Katerina Cizek

Visiting Artist

Sponsored by the MIT Visiting Artists Program

Director of the National Film Board of Canada’s multi-year HIGHRISE project, Katerina Cizek is an Emmy-winning documentary-maker working across multiple media platforms. Prior to HIGHRISE, she worked as the NFB’s Filmmaker in Residence. Her work has documented the Digital Revolution, and has itself become part of the movement.

Arnau Gifreu

Research Affiliate

Arnau Gifreu is a Professor of Communication Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the Universitat de Vic (UVIC). Arnau is also a member of the i-Docs group. The Director of the UVIC_Lab, the Digital Content Laboratory at UVIC, he has also been a research lecturer at Harvard University (Harvard Metalab) and York University (Future Cinema Lab).

Suvi Andrea Helminen

Artist in Residence

Suvi Andrea Helminen is an interactive and documentary filmmaker from Denmark, currently based in Boston. She graduated from The National Film School of Denmark’s documentary department.  Her first interactive documentary “48 Hour Games” was released in December 2012. It is currently touring and it has been showcased at panels and live events at SXSW Interactive, CPH:DOX (Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival), Game Developers Conference San Francisco, and the Nordic Game Conference a.o.

Karim Ben Khelifa

Artist in Residence

Karim Ben Khelifa is a photojournalist who freelances regularly for Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, Le Monde, Stern, GEO and dozens of others. He is also the co-founder of Emphas.is an online platform that connects audiences and freelance journalists in order to create global communities and alternative funding models for visual storytelling. He is currently the 2013 Carroll Binder Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Andrew Lowenthal

Research Affiliate

Andrew Lowenthal is Co-Founder and Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-Pacific human rights and environmental non-profit exploring the intersection of video, technology and social change. EngageMedia harnesses the advocacy potential of video and online technologies via the development of open source technologies, the creation of strategic networks and experimentation with new distribution tactics. In 2013-2014, Andrew will be a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Alexander Reben

Research Affiliate

Alexander Reben is a kinetic engineer and interactive artist who designs robots and novel interfaces to experimentally explore humankind’s evolving relationship with technology. His work has been shown at Ars Electronica, MIT, Axiom, EYEBEAM, The Whitney Biennial, and has been featured in New Scientist, Fast Company, BBC, CBC, Hack a Day, and other news outlets. Alexander’s recent interactive installation, “Robots-in-Residence”, “The World’s First Documentary Shot And Directed Entirely By Robots”  premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s Doclab, and showcased at the 2013 Tribeca International Film Festival’s Storyscapes Competition.

In her prompt, [Olga] models the kind of story she wants people to share. She tells a short story of how a smell elicits a memory for her. She gives people time, in this prompt, to reflect on a smell and memory in their own life and asks for people to contribute. Not everyone who calls leaves a message, some seem to hang up and call again later. There might be something in asking people for memories instead of stories. It seems more accessible — we all have memories, but stories have clear starts and ends and lessons learned, they are harder to construct, and harder to share with strangers.

Read the rest of Becky’s post at the MIT Center for Civic Media blog, where she discusses the different ways that Olga invites people to participate in several of her collaborative storytelling projects.

Arnau is in the process of interviewing a number of practitioners, scholars, and students of interactive documentary about the state of the field. He will be posting select clips on the OpenDocLab website. Below you’ll find Part 3 of an interview with OpenDocLab Principal Investigator William Uricchio.

In this series we focus on the theoretical part of the study of interactive documentary. We will conduct video interviews with the main experts in the field based on six key questions: (1) the definition, how would they define the interactive documentary; (2) the evolution of the form, whether they believe that the interactive documentary is a natural evolution of the linear documentary; (3) the change in the logics and dynamics, if they believe there is a change in the logics of production, distribution and exhibition; (4) the role of the author, if they believe that the role of the author is threatened; (5) the business model; and (6) their views on the production, research and events organized by countries that are active in this field, placing special emphasis on Canada and France.

