In 2009, the National Film Board of Canada (co-producing with Primitive Entertainment Inc.) launched the online documentary Waterlife, an interactive exploration of humanity’s impact on the Great Lakes in North America. As well as being intellectually and emotionally engaging, Waterlife is a brilliant example of how a film documentary can be adapted and reconfigured for an online platform. A website production company called Jam3 spent four months reshaping the content for the web, and the site was recognised by several awards for Cross-Platform Media and interactive activism.
Waterlife was directed by Kevin McMahon, an innovative Canadian documentary filmmaker who has always held an affinity for the environment; this ‘waterscape’ in particular. Situated on the north-western border between the United States and Canada, the Great Lakes is the largest source of fresh water in the world. However, its rich wildlife, clean waters, beauty and assets (not to mention the health of nearby residents) are under threat from pollution, industrial work and generally bad human activities. The purpose of Waterlife is to highlight these threats, making people aware of the problems we are causing to the environment and ourselves, unknowingly and otherwise. By taking a well-known location and showing it in these new ways, the makers of Waterlife hope to inspire actions to amend the situation, or at least to try to stop making it worse. Therefore, the intended audience is quite mature, most likely adults; it’s especially targeted towards American and Canadian citizens but the issues raised are relevant for everyone. Although the content is widely accessible, the more environmentally conscious among us would probably spend more time on the site. Suitably, the content is very informative and educational, almost journalistic in style.
The design of the interactions maximises the accessibility of the content for the users to explore. Users are first met with succinct introduction to the website – “the Great Lakes are changing and something’s not quite right with the water” – a fairly foreboding invitation to the experience. Once users have entered the site, they are met with three different ways to navigate to the information – a central photo map starting in the shape of the Great Lakes and made from images representing the different ‘scenes’, an scroll-over bar across the bottom of the screen, and a twirl-down menu on the left allowing users to see a list of all the sections. Offering these alternative means of navigation is a really clever way of structuring the content, because it aesthetically presents users options catered for the experience they would like. For example, when I first visited Waterlife I was happy to click on the images at random and see what there is to see, but when I became more involved and invested in the information I used the menu to make sure I didn’t accidentally miss something out. The multiple navigation methods also accommodates for a range of intuitive and computing abilities of the audience, maintaining useability for everyone without sacrificing interest. It is a great credit to the website that all of the content makes sense in any order that it is experienced – nonlinearity enabling a lot of control for the users, and requiring a good level of interaction and absorption.
Upon clicking on a ‘scene’, the photo map rearranges to display a symbolic picture of the section (for example, a simple house image logically represents “Water is Home”) and users are presented with an engaging initial sentence or two as the scene loads. Typically with one to five pages, the sections contain explanatory text, quotes from experts or local members of the community (both written and verbal), photos and moving imagery, and simple interactive features. Sensibly, the key information is displayed on the first page, and often links to other websites are given at the end for those who would like further information or see what organisations are doing about the issues, and to validate Waterlife’s claims. A collection of all the links are also provided in the “Resources/Community Action” tab in the menu bar always present at the bottom of the screen, which includes information about the documentary itself and other navigations.
Overall, the interactivity in the Waterlife is smooth. Rather than being click-heavy, most of the interactions occur via the mouse hovering over things, such as tilting the central photo map and loading quotes. There are a number of small and sweet interactive features within the scenes, like moving the paperclips and flipping photos around – little playful things that don’t distract from the conveyed messages, and are not crucial to the meaning making. Although users do not have the ability to contribute to the documentary through tagging, uploading or adding comments and so on, they are provided with all the tools necessary to explore the site clearly and autonomously.
Something I really like about Waterlife is its interface design. It has a very high production, cinematic style – reflecting its original film format. From the very first animations in the loading sequence, the website holds a very fluid and watery theme, pleasingly appropriate and aesthetic. Objects flow, glide and wobble as if filled with liquid. The graphics and colour scheme fit in with this theme well – lots of blacks, blues and whites, with bright moments of yellows, greens, browns and other natural colours. Not only does the colour palette reflect the environment it is portraying, but also captures the somewhat sombre yet urgent atmosphere of the work. Text is treated stylistically and the typography is bold and attractive, delivering the content effectively. There are two main ‘templates’ for the scenes, one usually with looping video footage as the background and text in a black segment (with small animated edges about the topic), and another of a desk style – with folded paper, coffee cup stains, some clutter and a hand-written kind of font. Mouse-activated animations and excellent video footage (for example in the section about Invasive Species) create a good impact for the content. The movements and transitions are great, creating a 3D space and sense of layers. Altogether, the design features are very suitable and cohesive, summoning the strong overriding tone of the site.
The sound design also aids this sense of cohesiveness. Instrumental mood music from the likes of Brian Eno, Philip Glass and Sigur Ros really capture the fluid location and sense of loss set by the content. Subtle sound effects (mostly of the underwater variety) and occasional grabs from interviews overlap when necessary. My only criticism on sound is that it becomes a little repetitive after spending some time at the site, although users are given the option of skipping songs or even muting them. Interestingly in the listed credits, several other artists are mentioned – I wouldn’t mind hearing some Sufjan Stevens for example, but his music is only featured in the initial documentary. The background music is only suspended in one scene, which plays a music video using footage from the film, a song by “The Tragically Hip” whose leader singer narrated the documentary.
Although the website does not utilise user generated content or social media (other than the now standard options of sharing the link to other services), it offers a sister website “Our Waterlife Community”, intended for people wanting to get involved and discuss local water issues. Sadly, this site seems to be focused on drumming up praise and further information about the film rather than providing a discussion service for concerned members of the public. But I’m glad the documentary did not try to incorporate these aims into its main website – I think sometimes these kinds of endeavours can be too distracting and detract from the effect and quality of the user experience.
Overall, Waterlife is an engaging online documentary I would highly recommend to people. Potentially, I would like to have a bit more information about what I can do to minimise harm to my own local water supplies, or what companies can I support to be more environmentally ethical. While its technical qualities are somewhat beyond my abilities, I’d like to be able to create my project with a similar sense of nonlinearity and cohesiveness of style.
Webbed Realities 