wow factor, the “hey, this is cool, I feel part of this flat”… but is this enough? Since I am not in the flat (I am in an installation space with another 50 people around me) how can we use such artificial representation to understand differently the same content that is on the web?

Would the mode of interaction be the key to add a layer to the piece? Space and scale are important for immersion, but is interaction not the next step to “relate” to content? From what I understand in the video people could interact by stepping into a spot of light on the floor. This means that instead of clicking an image with a mouse they phisically move into a spot of light. When movement becomes the key for change, things become interesting… in the same way that our world changes with us when we move within it (creating a whole where in and out is not relevant any more), an interactive documentary could use space to simulate, not reality, but our way to engage with it… This is for me the beginning of a new path in conceiving what interactive documentaries could do, or could become. I am not sure that moving into a spot of light is strong enough in this regard. After all this is a little bit too much a translation of the click of the mouse (a gesture that symbolises a decision). But… it is a beginning… To use our body as a catalyst for change is a way to realize how we perceive and relate to the world around us… and this is using interactivity at its most profound level!

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…

Here is how the project is described in its website:

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.

So… feel free to play with it. The 360 degrees videos are an interesting technology…although I am not too sure what they add to the whole story… I have mixed feelings about this project: it is old and new at the same time. I like the idea of a virtual building, but I am not sure that the individual stories are strong enough… I probably need to play with it more… let me know what you think of it!

Here is an example of the 360 videos:

A year down the line its director Katerina Cizek is clearly cooking an intriguing collaborative project using 360 degrees images.  Her team first announced that they were  prototyping an art installation in physical space (to re-translate digital space into physical one) and now they are asking for collaboration from all of us who live in a tower block (sending our highrise views to a Flickr account). How are they going to assemble them is a mystery… but from what I understand both a website and an exhibition should come out of it soon…

Although 360 technology is sexy, the point here is to know how it will be used. In her last project for NFB, Filmmaker-in-Residence, Katerina Cizek took very seriously the meaning of “collaborative” media.  During 5 years she worked with the medical staff, and with the patients, of an inner-city hospital… and it is only through deep rooting into their universe that she emerged with the version of the interactive documentary that is available online – and on DVDs. I am really curious to know what type of collaboration she is experimenting with in her new project, Highrise. After having directly engaged with a selected group of tower residents in Toronto (see their descriptions of their space and the presentation that has been organized with Toronto’s major here),   they are now asking everybody to send photos to Flickr… is this a contradiction or a cleverly balanced dose of crowd sourcing and intimate collaboration?

And also… is 360 degrees technology an aesthetic landscaped choice or does it experiment with new type of digital interaction?

I am afraid that for now they are the only one to have the answers… maybe they want to share some information with us?

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….

Have a look to their trailer. If you are interested in this project you can also subscribe to their newsletter.

This is how they describe the project on their website: “HIGHRISE, a multi-year, multi-media, collaborative documentary project about the human experience in global vertical suburbs. We will use the acclaimed interventionist and participatory approaches of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada’s Filmmaker-in-Residence (FIR) project. Our scale will be global, but rooted firmly in the FIR philosophy — putting people, process, creativity, collaboration, and innovation first.”

Worth following…

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:

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.