Our first interviewee is William Uricchio, Professor and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is also Lead Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and MIT Game Lab. In this video interview Uricchio answers the last questions:

1. Which could be a possible business model behind the interactive documentary?

2. Which are active countries in relation to the production of interactive documentaries?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uricchio argues that the crowdfunding model could be a good business model for interactive documentaries: if you like what you’re watching, think about ways you can support it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uricchio remarks that on one hand we have the contribution model and on the other hand we have state support, and in between there is the commercial and game industry models. He notes that there are state-supported institutions creating interactive documentaries in Canada, the Netherlands and France. Different nations have different approaches, which enriches the entire field.

Arnau Gifreu Castells (PhD)
Research Affiliate, MIT Open Documentary Lab
agifreu@mit.edu

Arnau is in the process of interviewing a number of practitioners, scholars, and students of interactive documentary about the state of the field. He will be posting select clips on the OpenDocLab website. Below you’ll find Part 2 of an interview with OpenDocLab Principal Investigator William Uricchio.

In this series we focus on the theoretical part of the study of interactive documentary. We will conduct video interviews with the main experts in the field based on six key questions: (1) the definition, how would they define the interactive documentary; (2) the evolution of the form, whether they believe that the interactive documentary is a natural evolution of the linear documentary; (3) the change in the logics and dynamics, if they believe there is a change in the logics of production, distribution and exhibition; (4) the role of the author, if they believe that the role of the author is threatened; (5) the business model; and (6) their views on the production, research and events organized by countries that are active in this field, placing special emphasis on Canada and France.

Our first interviewee is William Uricchio, Professor and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is also Lead Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and MIT Game Lab. In this video interview Uricchio answers the following questions:

1.Do you believe there is a change in the logics of production, distribution and exhibition?

2.Do you consider the role of the author threatened in this specific form?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Interactive documentaries reveal huge changes in the production, distribution and exhibition logics and dynamics compared to traditional documentaries. Uricchio points out that production technologies are becoming cheaper, easier to use and more pervasive. Distribution has been transformed by the Internet, so that people can now spread information easily throughout the world. In terms of exhibition, he remarks that we’ve seen big changes in digital devices, for example the development of tablets, and people have a different kind of emotive relationship with them. Uricchio believes that these factors all point to a radical shift.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uricchio affirms that the traditional understanding of what an author does is certainly threatened by interactive documentaries, but there’s another way of considering the authorial voice according to the analyses by Barthes and Foucault. Uricchio sees the author as a “collaborator”, someone who is shaping and creating an environment, providing structures and new avenues of experience. But this new role does not mean that the director will lose the authorial voice. Uricchio stresses the word collaboration as a negotiation of reality between the author, text and user.

Arnau Gifreu Castells (PhD)
Research Affiliate, MIT Open Documentary Lab
agifreu@mit.edu

In the tenth part of Filmmaker‘s interview project with prominent figures from the world of transmedia, conducted through the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Katerina Cizek gives her take on the way digital technology is shaping contemporary storytelling. Cizek is currently the director of the NFB’s HIGHRISE project, exploring new forms and new approaches to content. HIGHRISE is a multi-year, many media series of projects. You can see it at highrise.nfb.ca and her previous project Filmmaker-in-Residence at filmmaker.nfb.ca.

For an introduction to this entire series, and links to all the installments so far, check out “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code,” by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Sarah Wolozin.

MIT OpenDocLab: How did you become a digital storyteller? Were there any projects that inspired you? If not, where did you look for inspiration?

Cizek: I’ve always called myself platform-agnostic. I’ve worked in all forms of media: photography, print, video, radio, and, of course, digital. I was really a child of the digital revolution and its democratizing effects. That’s what allowed me to get into storytelling, and understand the relationship between media and community.

My first real experience on the ground was behind the barricades at the Oka Crisis. It was a significant event in First Nations history in Canada. The municipal government wanted to build a ninth hole of a golf course on ancient Mohawk burial grounds. The community at Kanesatake said no, and they put up a blockade and it escalated with a shootout with the local police. The Canadian Army was sent in and there was an armed standoff for 77 days. I ended up behind the barricades, and witnessed a very different lived experience than what I was seeing on television at the time.

From that moment, I became committed to the need to amplify community voices. That propelled me into exploring the relationship between media and community, in what was then the very beginnings of the digital era. Already handicams were making their mark in terms of people being able to document their own lives in an accessible and affordable way. I was hooked on the possibilities of community organizing, community activism, and creating media and stories, and exploring how they might work together.

