Documentary is a word that carries with it the weight of social-issue, historical, and activist cinema. But nonfiction storytelling isn’t limited to these genres; indeed, more and more businesses and brands are turning to documentary content for marketing purposes, having realized that true stories have the power to advertise, engage, and inspire.

This new role for documentary—using it in the nonprofit, commercial, and corporate spaces—is fresh enough that it doesn’t have a settled name. Depending on who you talk to, you might hear phrases like multimedia storytelling, branded documentary, or nonfiction advertising.

Whatever you want to call it, we’re talking about telling true stories to achieve an objective. Here, we highlight powerful campaigns for three Fortune 500 companies. While we can’t take credit for this work, it proves that documentary storytelling has come of age as a valid and powerful tool.

Brand: Intel
Agency: Amsterdam Worldwide

Brand: Starbucks
Agency: Mediastorm

Brand: Prudential
Agency: Droga5

What’s in a name? Around the web, we’ve seen documentary storytelling referred to as

• multimedia storytelling
• branded documentary
• nonfiction advertising
• brand journalism
• nonfiction advertising
• sponsored documentary

Kristen and Ben got back from Hot Docs last week, where our film Sanjiban screened. After 10 days taking in the best nonfiction storytelling on the planet, we particularly recommend the following films.

The Impostor

Ben: Three years after a fair-skinned, blue-eyed boy disappears from a small Texas town, a brown-eyed man with a thick accent surfaces in Spain and convinces the boy’s family that he is their son. The Impostor was by far the most gripping film I saw at Hot Docs; paced like a Hollywood thriller, it is technically flawless and pushes the envelope of the documentary form in a way that I can only describe as delightful.
Official site • Directed by Bart Layton

Canned Dreams

Kristen: I thought this film tracking the production of a can of ravioli, featuring interesting characters and beautiful landscapes, would be a fun adventure. Nope. It was horrifying, but in the best possible way.

Director Katja Gauriloff destroyed any naïveté I tried to maintain about food production and made a statement through the graphic images that lasted long past my comfort zone. From Brazil to Finland, stories are told through raw, heartbreaking portraits from those who make our food, while dreaming of much more. If you’re squeamish, close your eyes—but not your ears, because the sound design and music are pretty remarkable.

Official site • Directed by Katja Gauriloff

Chasing Ice

Ben: Great documentaries often find a way to access big issues, such as global warming, through small, human-scale lenses. In this spirit, Chasing Ice follows a photographer as he documents receding glaciers with custom time-lapse camera equipment, capturing an extraordinarily visual record of our changing planet. The cinematography is astounding, and the surround sound design by Skywalker Sound really needs to be experienced in a theater. Significant resources went into this film, and it shows.

Official site • Directed by Jeff Orlowski

Planet of Snail

Kristen: Following the daily routine of a deaf-blind man and his physically disabled wife, Planet of Snail does not showcase their struggles for sympathy nor does it smother the viewer with an inspiring message of overcoming adversity. It’s more than that; it is a love story. The sensitive filming allows for a gentle, patient look into their relationship and captures the snail-like pace of their lifestyle, making it impossible to look away.

Official site • Directed by Seungjun Yi

Downeast

Ben: Another strong vérité film by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, Downeast is a careful, sympathetic study of the opening of a lobster factory in rural Maine. David told me the pair moved to Maine to make this film, and their deep access allowed them to capture pivotal community meetings, a clear narrative structure, and even a curmudgeonly foil to their character.

Official site • Directed by David Redmon, Ashley Sabin

The World Before Her

Kristen: Now this is how you tell a story. In The World Before Her, director Nisha Pahuja brilliantly juxtaposes two opposing boot camps for young women in India. Twenty Miss India contestants endure a month of Botox, skin bleaching, and objectifying training in order to gain stardom, while the girls of a militant fundamentalist camp are taught to protect their Hindu tradition and fight westernization through protest and violence. The Indian government has deemed that this youth camp promotes terrorism, making the filmmaker’s groundbreaking access all the more mind-blowing. I left not continuing to think about the debate of tradition vs. modernity, but rather the significance of what these young female role models have in common: their personal triumphs over the patriarchal society they live in.

Official site • Directed by Nisha Pahuja

Our award-winning short film Sanjiban is now available for your viewing pleasure at sanjibanthefilm.com. Check it out, and vote for us to win in the International Documentary Challenge’s Audience Award!

Synopsis:

After his diagnosis with terminal cancer, eccentric filmmaker Sanjiban Sellew spent his final days at home with family and friends. Choosing to be as open with death as he was with life, he narrated on camera the extraordinary changes happening to him: “I feel myself becoming less of a human being daily, by the cancer in my brain that’s still chomping away at my electronics, my circuit boards.” After two and a half months, he died at home in rural Massachusetts.

This short documentary takes place in the space and time between the end of one journey, and the beginning of another. With his twin brother John as our guide, we ferry Sanjiban’s body from home—a makeshift shrine in the dining room—to the furnace that will consume his earthly remains. “Sanjiban” is an intense, life-affirming story about the profoundly human experience of saying goodbye.

