Does a Bear Pose in the Woods?

When you first meet Bear 71, she's desperately trying to escape a snare, but a dart plunged into her dark fur overwhelms her strength.

"That snare had a breaking strength of two tons. The dart was full of something called Telazol, brought you to by Pfizer, the same people who make Zoloft and Viagra," she tells you. "Next thing I know, I'm wearing a VHF collar and have my own radio frequency. They also gave me a number.

"I'm Bear 71."

This omniscient grizzly roams her territory near Canmore, Alberta, in the Bow River Valley. She calls it the Grid. Everyday she must innovate to survive, changing her course to avoid perilous highways and train tracks, and struggling to sniff out prey amidst a cloud of foreign smells: "deodorant and dog food and marshmallows and antifreeze."

She lives within a rapidly altering landscape threatened by encroaching urbanization, depleting food sources, and in this particular world, you.

Co-created by Vancouver-based artist Jeremy Mendes and Canmore filmmaker Leanne Allison, and with a script by The 100-Mile Diet's J.B. Mackinnon, Bear 71 is a new interactive documentary by the National Film Board -- and it's available for anyone to view online here.

Wild ideas

Based on the true story of a tracked bear, the idea for Bear 71 started as Allison was sifting through thousands of trail camera images obtained from Parks Canada. The photos, unframed by the human eye, told her much about the daily hubbub of wildlife in the area where the bear lived.

"Despite all the challenges that bears face in this valley, she seemed to have figured it out; she stayed away from roads, she stayed away from campgrounds, she was hardly ever seen," says Allison. "She was very productive, she had three sets of cubs. She was kind of the hope that grizzly bears could still eke out a living in this very busy place."

When Mendes first saw the photos, "I thought, this is the CCTV cameras in Times Square, this is post 9/11 security, observation, privacy issues of the day. It's about technology. It's about us."

The result, a Flash-based interactive story that incorporates the photos and video footage, provokes many questions about today's surveillance society: When creatures are so closely watched, what is lost? Are they even wild anymore?

Created in the NFB's Interactive digital studio in Vancouver, Bear 71 premiered at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. It was an unusual viewing experience, one that Mendes says brought grown men to tears. And this Friday, a live presentation of Bear 71 will kick off the 2012 DOXA Documentary Film Festival in downtown Vancouver -- the first time an interactive documentary has led the charge.

Medium is the message

Told from her point of view, Bear 71 chronicles the narrowing of her freedom under the vigilant eye of park rangers. A wise and omniscient creature, familiar with Facebook and Google Street View, she is your guide in the story.

But being an interactive documentary, you're in the story too. You're able to autonomously maneuver through the Grid's video game-like landscape, encountering creatures, landmarks and other various things to click on. Train your mouse on one icon, and trail footage of the big horn sheep appears, along with information about its declining population count. Tap another and see a sequence of night vision snapshots capturing a deer and its fawn, just barely evading the path of a bear.

With your permission, Bear 71 will even activate your webcam, bringing your surprised face into the Grid.

"For me, it's always been a critique of technology using technology," says Allison. "The medium is the message in this one, for sure."

Mendes agrees, saying that though people are surrounded by technology, it's never presented in an emotional way. Bear 71 aims to change that.

"We have all this technology and where is it getting us? At the end of the day, we're still trying to buy groceries and pay our rent and keep our families happy. I think this connects to that," he says.

Bear 71 taps into communication as well, exploring the concept of "rub trees" -- a form of conversation scientists have suggested occurs between male grizzly bears in the forest.

"The cameras have revealed that pretty much every single animal will check in on those trees. And if you were to map them, they would look like this network of cell phone towers. There could be literally centuries of information up to the last minute within that tree," says Allison. "I think there are ideas and elements of nature like that that I feel we're losing touch with, because we're beholden to our current technologies. It would've been the most natural thing in the world for us to check in on those trees at one time.

"In many ways it's about how we communicate."

From Sundance to DOXA

At this year's Sundance Film Festival, Bear 71 played to audiences as a live event with Mendes at the helm, navigating the Grid on his laptop. Musicians provided live accompaniment. It piqued the interest of DOXA festival programmer Dorothy Woodend.

"The idea that you can interact with a film in more than one way is really exciting to me, in that it really reflects how people use media, whether that means watching a film online or in a 700-seat movie theatre. There are multiple entry points into a film, different platforms for presentation, and far greater accessibility is a very good thing simply because it means that films get seen," says Woodend (who also is film columnist for The Tyee).

"If online access to films allows more people to see them and share them, then I am fully in favour of it," she says, adding that she expects more interactive documentaries will colour DOXA's future programs.

Mendes sees interactive documentaries as part of a greater shift in entertainment. "What we're doing is experimenting, knowing what we know about user habits online, how people consume content, how their attention spans have evolved."

The result is a viewing experience that has the power a "conventional" story does, with linearity and a story arc that has an emotional impact, yet one that allows the viewer to be active, he says.

To Allison, it seems like many industry players believe cinema will become more interactive over time, in some shape or form.

"Tom Perlmutter, the head of the NFB, made the analogy that we're kind of at the silent film era in this medium. Our tools are still kind of clunky, and audiences are still trying to figure out how to relate to it. But it's inevitable that we're going down this road," she says.

Audiences in Vancouver can see Bear 71's live presentation on May 4 at St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church. Mendes will work the Grid, and the performance will be accompanied by cellist Heather McIntosh. Following the show is a performance by electronic musicians and sound artists Loscil and Tim Hecker, whose music appears in Bear 71.

And if you miss that, a Bear 71 installation is open to the public at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre in Yaletown, Vancouver, from May 10 to 12. The installation incorporates large-screen projections of Bear 71 along with an "augmented reality app" that allows users to explore the interactive documentary using a tablet. Admission to the installation is free.