I made my first big web project in 2002, as a companion to a documentary I made with co-director Peter Wintonick, on this very subject, in fact, called Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News.

MIT OpenDocLab: What are the most useful skills for an interactive storyteller? What are the tools of the trade?

Cizek: Adaptability. Collaboration. Curiosity. And then just good old pixel-pushing. So many digital artists come from such diverse disciplines. Some more from coding, others from the art-music-photography worlds.

MIT OpenDocLab: When you start an interactive project, how do you put together a team?

Cizek: Our methodology is a bit different from other kinds of digital projects out there. HIGHRISE is founded on the idea of inter-disciplinary collaboration. So our teams include a broad scope of disciplines: architects, urban planners, academics, civil servants, landlords, community engagement officers, animators, web developers, art directors, creative technologists, sound designers and of course, highrise residents themselves. In HIGHRISE, as in Filmmaker-in-Residence (the project that Senior Producer Gerry Flahive and I did previously at the NFB), the stories and the projects stem from the relationships rather than the other way around.

As the director, I am having multiple conversations concurrently, some more to do with content, others more about technology and emerging forms. At a certain point, I see a connection, and the conversations begin to converge. That’s how a project begins.

MIT OpenDocLab: Where is this community and how can people access it?

Cizek: You need to create your own community around projects, because it really doesn’t exist yet. The most exciting part of it is the multidisciplinary approach. In some respects, it’s like starting a band, but with people from many different walks of life. You go to gigs, listen to other people’s work, get to know people and how they like to work, and eventually you find a way to play together. A part of this world is definitely entrenched in the “ad agency/creative company” culture, but it’s pretty easy to get past that quickly with the right partners.

MIT OpenDocLab: How does the role of a director change? What are the creative challenges?

Cizek: I love what Walter Murch says about conventional filmmaking: “The director is the immune system of the film.” And in interactive, that fundamental role doesn’t change. It’s the director’s responsibility to see the big picture, to collaborate, and to create an environment for people with talent and expertise to do the best that they can do (whatever that may be!), and keep bad things away from the production.

MIT OpenDocLab: How does the role of the audience change?

Cizek: The people formerly known as the “audience.” I also like to talk about the people formerly known as the “subjects.” There’s a democratizing process going on, it’s a much more nuanced multidirectional relationship between “makers,” “subjects / participants” and “audiences / users.”

MIT OpenDocLab: What’s your level of understanding of coding or programming? Do you see the relationship of director and creative technologist as analogous to director and cinematographer? (Why or why not?)

Cizek: I learned basic html about 15 years ago. Coding is the 21st-century stage of necessary literacy. We all need to learn the basics. The Mozilla Foundation is doing some phenomenal outreach work on this, arguing for a digital literacy, starting very young. They’ve created great tools for kids to learn. We ran some workshops with them last summer at one of the highrises we work in, with girls nine to 13 years old. Recent refugees, many still learning English. It was really incredible to watch how quickly they could pick it up.

That said, the role of the creative technologist is very important in a digital production, and a director needs to understand what they do. Creative technologists are artists and key members of the team. It’s not quite like director /cinematographer, I would argue it’s a bit closer to a director / editor — a little bit closer to the user experience side of things.

MIT OpenDocLab: How do you find funding for digital interactive storytelling projects?

Cizek: I am really fortunate to be working at the National Film Board of Canada, Canada’s public producer. It’s an organization with a firm commitment to original digital production (starting with our project Filmmaker-in-Residence in 2006) and is doing work that very few can around the world. The mission is to explore and nurture the public sphere. So we are mandated to do things that precisely no one else might be able to do.

MIT OpenDocLab: What’s your idea of the new model of distribution?

Cizek: The big question for everyone is how to be heard above the huge noise of the trillion or so websites out there, without just talking louder, and how to get to large sets of audiences. I like Henry Jenkins’s notion of “spreadable media” rather than “viral media.” He advocates that we should understand the sharing of media with more of a sense of agency than disease.

MIT OpenDocLab: What’s your vision for how to exhibit interactive projects?

