THE INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARY

For five years, Montréal producer Glen Salzman (Cineflix Inc.) and director Magnus Isacsson have been shooting a documentary on the native fight to stop Québec Hydro's Great Whale project. There is now over 200 hours of footage. In addition to a linear documentary, Glen is working on a CD-ROM version of the show. The CD-ROM will not contain the finished documentary. Instead, the CD- ROM will contain clips from the show, as well as clips not used in the show. This material will be combined with stills, maps and text to provide an interactive, multimedia production with a different look, feel, and content from the original broadcast film. Glen says that CD-ROM/multimedia production is "not about P.O.V. filmmaking." Giving the consumer control of how and in what order material is viewed "democratizes" the process of filmmaking.

(It is common to view CD-ROMs as an "interim technology". Surely when ATM, fibre networks become as commonplace as phone lines, then people will no longer need CD-ROMs; multimedia will simply be accessed online. Not so according to Michael Keefe, Director of Multimedia for ICE (Integrated Communications & Entertainment). Keefe believes that CD-ROMs or their physical equivalent will be with us for some time to come, because as "hunters and gatherers" people still like to own things, including software.)

INTERACTIVE TELEVISION

Another spin on interactivity can be found in the interactive television service of Montréal's Le Groupe Vidéotron. Videoway has been on the market for five years and now has a subscriber base of 300,000 homes in Canada, England and the United States. Videoway supplies the consumer with a variety of interactive television services including video games, videotext-based information services, Pay-per-View, and interactive television programming. In 1995, Vidéotron introduced Phase 2 of their Videoway service, called UBI (Universal Bi- Directional Interactive). UBI is a "transactional home electronic highway" which gives consumers access to a wide range of goods and services in the home. Everything from home banking and shopping to distance learning is available with UBI. Both Videoway and UBI use a set-top box, and a remote control. There is also a small thermal printer for a hard copy of any transactions, and a smart card reader with a PIN keyboard for use with credit/debit cards. UBI is sponsored by the National Bank of Canada, Hydro-Québec, Loto-Québec, Canada Post, and the Hearst Corporation. Each sponsor offers specific services to the consumer.

The interactive television that Videoway supplies is based on the simultaneous transmission of four separate, linear master tapes, synchronized to each other by time code. Each transmission is on a separate cable channel. The viewer has the option of switching from one "interactive" channel to another using the Videoway remote control. At other times the viewer is automatically switched back to the master channel by a programming signal encoded in the close- captioned area.

What the Videoway technology allows is sportscasts with additional camera support that follow specific players for the duration of the game. For instance in hockey, a player is picked from each team, and a camera stays on that player for the entire game. The player's individual statistics are displayed to one side. The fourth channel is a seven-second delay of the master broadcast so that fans can switch to an instant replay, though not in slow-motion. In baseball, channels two and three are devoted to the pitcher and batter.

Concerts have also been done using Videoway. A Céline Dion concert in September, 1991 featured a dedicated close-up camera, a channel of matching rock videos for each song, and a channel on which the song lyrics were superimposed over a wide shot of the concert.

Game shows are also a popular application for the interactive television technique. With Videoway, games can be designed or modified so that the audience can play along with the studio contestants. The Videoway set-top box keeps track of the home player's score.

Since Vidéotron is a cableco and not a broadcaster, they can not produce programming. Therefore they work in conjunction with traditional broadcaster/producers and advertisers. All the interactive programming that they run is advertiser-driven. Coca-Cola sponsored the Céline Dion Concert, and ran interactive advertisements throughout the show. Viewers could choose which of four streams of ads they wanted to watch. Sometimes their choice was based on language. Coke also ran a contest during the show in which viewers generated a lottery number according to their choice of commercials. The number was stored in their set-top box, and at the end of the broadcast the viewer phoned in their number.