UPDATE: Sanjiban is now available online at the Doc Challenge screening room.

We are delighted to announce that our new film Sanjiban has been selected as a finalist in the International Documentary Challenge and will premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto, Canada!

We conceived, shot, and edited Sanjiban over five intense days in March 2012. To qualify as a competitor in the Doc Challenge, our finished documentary had to conform to a randomly assigned genre (“biography”), be four to seven minutes in length, and incorporate this year’s theme (“cycles”).

Sanjiban will premiere on May 1 at 7PM at the University of Toronto’s Innis Town Hall.

Synopsis and Credits

After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, eccentric filmmaker Sanjiban Sellew spent his final days at home with family and friends. Choosing to be as open in death as he had been in life, he narrated on camera the extraordinary changes happening to him: “I feel myself becoming less of a human being daily, by the cancer in my brain that’s still chomping away at my electronics, my circuit boards.” After two and a half months, he died at home in rural Massachusetts.

This short documentary takes place in the space and time between the end of one journey and the beginning of another. With his twin brother, John, as our guide, we ferry Sanjiban’s body from home—a makeshift shrine in the dining room—to the furnace that will consume his earthly remains. Sanjiban is an intense, life-affirming story about how one offbeat family celebrates the profoundly human experience of saying goodbye.

Director, Producer, DP Ben Pender-Cudlip
Editor Kristen Salerno
Associate Producer Casey Atkins
Sound Mix Kristen Salerno
Sound Engineering Audrey Knuth
Original Piano Composition John Sellew
Composer David Guerette
Guitar Neil Dean

Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is North America’s largest nonfiction film festival, featuring 189 documentaries from around the world. This year’s festival is April 26 to May 6, 2012.

The International Documentary Challenge is a timed competition in which filmmakers are given five days to make a short nonfiction film on an assigned theme.

A conversation with Casey Atkins

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In this installment of “Remarkable Short Docs” we present Just the Mussel Guy?, a multimedia story about a mussel farmer in Maine. Photojournalist Casey Atkins spoke with Ben in person.

Ben: So, how did you find this guy?

Casey: I was at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, and we had to find a photo story—I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I kind of wanted to do something particular to Maine. I was playing fiddle at an Irish session and that’s where I met Carter. I asked him what he did and he said he was a mussel farmer. I didn’t really know anything about mussel farming and thought that that sounded really interesting, so later on I got in touch with him and asked if I could come out on his boat.

I don’t think he realized the extent of what I was going to be doing, because I was out on the boat with him for two months, at least every weekend. I also went to a couple concerts with him and I slept over at his house twice. It was fairly involved over the course of a couple of months.

Ben: He was not expecting this?

Casey: I don’t think so. They told us at the Salt Institute that when you’re first approaching your subjects about doing your story, you don’t, you know, run up and say “Hi, can I follow you around and document every intimate detail of your life?” People would probably say no.

So I kept going out on the boat, and then at some point I said “You know, I think I really need to shoot some of your morning routine at home, because that’s an important part of the story.” So that’s how I ended up getting to stay over at his house. I think it kind of helped that I played the fiddle, because we just sat and jammed on fiddle tunes for a good portion of the evening. Actually, that’s where I got the recording of the background music.

Ben: What’s that dynamic like? Your job is to be removed from situations and photograph them, but sometimes you have to put down your camera and play the fiddle with your subject. How do you know when to do that?

Casey: I actually struggled with that a lot, because this was my first time doing any sort of documentary work. I was very, very aware of trying not to be too involved. In retrospect, I probably hung back even more than I needed to, because I was pretty quiet. I guess I didn’t talk too much about myself. I think sometimes it’s easier if you share a little bit of personal information with people, so that they feel more comfortable with you. You want the person to relate to you, but also you want the person to like you. If you’re going to be hanging out with somebody for two months and watching them get up and brush their teeth in the morning, they’d better like you, right? They’d better want you to be around.

Ben: And so, you mentioned that one of the interesting things you learned about Carter is that he has a doctorate?

Casey: Yes, a master’s in oceanography, and a Ph.D. in marine biology, I think. That was one of the things that I found really interesting about him. He was this fisherman type, a Mainer, a little bit rough around the edges, and he has this mussel farming business. Then he’s this super intelligent guy, who has all these degrees and who’s doing all this research. For example, he did research on the optimal angle at which to place his mussel rafts, so the water would flow through precisely for the best filtration. And he went over to Ireland at one point to help people over there with their mussel farms and share his research.

Ben: When did you do the interview?

Casey: Near the very end. I did a bunch of recording almost right away; the first day I went out on the boat I got so overwhelmed, because he kept coming up and telling me all this technical stuff about what was going on while I was trying to take pictures, and I was thinking “I’m missing all this awesome information!” This was my first project and I was thinking “I have to capture it all, I shouldn’t miss anything,” so I took the recorder and hung it around my neck, and strapped the microphone to my backpack strap. For the rest of the time that I was out on the boat I would often be running the audio recorder. So I have a lot of recordings of engine noise. And a lot of really useless tape!

