Kevin Mcmahon looks to the future

MEADS: Medium
Concept shot of MEADS (Medium Extended Air Defense System), a program that aims to replace Patriot missiles in the United States, the older Hawk system in Germany, and Italy’s Nike Hercules missiles. From www.defenseindustrydaily.com.

You are probably familiar with the series 7 and Up by British filmmaker Michael Apted, who has been following fourteen individuals since 1964, filming them every seven years. Well, my colleagues Robbie Hart and Luc Côté have done a variation on that idea, with their film Turning 32. Sixteen years ago they released a series of portraits of 16-year-olds in third world countries. Now, their 16-years-later feature-length movie will play at the AMC Cinema in Montreal Starting Sept. 17th. Going to see docs on the big screen is the best way to ensure they continue to be shown!

On the heels of Waterlife flows from one medium to the next, about the relationship between Kevin McMahon’s Waterlife online project and his film, here is another installment of the interview with Kevin, written by my young colleague Tobi Elliott.

Looking forward… as a filmmaker trying to grapple with new forms of storytelling, what excites you or – possibly – depresses you about the possibilities offered by interactive and online documentaries?

Well nothing depresses me about it. In a way, I’ve been waiting for this my whole career. What interests me are environmental questions, questions about the way society works, questions that deal with larger systems. And it’s always been a challenge to deal with those questions in linear format without falling back on really conventional tropes that I don’t think are particularly successful anymore. **

In interactive media, there are still enormous limitations of all kinds, but I think we’re seeing the beginning of something incredibly interesting and exciting. What excites is the possibility of two things: one, creating realistic, virtual environments. The other thing, which Waterlife doesn’t do but which we’ll see more and more in the future, is the possibility of beehive environments that are essentially constructed by the users. Talk to Katerina Cizek about that.

Kevin McMahon

There are two ways you can go: you can construct a large, aesthetic experience, sort of like you do with feature film, or you can construct a beautiful aesthetic experience that is more like a building that users or contributors can come to and build or decorate. Like the NFB’s Highrise, where they’ve built all the ‘girders’ in the building and said, ‘This is what this building can do, but you, the user, are going to contribute this wall, and that user will contribute a window.’ It’s a fascinating experiment. Both those possibilities excite me.

They’re different approaches to basically the same thing, which is to create not just a two-dimensional thing that the viewer passes and looks at, but rather to create an aesthetic the user can move around in. I find that totally fascinating.

What are you working on right now?

We’re working on a big project right now that’s only going to be online, called Planet Zero. The subject is nuclear weapons.

I’ve been working on the subject for thirty years, and have written a book and done two films about it, none of which were satisfactory. I’m hoping that as we’re approaching it again as an online project, that maybe we’ll be able to solve some of the deficiencies of its earlier forms.

As you’re looking at something like nuclear weapons, that’s an enormously complex, physical problem. You’ve got these bombs sitting all over the world. It’s one of those things that are so big and complicated and hidden, that linear media does a really shitty job of being able to penetrate and convey it. Books, which are non-linear, do try, but they aren’t able to bring any emotional content to the subject. Novels do, but technical books have a real struggle…. You’re always tossing and turning, trying to find a voice that can express something that’s complicated and realistic, and do it with passion.

With non-linear media, we’re attempting to create this website – well first of all we’re trying to put the money together to do it – but the idea is to recreate an environment as best as we can, with the resources we’ll have, of a nuclear world. In the first iteration, it’ll be like Waterlife the website, and a construction, like a documentary.

So that’s exciting to me, it’s a new way to approach an old subject in the context where old approaches have not worked very well. Nuclear weapons are something that average folks don’t have much information about, and specialists do. We are trying to think of ways to make it extensible.

** To read more on this perspective, see Kevin’s article, ‘AERIAL PERSPECTIVE: A Window on Reality for the 21st Century’ printed in POV magazine, Spring/Summer 2007 issue, No. 66.

Waterlife flows from one medium to the next

Screen shot 2010-09-03 at 3.18.49 PM

This blog post was written by my young colleague Tobi Elliott, who is helping me with several projects right now.

