“What Makes It Interactive?” Crisps, Chats and Factual Documentaries

I started to research interactive documentaries back in 2013 when I was living in Italy, because this hybrid form of storytelling matched my interest in digital narratives and audience engagement. As soon as I moved to London I looked for people interested in the topic and immediately found out that one of the leading researchers in the field, Sandra Gaudenzi, was running a Meetup called London’s Interactive Factual Narrative.

The name speaks for itself: it’s not about fiction, and it showcases state of the art technology applied to storytelling. Last year I had a preview of Nonny de la Peña’s Project Syria and Ulrich Fischer’s MemoWays, a new platform to tell personalised stories. Now, thanks to the interest of the University of Westminster that is hosting this edition, Sandra kicked off 2015 by providing a new place for this eclectic community made of filmmakers, coders, gamers, researchers and people just passionate about interactive stories.

The first event of this year was actually a relished surprise, as she organised a discussion around “strategic passion” for creative people (in short, how to invite professionals to adopt a story and give some of their time to grow a project together). I already knew the speaker she invited, as I had got in touch with Anrick Bregman for my series of posts about his interactive documentary, The Most Northern Place.

I thought I knew the project quite well but I have to admit that I was struck by the passion Anrick showed on stage. It was something that I hadn’t experienced before, given the fact that my interview “took place” via email. In a way, I was re-discovering The Most Northern Place through a different (I would say more emotional) approach. Anrick openly shared his mistakes, the trials and errors, the quest for the perfect design and platform, technical issues, what worked and what did not. In some respects, his talk and the Q & A that followed were themselves a form of interactive storytelling (by the way, it was here that the crisps of the title came centre stage, during the break).

I soon realised that his way of speaking was really close to the pace of his documentary. It was a continuous, almost cuddly flow that mirrored what he was reminding us of in his slides: “Don’t rush. It’s not a race.” Anrick is not someone who shows off (although he could, given his CV). He went through the different stages of his process (“Develop the Idea”, “Imagine the Experience” and “Build the Team”), and focused on some key questions that everyone planning any audiovisual narrative should ask themselves: What is your story? What does your viewer do? Also, consider how the interactivity will affect the perception of the story itself.

I leave you with one of his final remarks, something that usually is at the bottom of the list of a creative mind, but should instead be on top of it. “Do what you think is beautiful, or meaningful, or good. Because you’re the one that has to live with it.” This is even truer if you spend four years of your life creating it. I think that with The Most Northern Place Anrick achieved all of this, but you don’t have to trust me. You can see for yourself by watching it and exploring the true story of Thule.

Do You Know Which Is The Most Northern Place? Filmmaker Anrick Bregman Has the Answer. And It’s Interactive (Part 3)

After discussing the project’s genesis and some aspects of the storytelling process, I asked director Anrick Bregman to share more insights about immersive tools, music and sound design featured in his web doc The Most Northern Place.

Prominent Monkey: Which are the main features that create the immersive experience you designed for the viewer?

Anrick Bregman: I think the whole experience is immersive in the sense that, through interacting, you’re more involved with the story than if it were a traditional film. You’re exploring a story and finding out about it step by step, rather than following a narrative with an introduction, a series of in-depth chapters, and then a conclusion.

But in addition to this, there are two ways in which we tried to transport you over to Northern Greenland a little bit. The pre-loader doesn’t show you a percentage or a spinning graphic, or anything like that. What we’re doing while loading the main website is counting the number of miles between you and the actual place where the story takes place, Thule in Northern Greenland. We also point in the direction of Thule using a compass graphic.

The other immersive chapter is a web-based old-fashion radio that we built to mimic the way people used to communicate in remote communities. This allows you to speak to anyone else who is on the website at the same time as you are.

P. M.: Speaking about sounds, I find the background music mesmerizing. How did you get this feeling from the composer?

A. B.: I worked with a very talented composer, Alex Kozobolis, and I asked him to make a piece of music which would not sound too sad, or too happy, and which would have no specific rise and fall, like a traditional score might. It should loop and create a unique feeling while not having a lot of distinctive qualities to it.