Cizek: There’s clearly a tension between an intimate single-user experience, and a live or physical collective viewing experience. Not all projects are suited to do both, and it doesn’t make them less important if they don’t. I know traditional film festivals are beginning to explore how to exhibit digital work. IDFA DocLab does live screenings, which are quite performative. I performed HIGHRISE/Out My Window there, and I’ve performed Out My Window live with musicians too several times, it’s really fun. We also created an installation at IDFA, which was a great experience. Sundance and Tribeca are now in that space, looking to “spatialize” the works, in gallery-like settings. I feel it brings the work into more of an art-world experience.

MIT OpenDocLab: Where do you see the future of this field going?

Cizek: We are early days. It’s questionable whether we will even be able to access the digital projects we are making in 10-15 years! So it can feel ephemeral. It’s a big issue at the NFB, which has done great work to make decades of old films accessible for free online. Now, we are working to figure out how to archive this digital work so that it can be seen down the road, because whatever we are doing then, it’s most certainly not going to be what we are doing now. But we won’t get there from here if we don’t continue to experiment, which is what makes it worthwhile.

Arnau is in the process of interviewing a number of practitioners, scholars, and students of interactive documentary about the state of the field. He will be posting select clips on the OpenDocLab website. First up is Part 1 of an interview with OpenDocLab Principal Investigator William Uricchio.

In this series we focus on the theoretical part of the study of interactive documentary. We will conduct video interviews with the main experts in the field based on six key questions: (1) the definition, how would they define the interactive documentary; (2) the evolution of the form, whether they believe that the interactive documentary is a natural evolution of the linear documentary; (3) the change in the logics and dynamics, if they believe there is a change in the logics of production, distribution and exhibition; (4) the role of the author, if they believe that the role of the author is threatened; (5) the business model; and (6) their views on the production, research and events organized by countries that are active in this field, placing special emphasis on Canada and France.

Our first interviewee is William Uricchio, Professor and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is also Lead Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and MIT Game Lab. In this video interview Uricchio answers the first two questions:

1. How would you define the interactive documentary?

2. Do you believe that the interactive documentary is a natural evolution of the linear documentary?

Click here to view the embedded video.

The main idea Uricchio puts forward is that in interactive documentary, the user is a “co-constructor of the text” along with the author/director. In this new form of documentary, the author and the user collaborate to create the text.

Click here to view the embedded video.

According to Uricchio, this new way of storytelling is not necessarily an extension of the linear documentary, although it could be seen that way. Uricchio stresses that we need to understand that interactive documentary is coming from a different space than traditional filmmaking–the space between the narrative and play. Uricchio argues that the interactive documentary has its own roots and is based on an experience that is in fact closer to playing a game.

To get deeper into this topic, check out the OpenDocLab Moments of Innovation project, which gives a history the overlap between documentary and play.

Arnau Gifreu Castells (PhD)

Research Affiliate, MIT Open Documentary Lab
agifreu@mit.edu

The OpenDocLab team is happy to welcome Arnau Gifreu Castells, an OpenDocLab visiting research affiliate, as the inaugural contributor to the Research Forum. A Professor of Communication Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the Universitat de Vic (UVIC), Arnau is also a member of the i-Docs group. The Director of the UVIC_Lab, the Digital Content Laboratory at UVIC, he has also held research lecturer positions at Harvard University (Harvard Metalab) and York University (Future Cinema Lab).

Combined evolution of the documentary genre and interactive media: towards the interactive documentary

Introduction: the documentary genre and the digital media (I)

by Arnau Gifreu Castells

In this series we focus on analyzing the two main parts that constitute the interactive documentary field: the documentary genre and interactive media. In these articles we trace the evolutions of both the documentary and digital medium, and examine the significant ways they intersect. Our aim is to link moments of innovation in the documentary genre and storytelling in general with technological experiments, inventions and pioneering concepts in the digital field.

The documentary genre: preliminary issues

The study of documentary is a complex area and it is often difficult to put forth a definition of the genre that is free of criticism. As well as attempting to illuminate a historical context and possible definitions, it is very important to review the various positions adopted by documentary filmmakers during the first century of the genre’s existence, and to illustrate this using a number of directors and specific works. In Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (1996:261), Erik Barnouw says that the positions or different functions adopted by the genre were never mutually exclusive, but instead, directors used to adopt a combination of various functions or positions assumed at different points in time. Barnouw also points out that the documentary’s position in history has varied depending on the period and the prevailing needs, and has often been subordinate to the regime in power and its social function.

