Interactive sabotage? Whac-A-Mole!

So my colleague Mike Paterson says WTF Boron….I say WTF interactive!

Listen, Boron is really not the problem here: it was deliberately chosen as an underdog amongst the elements – we’re going to turn its everyday quality into an advantage (BTW the piece will also contain a polemic on the use and abuse of the E word, but let’s not go into that here).

No, the real challenge is going to be how to establish the relation between a broadly linear short film (Boron Mon Amour) and an interactive website (94 Elements). I say “broadly linear” because the tradition I’m working in – the digressive essay – already has a habit of going off at tangents, commenting on itself and addressing the Viewer (Reader? Listener? User?) directly. It’s a noble line – Mike and I recently had the pleasure of encountering US filmmaker Alan Berliner at the UK premiere of his latest feature First Cousin Once Removed – like all of his films, a playful and dazzling collage that both entertains, intrigues and ultimately moves. By way of inspiration I’ve also recently revisited my DVD collection to watch Orson Welles celebrated 1973 film F for Fake where the old showman takes us on a shaggy dog tale of epic proportions, revelling in the role of magician-sorcerer (here's the fake trailer Welles created). But there’s the rub – for all the digressions, these are still linear experiences where the filmmaker / author takes us on an emotional-intellectual journey, a roller-coaster ride they have created  – one where you board the train at A and get off at C (B is closed for maintenance).

It’s my own fault, of course: since moving to Bristol three years ago, becoming involved with iDocs and discussing ideas with colleagues at the Pervasive Media Studio, I’m more and more fascinated by how the documentary form (in its widest sense) is always morphing, resisting easy definition. But my interest is not in how much information we can cram into a film – whereby an interactive element can of course be invaluable, adding resources, off-cuts, extended interviews, the parts that don’t find space in the body of the film. No, it’s very much a question of attention and emotional engagement – of how film uses rhetorical strategies to move, intrigue and persuade the Viewer (I think I’ll have to start to use the acronym VRLU to cover all the categories above).

So one of the main questions we are now asking ourselves is: although “Boron Mon Amour” should also work as a standalone piece, how will it work with and play off the interactive elements when it embedded in the new website? Won’t its flow simply be sabotaged by multiple distractions that keep popping up like the classic arcade game Whac-a-Mole? 

Aaaargh!! Take that, you pesky pop-ups!

Am I sounding like a fusty old-fashioned filmmaker about all of this? You betcha! But I guess that’s what this Future Documentary Sandbox is all about, easing us of our comfort zones. Usefully, earlier REACT participants in other fields have also reflected on this, for instance the entry “are we there yet dad?” - on “these pages fall like ash” blog of the Books & Print Sandbox.

For Boron Mon Amour I guess the key is to embrace this potential conflict head-on, even relish it as a challenge to create a playful dialogue between the different layers - remembering all the while Mandy Rose's experiences on the Are You Happy project where things got very complicated before being stripped away to reveal the final version. As for the Boron team, I’m glad that we have Emma Weitkamp of the Science Communication Unit to advise us on how we might tackle these issues and I promise not to hit our web designer Marcin Ignac over the head with a large soft mallet if the interactive levels threaten to take over and sabotage my film. Well, at least not in public.