Waterlife, the film, follows the epic cascade of the Great Lakes from Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean, telling the story of the last great supply of fresh water on Earth. Filled with fascinating characters and stunning imagery, it’s an epic cinematic poem about the beauty of water and the dangers of taking it for granted.

With regard to the Web site, the goal of Canada’s National Film Board was to reach people who might never see the film and to create an interactive experience that could stand on its own, from a creative and educational perspective, yet still contribute to the project. All of the major content and themes from the documentary have been combined with Flash, Papervision and a truly amazing soundtrack to create a compelling online experience that tells the story of the extreme state of distress that the Great Lakes are in—a situation that affects the drinking water of 35 million people.

To immerse visitors in the content, the site has a fluidity that mimics the ebb and flow of water and a mosaic of images from the movie transform into different shapes and icons. A water-like timeline at the footer is accompanied by a conventional and easy to use navigation that slides out from the left. Also included is the film’s amazing soundtrack (which includes music from Brian Eno, Sigur Ros, Tragically Hip and composer Phillip Glass) and accompanying sound production (by Pirate Toronto) adds to the experience. Technically this project pushed the limits of Flash and the creative team was continually trying to make things cooler, less processor intensive, smarter and more intuitive for the user (small corners of the site have more coding than is sometimes delivered to an entire site).

• The main screen of the site with some Papervision coding uses thumbnail-sized screenshots of scenes from the movie to form 24 different mosaics.

• There are 23 different sections, some have their own small interactions, custom animations and the info pages have anywhere from 2 to 4 pages within them.

• The site makes use of Papervision and includes a lot of hardcore Actionscript programming; the massive undertaking took three intense months to code.

• No creative brief was provided to the creative team. The National Film Board wanted an experience that would reach an audience beyond those who are just interested in water issues and provided all footage, music and research from the film and worked closely with them to develop content for all 23 sections of the site. (The team was also lucky enough to collaborate with the film’s director, Kevin McMahon.)

• Before being promoted through PR, the site was receiving 150 hits a day. It’s now getting more than 2,000 hits a day and being Twittered about 100 times. The average time spent on the site is 6 minutes and 20 percent of the visitors return.