“I was impressed when Bear 71 was released as an interactive documentary several years ago, and translation of the work into virtual reality (VR) makes the content even more powerful. Kudos to the National Film Board of Canada for creating an experience that serves both the content and the medium of VR.” —juror Erika Tarte
“The interactive documentary was impressively crafted when it was initially released for the web, but it’s even more emotionally impactful the second time around when experienced through VR.” —juror Stephen Hadinger
Overview: What would you do if people were invading your home? The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) poses this question in an interactive documentary that follows Bear 71, a tagged female grizzly bear that is tracked by trail cameras in Canada’s Banff National Park. In collaboration with Google, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s DocLab and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, NFB reunited with Toronto-based studio Jam3 to reimagine the project, which was first released as a Flash site in 2012, as an immersive WebVR experience. Follow Bear 71 as she attempts to survive in a formerly secluded habitat now teeming with human visitors and suburban expansion.
• Bear 71 VR has received 84,000 visitors since it launched.
• A core team of five to seven people worked on the project.
• The project was built with HTML5, WebGL and WebVR.
Comments by Laura Mitchell, project manager, National Film Board of Canada:
What are the origins of the Bear 71 story? “The project was originally conceived by Being Caribou filmmaker Leanne Allison, who was inspired after sifting through thousands of trail camera pictures from the Bow Valley and seeing all the wildlife activity. As she was piecing together a story, digital media creator Jeremy Mendes came on board. He was especially drawn to how closely the trail pictures resembled surveillance camera photos. Leanne said that at that moment, Bear 71 became a ‘story not only about a grizzly bear, but also about how much we rely on technology to relate to each other and also to the natural world.’”
From concept to completion, how long did the project take to produce? “Bear 71 originally launched as a Flash site in 2012. Since Flash is no longer supported in some browsers, we were eager to explore HTML5 and WebVR as a way to preserve the project’s legacy and stretch the experience of the story. We started prototyping in June 2016 and developing the project in October 2016. The project was featured at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in November and shown by Google at New Frontier’s VR Bar at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2017.”
What are the project’s core features? “The immersive nature of VR. The 3-D world, expressed as data through a grid, becomes a digital landscape surrounding users as they explore the landscape of the Bow River valley. Additionally, WebVR demonstrates that it’s still possible to innovate on the web in browsers like Chrome. The National Film Board is a public institution, and we saw this project as a chance to support the democratic web. Using open web standards allows for free expression and for everyone to enjoy the experience.”
