It seems the right moment to be updating the world on where our six Future Documentary projects are at as they’re now nearly one month deep into the Sandbox. Mark Leaver and I have just completed the first producer and business advisor tag team meetings and I think it’s fair to say that ambition and scope is the flavour.  Mark has designed a shape for the sandbox participants that takes the form of a double diamond, where projects from the outset think big and are ultimately overwhelmed by the possibilities, then thrown some ideas out, refocus and set to work on what ‘the thing’ is going to be (this is the smaller second diamond.) Here’s the shape in all it’s glory courtesy of Jeanie from the Orion: Behind the Mask project.

These sessions with Mark are for the projects to take a moment out of the minutia of their creative thinking and to act as a commercial conscious. Also to ensure we utilise the full network that sits around the Sandbox process and to reap the benefits of the people as well as the funding; One point of reflection that always echoes from previous Sandbox participants. 

In this first session we focused in on the unknowns, after all the sandbox is about exploring the things you don’t yet know. After three weeks of explosive ideas generation, there’s (thankfully) a healthy sense of scheduling and looking at the three-month period, marking out the peaks of activity and moments of testing. The major theme I found running through where projects are at, is this sense of finding the right balance as they start to channel down. 

First up the Quipu team have been reunited and are making brilliant progress, as Ros from Chaka films and Matthew from University of Bristol are back from Huancabamba in the hillsides of North Andean Peru where they have been collecting stories and engaging with communities. (Maria has written a brilliant blog post about their visit here.) The prototype of phone line is a simple interactive phone line that integrates Twilio and Drupal that can be accessed either through smartphones or dumb phones to hear and share audio stories. It has been a big success, the first workshop with the women from Huancabamba had 30 women participating, 12 audios stories shared through the phone, 17 audio questionnaire answers and 3 subsequent comments. While the women were testing the system thousands of miles away, the Quipu team were moderating the posts to publish their stories on the phone line again, so they were able to listen back to their contributions. They now have strong evidence of what works when engaging with the communities and the team are now thinking about the mediation of those voices and how they can be a campaigning voice, also exploring chapters of stories as radio docs to be broadcast at local radio stations.

The JtR 125 project team are on the other hand in the midst of working out how they access the content they need, can newspaper images for example be accessed freely, or does the act of someone scanning or photographing then generate a license fee? What’s interesting right now in this project is the tension between gameplay and the documentary, how do they draw the right balance between the two without compromising the experience.

Jeanie and Judith of the Orion: Behind the Mask project have been drawing up a framework and formula for their pre, during and post production engagement with audience/ participants with 383 Labs. The unknowns for them still remain just how to create the wrap around that will integrate into the offer of the feature film without it just being another website or promo gimmick. What’s the right balance in terms of engagement for the range of audiences they will be working with, from the hardcore Orion fan base to the casual Elvis fan. In other news Jeanie will be attending the Porthcawl Elvis Festival, which looks like a brilliant starting point for researching how Elvis fans want to engage with the story.

This is a related concern for the enthusiastic Page to Stage team, who have been to visit the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and are making progress with ideas for their app to bring to life and enrich the story behind performing Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. There still remains the big question over the identified audience for the project and how the design should reflect this. If they are making this app for young people then how can they best frame the interactions to elicit a positive response. Also how do they capture a whole potentially huge secondary audience of classical music lovers who like Sheila, Ken and Amanda are more than ready to engage in non traditional formats.

Boron Mon Amour, could it be the most boring element in the table of elements? Mike Paterson would definitely disagree as he outlined just how this film is set to inspire a new generation of interactive films for the 94 Elements series, rather than as previous straight linear films. John Burgan, the film maker in this collaboration is motoring on with setting up opportunities for filming, the first to be set in Kabul, Afghanistan for a scene playing the traditional Indian game of Carrom, which uses Boron as a dusty kind of lubricant for shuffling pieces around the board. The big question still remains for this team, ‘the data.’ They have done substantial work in compiling data on Boron, but now how do they animate it and get Marcin at Variable working on the visualisation in parallel with John, the filmmaker as the project develops.

Similarly Matt at Team Rubber and James are grappling with that sweet spot of interactivity between the lean forward and engage and interact with something and the lean back and watch. They are particularly interested in how to engage a broad audience with interactive documentary and are forcing themselves to look at how an interactive documentary might reach audience figures of 200,000 with Team Rubber’s experience of making viral films for platforms like youtube and vimeo; Trying to break the mould and access a wider audience to experience something innovative and informative. Also what can you usefully get from this that you can apply to your everyday life? They are playing with how we misperceive risk and how bad we are at judging this. So it’s been all about working out the framework and narrative for Matt and James and enlisting the characters that will pervade the film as an engaging front end for the subject matter of risk. `So far, they are thinking of free-runners and wing suit flyers, next time we catch up I expect to see the team suited and booted accordingly in their lycra onesies.