One of Canada’s recent successes in the interactive documentary universe is waterlife.nfb.ca, a site based on director Kevin McMahon’s documentary film of the same name. Waterlife the film (Special Jury Prize for a Canadian Feature at Hot Docs 2009) is a moving epic about the Great Lakes and the story of water itself: how it affects every part of our lives, and how it – and we with it – are under assault.

Its own creative endeavor, Waterlife the website is a co-production between Primitive Entertainment and the NFB. It picked up a coveted Webby award last April for Online Film and Video/Documentary, as well as the 2010 SXSW Interactive Activism Award, the BaKaFORUM City of Karlsruhe Prize for Multimedia, and a Canadian New Media Award for Best Cross Platform project in 2009.

Waterlife the website is considered a success, but how do you measure success in the online universe? Is it in page views, critical response, viewer comments, or what?

That is a very difficult question and I don’t really know what the answer is. Waterlife is considered a success probably for two reasons. One, there is a lot of public interest in it, and a lot of visits – about 600,000 visits – since it first went online a year ago.

Back when people like Magnus [Isacsson] and I started in documentary about 20 years ago, a CBC documentary would typically get 500 – 600,000 viewers, no problem. But that’s not true anymore. Although the film Waterlife has also been quite a success – it still screens almost weekly – it will not have reached a cumulative audience anywhere near 600,000. So that’s one measure: how many people come see it.

Another measure is how long they stay. In the case of Waterlife the website, when it first launched the average stay was seven minutes, but many users apparently stay around twenty minutes. To the web folks, this is a mark of success, but it does make you wonder about the quality of the experience vis a vis film.

It’s always difficult to measure, and it’s the same for a film: do you measure by critical success, by the fact that it really moves people and a lot of people go see it? By commercial success? All of these measures are relative and valid.

Kevin McMahon Waterlife

You write about Marshall McLuhen and his view that “the media’s touch is physical, and the feelings they provoke are real.” ** How do you think each medium – interactive media and feature film – feels to the audience? How do they perceive or react emotionally to them?

Broadly speaking, the film is really an entirely emotional experience. Some would say it’s more arty, or more of an intellectual film in some ways, but having been in many audiences, I’ve seen that the way they react to the film is really emotional. It’s a movie – it’s got music and pictures and people, and [the audience] reacts to the emotions it evokes in them.

I would say the website has an emotional component but also an intellectual one. The interesting thing about the web is that it’s engaging both sides of the brain all the time. It’s got pictures and sound, but it also has text. One of the advances in the Waterlife website is it relies much less on text than other websites do, but it still has text. That keeps that linear part of your brain engaged all the time.

Do you think each type of media appeals to different people?

I think they probably appeal to different people, because of the generational aspect, but they also appeal to people in different ways.

How did you combine the different platforms in terms of design, information-sharing, content? How did that work out?

The way they work together is that people who see the film and appreciate it, particularly anyone in an educational context such as teachers, students, are driven to the website by the film. There are two websites, and Ourwaterlife.com was set up to link people with activist organizations in their community, like Great Lakes United, Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, where they can go to take action. Waterlife.nfb.ca has that, but it’s kind of buried.

The film sends people to the website but I don’t think the website sends people to the film. It’s counterintuitive, the opposite of what we think websites are about. Websites were initially set up and used for film and television as advertising. Like flyers for your film.

But I don’t think that’s how they work, and in Waterlife’s case that’s not how it works at all… partly because the website is accessible to everyone in the world and the film’s available for screenings only in Canada and the U.S. It’s not as available as films in your living room that you can dial up via a website. We also know this because a lot of the feedback on Waterlife.nfb.ca comes from around the world and from places where the film is not showing.

What they share is their aesthetic, and they share a lot in their content. There’s no way of tracking the traffic between them but my sense of it is, there’s not a lot.

We went into this project thinking the website should be an adjunct and that it should drive people to the film. But Rob McLaughlin (Director of digital content and strategy for the NFB English Program), the driving force behind the website, said, “They are two different things. They share assets, there will be some back and forth traffic, but you have to approach it as two different things.” He was completely right and has proven to be over time.

** Refers to Kevin’s article AERIAL PERSPECTIVE: A Window on Reality for the 21st Century,” printed in POV magazine, Spring/Summer 2007 issue, No. 66.)

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Part Two of the interview to come: Kevin McMahon looks to the future.