Tap Water Burning

Partway through this clip, a Colorado man lights his tap water on fire. The source of his water's unusual behaviour is apparently a natural gas leak, which has contaminated the local aquifer.

These days, a spectacle invites viral video. The Internet has an insatiable appetite for the shiny, rare or surprising, and fire rates pretty high on all three scales. Flammable water, then, is a ready-made viral video hit. If this clip hasn't spread like wildfire yet, it may be because burning water has gone viral before. Last March, a story about flammable water in Colorado hit Boing Boing, though without accompanying video.

But when the web is at its best, it marries spectacle with meaning. In this case, the burning water will be part of a documentary about the impact of natural gas drilling on drinking water, Water Under Attack. It's a great example of the ways that viral video and conventional documentary filmmaking can complement each other.

Filmmaker Josh Fox has been posting regular dispatches on Vimeo for a year, but started collecting them on the documentary's website last April. He actually posted a shorter version of the flaming water video five months ago, but this newer clip provides much more context.

The interesting thing about Fox's site is that he isn't just posting trailers or finished segments from the documentary. In this video, we do not see a polished final product, but we see him filming the documentary, often from another camera. It's as if Fox is releasing making-of extras ahead of the film. In many ways, this informal style is better suited to the web than the full-length finished documentary ever will be.

Fox is certainly not alone in this approach. Filmmakers are realizing that the web isn't just a threat, but a tool, to be used for much more than advertising. Viral video can help directors accomplish their goals -- in this case, raising awareness about natural gas contamination -- in a different, but related, medium.

In this, the National Film Board of Canada is ahead of the curve. Last week they released an iPhone App to serve as a mobile portal into their already fantastic website. On the app or website, you can watch hundreds of embeddable NFB films and trailers, or take in curated playlists. But the NFB also hosts the slicker cousins of Fox's documentary website, detailed film-specific sites -- take this dazzling multimedia site for Waterlife, a documentary about the Great Lakes, or the blog posts and video clips accumulated during the making of 2008's celebrated RiP: A Remix Manifesto.

Most days, the web tends towards entertaining fluff. It takes someone special to turn that tendency back on itself, and slip in something important along the way. That's why we're lucky to have Fox, other filmmakers like him, and the NFB. The rest of the viral video web should learn from their example.