Music for interactive films is very hard to compose, because you can’t plan ahead where any part of your score will play, within the timeline of the visuals. If the viewer pauses the film for a while (to make a cup of coffee, for example) the music continues. So there’s no sense of sync. Despite this challenging brief, I think Alex achieved something remarkable. It was just him, playing at a piano with a small recording device. But I loved it the moment I heard it.

P. M.: What about sound design?

A. B.: I worked with Richard Nathan to create a soundscape that would complement the score. I gave Richard a lot of sound files that I had extracted from Nicole Paglia’s footage. Different sounds live recorded in Greenland, in and around Qaanaaq. But because we’re talking about memories of events which took place a long time ago, Richard started to use effects like reverb to process those snippets of audio. It created a really nice balance, I feel like the sound design is the perfect canvas for the music to sit on – they work together perfectly, if you consider that they were created by different people at two very different times.

Technically, we had the music playing independently from the visuals. While the sound effects are broken up into two layers, one of which running with the music, other layers of the sound effects are embedded within the video files.

P. M.: Your web doc is now online, but I know that there is a chapter two in progress…

A. B.: The Most Northern Place was always intended to be a first chapter, while our next project will complete the story. The first one tells the story of the town of Thule, and how it was moved to make way for a U.S. Airbase. Our next chapter will ask the simple question of why that happened. Watch this space!

Do You Know Which Is The Most Northern Place? Filmmaker Anrick Bregman Has the Answer. And It’s Interactive (Part 2)

After discussing the genesis of The Most Northern Place with director Anrick Bregman, I wanted to know more about the engagement aspects of his interactive documentary and discover how he and his team approached this compelling story.

Prominent Monkey: In this post you said that a traditional documentary would not achieve the same sense of exploration. Can you explain in more detail what you mean?

Anrick Bregman: I am an interactive filmmaker, so at the core I think about interactivity as something that is part of everything I do. It’s a sort of second nature. But I don’t think that The Most Northern Place offers something a traditional film couldn’t. I don’t think it’s better, I don’t think it’s the future of cinema. It’s just a new way to tell a story.

At the core of interactivity there is something very different for the viewer, though. While cinema is passive, in interactive formats the viewer must act, engage with the narrative material in order for it to progress. That “click” or “tap” is an action – as functional as it may seem on the surface.

In my opinion what that action creates is the sense that viewers are active in discovering the story, we’re just setting the scene for them. It changes the way you take in information, as a viewer. It’s not better, just more focused on the viewer’s pace and their interests, or attention span. And it’s not just different for viewers: to me, as a filmmaker, it is also very different to make a film that will be simply watched, as opposed to a film that will be interacted with.

It’s exciting to construct an experience knowing that viewers are a key player, and trying to preempt that. It’s a weird collaboration if you think about it: the filmmaker and the viewer are reacting to each other, it’s just that it is out of sync, we are working at different times to create a singular experience.

P. M.: In your web doc we experience several voices, which form a sort of stream of consciousness. Tell me something more about the writing process.

A.B.: The writing process involved a few steps, because early on we didn’t quite know what the exact outcome for The Most Northern Place would have been. It would have been a website, and interactive, but how? I had all kinds of ideas for the interface (much more complex than what we ended up with), but more importantly we initially wrote the script from the perspective of a narrator, a voice talking over all the film’s chapters.

We actually recorded several passes of a narrator’s voice for an early version of the project, but very quickly it felt contrived. Having an English voice didn’t sound authentic, a bit like when BBC news dub over interviews in foreign languages with people who have a faint accent. It sounds fake. So the words written for a voice turned into printed text on the page, which involved another few steps in the writing process.

P. M.: Are the “voices” we read the ones of the protagonists of Qaanaaq or is there also someone not featured in Nicole Paglia’s project?

A. B.: They are the same people featured in Qaanaaq. The two projects were both based on the same trip Nicole made out to Northern Greenland, and the interviews she recorded while she was there.

End of Part 2. Stay tuned: Part 3 will be online tomorrow.