The Making of a Web Documentary
Since this is the very first post for this blog, I thought it'd make sense that I start out by explaining what this all will be about and what I am up to. A while back, I applied for the Creative Catalyst Fellowship, which is a grant program geared to San Diego based artists. Basically, they were looking for art projects connected to San Diego that could engage the community in interesting ways. It's a pretty cool program since it funds artists directly. (For any SD artists out there, I definitely would recommend applying next year!) Artists work with a sponsoring arts organization. The sponsor for my project is the Media Arts Center of San Diego.
Enter my idea: 18 Bakers, an interactive documentary built primarily for the web to engage the issue of immigration. I'll talk more about the subject matter in future posts, but for this, I'd like to focus a bit more on talking more about documentary form, particularly this fairly newly fangled term "web documentary."
So, what is a web documentary? To be honest, I am not sure if web documentary is even the right term, but it depends on who you ask. I have seen similar projects described as idocs, webdocs, interactive films, and on and on.
Regardless of what you call them, over the last few years there have been some really engaging and innovative documentary projects that have been built for the web browser. Spurred by recent web features such as the html5 standard, these interactive pieces generally utilize video, photography, audio, and graphics to tell their stories.
What excites me about this web-based format is that it's still a new and evolving form of expression, one which provides few rules and many opportunities to innovate. The language of these projects often have one foot in a traditional film world, but are not limited to the same limitations of being linear in nature. That allows or more room exploring alternate ways to tell a story, and can also engage and empower the audience to have greater control over what they experience.
For me, the web documentary is a way for me to combine my passion for documentary art making, particularly film, and fuse it with my interactive experience. For the past 9 years, I have been working on video games and have been immersed in interactive entertainment on a daily basis for a while now. While there are many differences between film and video games, I think there is also a lot of room to fuse them into new engaging experiences. That is what I am hoping to do with my documentary project, 18 Bakers.
To close out, here are links to just a few of the web documentaries that I recommend checking out. (Please note that you may need an updated browser to run these.)
Hollow- About a rural county in West Virginia.
Clouds Over Cuba- Examines what might have been from the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Nowhere Safe- Looks at housing and poverty in France.