This is a post-mortem of sorts for John Doe, but it’s also a reflection on what I’ve found it means to make something interactive/participatory/connected/collaborative.

This semester I had two separate documentary projects to complete in 3 months, one of which is my thesis. This fact made me keep John Doe smaller than I would have liked. Given the option to do it again, I’d have taken on a smaller project idea within my larger thesis, which would have been both interactive and participatory. No regrets, though.

In any case, I’d like to share an understanding I’ve come to over my process these last few months: I’ve found traditional filmmaking, so to speak, to be highly collaborative. Documentaries by their nature are already connected, collaborative, participatory, and interactive, at least in some ways.

When choosing to use technologies and formats particular to the new exploratory tropes of documentary, a thorough research and discovery process has to happen first. Pathways to best express content present themselves when the filmmaker has spent sufficient time with the material. Otherwise you run the danger of tacking things on.

John Doe:

To tell this complex story of one man’s fight against something very big, we decided it would be appropriate to the story and helpful to the audience to preserve a linear flow. We wanted to get away from the somewhat widespread format of a grid of videos on one page, and also do more than simply providing external links, which can often be distracting and not relate directly enough to the viewing experience. The idea was to keep the narrative going but open it up to additional content. We wanted to make it engaging but also provide entryways for the viewer to get more information and context on some things that are difficult to grasp in ten minutes worth of video.

Result:

For this experiment to be front-facing, one thing I know I’d want to add, along with fixing all the bugs we have right now, is a visualization showing just how many Americans get cast into a web of surveillance with each National Security Letter issued. As it stands, the materials we brought in were too static and sporadic.

The Editing Process:

I found the editing process pretty tough. Aside from the fact that my external hard drive died 6 weeks into the process, in general,  I edit intuitively, and need to be able to change and move things around right up until the end. My working style when editing is to chip away at the edges until the form emerges and I get all the timing juuuuuust right. Working side-by-side with a javascript “ninja”  :-) proved to be a bit challenging, simply because the time constraints didn’t allow for us to meld our making processes into an effective left brain/right brain power machine. I think given more time we could have developed a better feedback loop between the two of us.

In a sprint at the very end, I showed Gavin the finalized 10 minutes of video, and then chopped it into tiny pieces according to his guidance. Each of these pieces would form a time break where we would insert outside articles, pdfs, and visualizations.

We sat there in a frenzy, exporting from final cut, to webm, to Gavin’s server. Once they were up, there was no room or time to change the order. We’d have to go through about 5 steps to re-order anything. This to me was daunting, but once again, with more time, we could develop an effective and efficient rhythm.

Mesh

While I was working on John Doe, I was also steeped in a much larger project for my thesis, titled MESH, a documentary about community-owned wireless Internet, and the future of networks . Community wireless networks are a grassroots effort to bring affordable Internet to people who don’t have access, or to people who want an alternative method of access independent of Internet service providers and telecoms.

Over the course of a speedy 3-months, during which the process of research, pre-production, shooting, and editing were condensed into one continuous cycle, I spoke to community organizers, activist-technologists, network engineers, and evangelists, collecting research and footage.

I became particularly involved in the low-resource community of Red Hook, in Brooklyn. Coming in there with a camera had me walking on egg shells from the beginning. I wanted not only to be respectful of the community, but also be useful. I ended up proving useful in a couple ways. First, I provided valuable documentation to the designer and non-profit responsible for the wifi experiment. But things really changed once I finally got more access. Two weeks ago I was able to accompany a community outreach worker while she did surveys on the police surveillance problem in the community, often referred to as Stop and Frisk. I got a lot of footage, so I offered right away to give it to her, knowing that she and the team at the non-profit are creating a video series about the subject.

I’d gone out with the intent to get a complete profile of this important community member, and ended up with a more complete picture of the community. Stop and Frisk isn’t exactly the focus of my documentary, but it’s one of the biggest concerns in Red Hook at the moment, and it’ll be important to address it in order to understand how affordable Internet access can be seen within this community’s hierarchy of needs.

Before I’d finally been able to get a better picture in this way, I’d been quite concerned with understanding how to make a story that doesn’t cut people off, and how to make something ~with~ people while creating a front-facing story for more than one audience. This type of involvement made me feel like I was becoming part of a feedback loop that’s mutually beneficial.

We had a blast, and after seeing the footage, the non-profit and I are going to do the same type of survey about Internet access and wifi.

After getting feedback from experts I’ve interviewed for the doc, I began to see myself as someone literally putting different communities together into the same space. And it’s become apparent that threading people and ideas together in this way  could be of value  to everyone I draw into this net.

Some people in the documentary know of each others work, but haven’t met. Others are working in parallel without any knowledge of the other. I showed the trailer to a couple people featured in it, and it was cool to hear them say, “oh! who is that? I know who that is.”

I am really excited  to do a neighborhood survey on Internet and computer access to find out more about community needs and sharing systems. I don’t know if that’s what a filmmaker usually does, but for me, as a researcher, it’s natural.

As for making the doc participatory, it would be great to have people from the community film themselves. But something like that requires a lot more resources and cooperation. And it has to be the right time…which isn’t yet.

So, as you can see, there are elements of collaboration and participation from stockholders throughout. I see plenty of possibilities for making this a full-fledged “interactive documentary” as well. I use a lot of network visualizations in my film. Wouldn’t it be awesome to make them dynamic parts of the movie?

I may have some visions, but there are so many factors that determine how and if they will take form — ranging from mundane things like funding, to determining the right time to ask certain things of the community. And to me that negotiation is about as collaborative/connected/participatory as it gets. I’m not saying that this is what it’s like for every doc, but that’s what it’s been like for me.