While the history of documentary can arguably be traced back centuries ago (even millennia, with cave paintings), based on the initial studies by Janssen, Muybridge and Marey, we will consider the evolution of the documentary genre over slightly more than a century. This brief approximation does not use a linear chronology, but is instead essentially based on the description of the modes suggested by Bill Nichols in Representing reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary (1991). It cites and lists a series of outstanding authors and periods in the genre’s history.

Directors in the genre have worked outside the boundaries of the big fiction system and outside the major film studios, as their field is reality and the outside world. Documentary filmmakers are becoming increasingly interested in the history and significance of the medium in which they operate. They pay tribute to and remember the work and words of several pioneers of the genre, such as Louis Lumière and his invention, Flaherty and his passion for other peoples, Esfir Shub and montage, Dziga Vertov and stylistic innovation, Grierson and his passion for immediate reality, and others. The directors of documentaries are excited by images and sounds from reality, and are drawn to them rather than to the things they could invent using a fictional screenplay. The documentary director way of expressing themselves is based on selecting and arranging what they find, and the decisions they make in this process become the discourse that they broadcast to the world, which is always framed within their individual subjectivity. Every choice by the documentary filmmaker becomes the expression of a particular point of view, conscious or unconscious, recognized or unrecognized. Barnouw (1996:312-313) believes that a documentary cannot be considered “the truth” but rather the evidence or the testimony of a fact or situation, within the complex historical process.

Michael Rabiger (1989:497) warned that the increasing production of documentaries, their independence from news journalism and their growing development as an individual voice in film could have major consequences in the future. Today, documentaries can be produced at no great expense using the latest modern technology, as the documentary does not depend on either studios or production centers. Two decades ago, Rabiger (1989) backed the production of films made on a speculative basis, and predicted a considerable increase in works in which the author was defined by their diversification and their independence from the major centers of power.

As with any other art form, film has been subjected to many classifications based on different criteria and points of view over the years. Rick Altman (2000) says that the film genre can be understood based on various perspectives and meanings. The list he suggests (Altman, 2000:35) is as follows:

• The genre as a blueprint, as a formula that precedes, programs and patterns industry production
• The genre as structure, as the formal framework on which individual films are founded
• The genre as label, as the name of a category central to the decisions and communications of distributors and exhibitors
• The genre as contract, as the viewing position required by each genre film of its audience

Altman’s proposal is an initial approach, which does not divide the genre into the two classic categories, fiction and nonfiction. Roman Gubern (1993) defined the concept of a film genre as “a subject category, a rigid cultural model, based on standardized and repetitive formulas which are used to create the episodic and formal variations that distinguish each specific product and create families of themed subgenres within each major genre” (Romaguera, 1999:46).

The pioneers of digital media and digital technology

The purpose of this second part of the article is to present a brief summary of the emergence and evolution of the digital medium, and to define the main contributions made by the pioneers of its conceptualization, who were mainly mathematicians and engineers. We will attempt to summarize the contributions to the terminology of the field and the concepts of multimedia, hypermedia, Internet, hypertext and interactive narrative. The documentary genre began in the late nineteenth century with the invention of the cinematograph by the brothers August and Louis Lumière. The emergence of the digital medium occurred half a century later, but it developed at an exponentially quicker pace. The difference between analogue and digital media lies in how they operate: until the arrival of digitization, all media operated based on analogue methods, i.e. by replica or imitation. Analogue is equivalent to transcription. Encoding information on an analogue basis involves transcribing a given magnitude to another system, consisting of a new magnitude proportional to the first, but more manageable.

Traditionally, in the analogue medium, an artist or author has a model or a reality and transcribes it (or transforms it) to physical media such as photographic paper (photographs), stone (sculpture) or paint (painting). In digital media, the process is no longer a question of transcription, but rather of conversion: the encoding of information entails the conversion of physical magnitudes into binary numerical parameters. The model becomes a series of numbers (which are always 0 or 1) without any new physical representation. As a result, during the digital conversion process, different physical items such as text, images and sounds are converted into bits of information (a kind of unique information package, which leads us to think that there is ultimately only one medium and interactive programs, as argued by Berenguer in 1997, are “unimedial”). In short: in analogue transcription there is always a physical medium (paper, rock, fabric, etc.), while in digital conversion only a series of numbers occupy the computer’s processor. A digital medium is defined as all the practices originating in an analogue or digital medium that become a specific numeric code after processing of their signal (a combination chain between 0 and 1).