Figure #11: Targeting commercials to viewer demographics on Videoway. (69K .gif)

All the interactive channels during sportcasts are also sponsored. Advertisers can also use Videoway to match commercial streams with the demographics of the specific audience in a room. By asking the viewer to respond to a poll at the beginning of a show, the advertiser can target the audience to a channel of beer ads, for a male audience, or feminine products for a female audience. (Yes, the advertisers are that simple-minded.) With an automobile manufacturer, you could ask the audience whether they were interested in vans, compacts, family sedans, or sports models, and direct them to the appropriate stream of commercials.

Vidéotron is very successful with marketing their service. Videoway and UBI are add-on tiers to existing cable services. The basic service is $7.95 per month; for $18.95 per month Videoway comes with a Pay-TV option. The monthly cost includes all the hardware necessary to access the service. Videotron is currently involved in a 1,000-home trial in Los Angeles.

nVIEWS

"The nViews project will provide the tools and framework to support knowledge workers in their effort to provide and communicate the context, meaning and significance of multimedia information." -- nViews Overview

According to project director Darryl Williams:

"There is no difference in using multimedia than there is in producing multimedia. All of the same underlying capabilities have to be there. So nViews slowly grew out of trying to look at multimedia information and what it might be, looking at how you might produce it for broadband networks, and how would a person actually use it, especially in the workplace.... So it grew as a symmetric system in which all players are equal.... The application itself is simply applied to content. It doesn't alter the content or change the content, it just gives a view of the content."

For the trial of nViews, Glen Salzman's Great Whale project is being used. 70 hours of raw material will be digitized and placed on a video server along with transcripts, documents, maps, etc. An ATM line is being put in place to link Ryerson to OCRInet, and OCRInet to Salzman's Cineflix office in Montréal. Sometime this summer, Salzman will begin assembling a network version of Great Whale from Montréal. When he's finished, other people will be able to access his work and shape and modify it to suit their purposes in a process that Glen refers to as "empowering people to have access to raw video."

In its simplest terms, nViews is a giant, non-linear, multimedia edit system. Though the servers and networks are high-tech, the machines that nViews runs on are 486/66 PCs running with Windows, the kinds of machines readily available in most production offices or facilities.

Later this year, nViews will be going public as an application on the Intercom Ontario trials in Newmarket.

THE ISSUES

A project like Great Whale is shot with a definite point of view, in this case a pro-Cree viewpoint. How then does the POV filmmaker rationalize the multi-threaded presentation that a multimedia version allows? The carefully plotted storyline and skilfully constructed arguments presented in POV documentaries are suddenly thrown into question by this new production medium. Interactive, non-linear forms of documentary are much more "democratic" and "empowering", but perhaps at the risk of less creative control by the filmmaker.

The interactive form is not always totally without shape. It can be, as in the case of nViews, where the end-user can control the flow and shape of the content. In other forms the interactive documentary can resemble the multi-threaded, interactive drama that may be familiar from interactive videodisc productions. This style of interactive documentary can be flow-charted and the paths of the viewer controlled to a certain extent.

When contemplating the concept of the interactive documentary, it is easy to relate it to the World Wide Web. The WWW seems to be a model that could be emulated in the new form. When surfing the Web, the user jumps from link to link at his/her own whim. There may be some logic in the decision-making process that goes on, but there is no logic in the pages themselves. No flow-charting can determine how somebody is going to use a home page, or where they are going to end up, or if they are going to come back. Not coming back is the key. In a non-linear documentary, will the links that are set up eventually lead to material outside the realm of the subject at hand? With links to other servers, this is entirely possible.

As people become more familiar with multimedia production and use, there will be more and more demand for raw film and video footage. Database companies are already anticipating the demands their clients will have for multimedia information. Users of multimedia applications such as nViews will use source material found on servers all over the country and the world and assemble and package it into new forms. At the National Film Board, discussions are already taking place about the use of their stock shot library. If and when it is digitized, it may be made available on a multi-tiered payment schedule. Students working on high school projects may access a non-broadcast quality version of a shot, and pay the equivalent of the cost of a photocopy. Traditional producers will pay a higher tariff for their broadcast quality version of the same material.

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