In early elementary school I distinctly remember seeing the National Film Board (NFB) production of Nahanni on one of those days, I’m guessing, when the teacher needed a break from the usual. The black and white images of buddy chasing his dream of striking gold on the Nahanni river in the Northwest Territories stuck with me forever, along with the grain of desire to follow that river myself. That film must have represented a certain cultural zeitgeist in Canada at that time, because I’ve met several gens d’un certain age that share the very same memory. Come to think of it, we all now own canoes and I’m personally working on the Trudeau fringed buckskin jacket to complete the fantasy.
About six months ago I began looking for NFB films and shorts related to housing that I could share on this blog. There are more than five hundred NFB films available online, more to purchase, and about 10,000 to view on location at the Mediatheques in Montreal and Toronto. That’s great, but what really caught my eye when I was Googling around this week, are their stunning interactive media projects.
Now maybe I don’t get out enough, but I found Welcome to Pine Point, a project about a northern mining town that disappeared from the face of the earth, breathtaking. The best way to describe it is like looking through a living, breathing, audio-filled photo album where you drive the experience. It is fantastical reality – beautiful, smart, creative, clever and touching with a surprising narrative structure. It’s perfectly brought to you by The Goggles, Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons, the creatives formerly behind AdBusters magazine. Check out their other projects while you’re at it.
There are a number of other interactive projects around housing, (Highrise, Barcodes and God’s Lake Narrows), as well as other subjects to explore.
While I can imbed the NFB movies into my website, I cannot do the same with the interactive projects. I can, however, tweet them in their entirety (as I did with Pine Point earlier today). So if you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to Follow Me on Twitter or regularly check my Twitter sidebar at Habicurious. As I add more movies, you will be able to click on ‘NFB’ in the tag cloud to easily retrieve stuff you didn’t catch the first time or search my old tweets.