It is possible to speak in terms of new media thanks to a series of contributions by mathematicians and engineers who invented and used tools and languages which today we call computer systems, which laid the foundations of this new communication environment known as the digital medium. Note that in many cases, the individual concerned did not invent the instrument or language, but instead led or coordinated a design and/or development team. The linking of the inventor to his invention, called the “heroic theory of invention,” has been heavily criticised by authors advocating a social perspective on technology (seen in terms of a product that emerges from working networks and is reconfigured to work and society), and is in contrast to the “theory of multiple discovery,” which posits that most scientific discoveries are made by different people simultaneously). Broadly speaking, the pioneers were the following authors: Charles Babbage, Herman Hollerith, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Konrad Zuse, Jack Kilby and Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, among others. The next table is a diagram showing the most important contributions by each of these authors.

References

ALTMAN, Rick (2000), Los géneros cinematográficos. Madrid: Ediciones Paidós Ibérica.
BARNOUW, Erik (1996), El documental. Historia y estilo. Barcelona: Gedisa.
BERENGUER, Xavier (1997), “Escriure programes interactius”. Barcelona: Formats, 1.Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Versió en línia disponible a: http://www.iua.upf.es/formats/formats1/a01ct.htm
GUBERN, Román (1993), De John Travolta a Indiana. Jones, Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
MERAN BARSAM, R. Nonfiction Film: a Critical History. Bloomington, Indiannapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992.
NICHOLS, Bill (1991), La representación de la realidad: Cuestiones y Conceptos sobre el Documental. Barcelona: Paidós.
RABIGER, Michael (1989), Dirección de documentales. Madrid: Instituto Oficial de Radio y Televisión.
ROMAGUERA, Joaquim (1999), El lenguaje cinematográfico. Madrid: La Torre.
WIENER, Norbert (1948), Cybernetics: or the Study of Control and Communication in
the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge: MIT Press.
— (1956), I Am a Mathematician. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Have something to add? Join the discussion. Please post in the comments, and make your opinion heard. If you are interested in contributing a piece to the Research Forum, get in touch with the OpenDocLab team.

In the ninth part of Filmmaker‘s interview project with prominent figures from the world of transmedia, conducted through the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Lance Weiler answers our questions. Weiler is a boundary-pushing transmedia storyteller who has, among many notable achievements, directed and self-distributed innovative movies (The Last Broadcast, Head Trauma), created an ARG for Head Trauma, made the immersive storytelling short Pandemic, and founded the regular creative conference diy days and the transmedia company Reboot Stories. He also writes the Culture Hacker column for Filmmaker magazine, and is on the board of the IFP, the publisher of Filmmaker.

For an introduction to this entire series, and links to all the installments so far, check out “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code,” by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Sarah Wolozin.

MIT Open Documentary Lab: How did you become a digital storyteller? Were there any projects that inspired you? If not, where did you look for inspiration?

Weiler: I feel as if I’m storytelling agnostic. It is not platform specific. I see it as storytelling. I’m trying to find some type of an emotional core for the work. Can I help the viewer / player to feel something? Can I help them to connect with the characters and story? I’ll often develop projects that mix analog and digital elements. Projects that spill beyond the screen and into the real world and back. The inspiration for the projects can come from anywhere. Similar to when I write for film and TV, the inspiration can come from a place, a feeling, a character, a situation or something that I see or feel in the real world. Lately, I’ve be inspired by things that I feel are challenging or at the onset seem impossible.

MIT Open Documentary Lab: What are the most useful skills for an interactive storyteller? What are the tools of the trade?

Weiler: Being able to understand the balance between story and technology is something that is a valuable skill. Development cycles for stories and technology are very different. Even if you attempt to work with an agile method of development you’re still going to hit up against the limitations of the process. So being able to communicate your creative vision in a way that can bridge silos is critical. Every time out is different. Each project is its own mountain to climb. The tools of the trade shift from project to project but what I find myself using often are a lot of design thinking principles.

