Documentary multimedia

NFB and The Goggles launch interactive documentary Pine Point

Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons, creative directors at the Canadian media venture The Goggles, recently teamed up with NFB to produce Pine Point, an “interactive web documentary about what happens when your home town no longer exists.” I am a huge fan of NFB’s interactive experiments and I received multiple emails notifying me of this site, so I was eager to check it out. That being said, I think I need to bring up the issue of Flash – when is it overdone and what can producers do about it?

Don’t get me wrong, it is obvious that Shoebridge and Simons the developers of this site are phenomenal programmers. The animations, multimedia and interactivity throughout the massive step-through documentary are impressive to say the least. But, as I took the time to click through to the end, I couldn’t help but think to myself that the site seemed overly flashy and cluttered. Of course they made a conscious decision about the design of the interface, so perhaps my personal preference is that of a cleaner layout.

All together, this site houses nearly 50 frames of multimedia content divided into 10 chapters. According to Reddit, the producers spent a year working on it and designed everything in Photoshop before animating it in Flash.

You can see flashy sites every day over at FWA so clearly Flash still plays a large role in innovative projects. Up until 2008 all of my multimedia projects were done 100% in Flash. But the more I read about HTML5 and the inability to play Flash on Apple products, I’m beginning to wonder whether producers should start experimenting with other languages for the interactive component.

Jonathan Quint emailed me about this site, noting that it’s “so different from the usual flashy stuff – this is just a great story!”

So I’m starting to think that this site was successful in being what the producers envisioned it to be. The question in my mind, though, is that if it takes a year to produce something of this capacity, how is an interactive Flash site going to have competitive advantage in the long-term and withstand the quicker and more scalable programming languages that help producers make something comparable in days or weeks? Thoughts?

Update: I corrected myself to recognize that while Shoebridge and Simons were the story creators, NFB and Mod7 did all of the programming.

Other posts that might interest you:

• Multimedia must-see: NFB’s interactive 360 panorama documentary “Out my window”
• Behind the scenes of “Africa to Australia”
• University of Miami students personify United Nations Millennium Development Goals in documentary project “My Story, My Goal”

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