MIT Open Documentary Lab: When you start an interactive project, how do you put together a team?

Weiler: Often I’ll start projects by testing them in the real world. I’m a big fan of failing quickly and learning from it. Just doing it to see if it works, how people respond and where it breaks. When I teach my course on immersive storytelling at Columbia University I’ll purposely bring a broken experience into the classroom. I’ll let the students ideate around it quickly. Together the students always build something that is so much stronger. I’m often surprised by how quickly they can get the story, game or interactivity to an interesting level. Rapid prototyping is an important part of my development process. By paper testing and analog prototyping I often find that it helps to inform the design and user experience (UX) of the technology that we’re building. My core team of collaborators consists of data scientists, researchers, creative technologists, UX designers, game designers and strategists. This is in addition to my producer, production designer and d.p. who I regularly work with.

MIT Open Documentary Lab: Where is this community and how can people access it?

Weiler: In terms of a community of practitioners there are a number of transmedia meetup groups that gather in most major cities. StoryCode is a great resource and they are expanding beyond NYC in 2013. The IFP’s new Media Centerwill be an interesting collaborative space when it launches later this year. In 2008, I started a roving gathering for creatives interested in 21st century storytelling called diy days. In the last five years we’ve staged 13 events all over the world. diy days is a special event in the sense that it is a social sandbox where storytellers can test projects and designs with a live audience. Some amazing projects have been incubated out of diy days. In 2011, Caine’s Arcade got its start at our diy days LA event and most recently My Sky is Falling, an immersive experience about aging out of foster care, was staged at our annual NYC event. In 2013, diy days travels to Gothenburg, NYC, Toronto, Paris, Istanbul, Ghent and L.A.

MIT Open Documentary Lab: How does the role of a director change? What are the creative challenges?

Weiler: It is truly an amazing time to be a storyteller. The directors of the 21st century will be experience designers and story architects. The demand for creatives who have a command of storytelling, technology and experience design is growing across industries. For instance, this year I’ve worked with media, publishing, gaming, festivals, technology companies and brands — all of which are experimenting with new ways to tell stories and reach audiences. The largest creative challenges at this point are the fragmentation of the landscape and lack of infrastructure to fluidly deliver experiences to audiences.

MIT Open Documentary Lab: How does the role of the audience change?

Weiler: Those formerly known as the audience are becoming collaborators. All the projects that I’m working on are leaving room for the audience to become collaborators. The days of expecting an audience to just pay and not participate are over. The audience feels that they are storytellers. For those willing to let go and experiment there are some interesting new business models that can emerge which help the audience to become better storytellers.

MIT Open Documentary Lab: What’s your level of understanding of coding or programming? Do you see the relationship of director and creative technologist as analogous to director and cinematographer? (Why or why not?)

Weiler: I have a solid understanding of coding. I know how long things take, I understand backend systems and how to scale projects. But most importantly I respect the role of technology within the projects that I do. I’ll spend a lot of time considering the “why” prior to jumping into the “how.” To me a creative technologist is analogous to a cinematographer, production designer and editor rolled into one. They can make or break a project and a good creative technologist with a sense of storytelling is a critical team member to anyone that’s attempting to tell immersive stories.

MIT Open Documentary Lab: How do you find funding for digital interactive storytelling projects?

Weiler: Every project is different. Some are crowdfunded, some funded by private equity, some are granted while others make use of brand underwriting or tap traditional media funding methods. In addition I’m experimenting with some new revenue generating models. In the past I’ve developed technology to meet storytelling needs due to a lack of the infrastructure. In most cases I’ve been able to take that core technology and license it to other parties and industries.

MIT Open Documentary Lab: What’s your idea of the new model of distribution?

Weiler: A model of collaborative ownership that radically challenges how IP is valued and shared. A model that strives to establish a level of creative sustainability by leveraging efficiencies and inefficiencies within the market place. But most importantly a model that encourages and rewards risk and innovation.

MIT Open Documentary Lab: What’s your vision for how to exhibit interactive projects?

Weiler: Data sits at the center of the experience and provides a connective tissue that enables stories to be pervasive across devices. Not only will the data help to bridge the experience it will enable discovery, personalization and re-playability. A data layer is a critical step towards being able to archive immersive storyworlds especially in the current environment where analog is still a better archival method.

MIT Open Documentary Lab: Where do you see the future of this field going?

Weiler: I’m excited that the tools to create and distribute have been democratized and are now quickly becoming commoditized. I hope that the focus can turn to the storytelling. That creatives will focus their attention on how to best make the stories they’re telling emotionally relevant. Meanwhile, I believe that those formerly known as the audience will become meaningful collaborators across the production and distribution process. At the same time I think immersive storytelling will become a natural part of the creative process. It will move beyond a novelty and escape the shadow of marketing and promotion.

Congratulations to the collaborative documentary Sandy Storyline, which was just awarded the top prize for transmedia storytelling at the Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes exhibition. Chronicling New York’s response to Hurricane Sandy, the online documentary is a collaboration between Cowbird, Housing is a Human Right, and our neighbors at the MIT Center for Civic Media. Interoccupy.net and Occupied Stories also partnered on the project–making Sandy Storyline collaborative even in its conception.

The idea behind the project was deceptively simple: Sandy Storyline was a place where New Yorkers could tell their own stories about the hurricane and the recovery. The project team wanted to share “these stories online in a way that prioritizes first person storytelling and creates the space for deeper storytelling than is possible through social media,” wrote Becky Hurwitz of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, one of the key organizers on the project. To do so, the team tapped Cowbird– an online storytelling platform that lets people make their own multimedia stories using photographs, text, and audio.

Working out of the tradition of oral history, Sandy Storyline organizers held workshops in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy where people affected by the storm could record their stories. The team also used the MIT Center for Civic Media’s VoJo call platform to record stories; with VoJo, anyone call dial a number to record their remembrances. The stories are then transferred to the website, where they are made available to the public. In addition to traditional uploads, stories can also be submitted to Sandy Storyline through SMS, making it possible for people to contribute to the project without having access to a computer.

Becky Hurwitz explained the genesis of Sandy Storyline in a case study first posted on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog:

We quickly realized the potential of inviting people who were being underserved all across the city and who may not have internet access to tell their own stories. We also realized that the project needed to be more expansive than just housing and named the project with the intention to serve as both a phone line to call in stories and also a platform to tell a different kind of storyline about Hurricane Sandy. We set up a group for StoryLine and Rachel developed and recorded custom prompts to invite people to share stories about their experiences of Sandy.

Since the storm, more than 300 stories have been submitted to Sandy Storyline. That number is still growing, facilitated in large part by workshops and continuing outreach in areas affected by the storm. Ingrid Kopp of the Tribeca Film Institute describes Sandy Storyline as “a living archive that shows the potential for sharing stories on a very human scale.” In this way, Sandy Storyline is a fantastic example of the potential of participatory documentaries to connect people with the communities around them and humanize the stories behind the headlines.

If you’re interested in learning more about the roots of the project, I can’t recommend Becky’s blog post more highly. You can also explore the hundreds of stories on Sandy Storyline, or share your own story about the storm.

Making Media Now is a fantastic annual Boston-based conference organized by Filmmakers Collaborative and hosted by the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. I attended last year and was blown away by the rich programming–the conference features everything from pitch sessions to a variety of panels focusing on topics like industry trends, digital storytelling and funding and distribution for independent filmmakers.

This year’s Making Media Now will take place on Friday, May 3. The theme is Living the Connection Economy. According to Filmmakers Collaborative,

This year’s theme, Living the Connection Economy, explores how media makers can do their best work by tapping both creative and business connections. Conference highlights include: finding and mining “New Forms – New Opportunities”; achieving financial and social impact success through “The Double Bottom Line”; and a spirited “Art of the Pitch,” featuring live producer pitches and industry expert analysis.

Open Documentary Lab Director Sarah Wolozin will appear on the 9 am panel New Forms, New Opportunities. The conversation with panelist Natasha Deganello Giraudie (Micro-Documentaries, San Francisco) and moderator David Tamés will explore how two key trends, short and interactive documentaries, are transforming the industry and connecting subjects, filmmakers and audiences in new ways.

For a Making Media Now 2013 schedule and full lineup of panels, please visit Filmmakers Collaborative.