On one of the last days I went out, I decided to put down my camera and focus on audio. I had the recorder, I was wearing the headphones, and I was holding the microphone up to the water flowing through the hose, and out of the hose onto the deck. When the engine started up, I made sure to get that properly, and also when they were pulling up the ropes. I was focusing on getting the audio because I’d been out on the boat so many times that I did not want to go out on the boat anymore. My teacher said, “You just need to keep going out on the boat.” And I’m thinking, “What am I doing here, I am so sick of these pictures, I’ve taken a million of them, and they all look the same.”

It was good that I did the interview at the end because I knew exactly what I wanted to ask, because he had told me all this stuff before. And so we met at a pub in Damariscotta and went outside and sat in my car for about an hour. A car is awesome for sound recording, and I think the interview came out well. But it was this very weird intimate situation where I’m sitting like two inches away from him, holding a microphone in his face the whole time. He even commented on that afterward, which was kind of funny.

Ben: How do you choose the right pictures to go along with the narrative track in the audio?

Casey: Sometimes you are able to find photographs that literally exemplify what he’s speaking of, like when he’s talking about making repairs on the ship and you see the wrench, or when he’s talking to the crew about the biology and you see him showing the mussels to the guy.

Sometimes I look for other things, like a theme from the image—for example, when Joe (the guy with the beard) is helping to move this big crate in the truck, Carter is talking about a hard day’s work and the satisfaction of bringing in a ton of mussels. I definitely struggled in some portions, because people talk about some abstract things that you can’t really find images to go with very well.

Ben: What about the sequences where you’ve got a number of images rapid fire? What’s the motivation behind doing something like that?

Casey: It was something that a bunch of people were playing around with one year at school, and I’ve seen a few other multimedia pieces and thought it looked cool. We watched Ed Kashi’s Iraqi Kurdistan on MediaStorm, and it was really cool to see how they paired the music with the images, and how they would go through a whole bunch of still images and then stop and focus on a single one. That’s one of the things my instructor really brought up: when it goes through all of these images and then stops on one, that’s what you would have published. It’s interesting to be able to see the movement, because still images are static.

Ben: You’re spending tons of time with Carter—why not go out there with a video camera?

Casey: First of all, I’m a still photographer. Secondly, I really believe in the power of the still image as opposed to video. At this point I hadn’t done any work with video, so I wasn’t even thinking in that respect. But even now that I do work with video, I still prefer still images in some instances, for a lot of different reasons. Video is always moving, and you don’t necessarily get to see a moment and hold it. Sometimes you just want to look at an image and consider it.

I think still images can be really powerful on their own, and so I like doing a mixture of both now. When I did this, Salt was just starting to get into the whole multimedia thing. I just fell in love with sound when I went to Salt. They had a really great radio program, and I wanted to work with sound too. When you bring in the audio, the still images come more alive, I think. One of the reasons I really like audio is that you can hear the person’s voice, and that brings them to life so much more.

Ben: How did you wind up with the title?

Casey: I went around to a few different restaurants with Carter when he was making his deliveries, and he was always “the mussel guy,” right? Just this local guy going around doing his thing, but I felt like there was way more to him than meets the eye. So that’s how I came up with “Just the Mussel Guy?” because he’s not just the mussel guy, he has this whole other interesting background to him as well. I tried to bring that out in the multimedia piece, but I think you learn more from reading the description that I wrote.

Ben: You said that you should be able to find a story in anybody, like that he isn’t just the mussel guy.

Casey: Everybody has a story, and everybody’s interesting in some way or another. If you hang out with somebody for long enough, you’ll find out what the interesting bits are; you’ll find out all these weird things. Maybe they’re not weird to them, maybe he doesn’t think that he’s really special or different, but other people coming across this might be intrigued by his story.

Ben: Is that why you do documentary?

Casey: To find interesting stories? I love finding out all the stuff that I wouldn’t get to know otherwise, and like asking questions that I wouldn’t otherwise get to ask. It’s an excuse to learn more about the world. I didn’t know anything about mussel farming and I was kind of curious: how does this work? You go out on a boat, and what do you do? So I got to go out on a boat for two months. I like seeing how things work and how people live their lives, because everybody lives their lives differently and sometimes in ways you wouldn’t expect.

Casey Atkins is a documentary photographer and photojournalist in Boston. Her portfolio is at caseyatkins.com.

Remarkable Short Docs is a regular feature spotlighting original nonfiction works and interviews with their creators.

Just the Mussel Guy? is published courtesy of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.

UPDATE: Sanjiban is now available online at the Doc Challenge screening room.

Short on sleep, Kristen and I drove to a late-night post office yesterday in rural Massachusetts and mailed a DVD. We had just finished a short film to compete in this year’s International Documentary Challenge, a five-day sprint to complete a documentary on an particular theme in a randomly selected genre. On the drive back, we didn’t have to say out loud what was obvious to both of us: this is the best film we have ever made.

Sanjiban documents the final journey of filmmaker and video artist Sanjiban Sellew, who died of brain cancer just a few days prior. In a video recorded during his rapidly progressing illness, he said “I feel myself becoming less of a human being daily, by the cancer in my brain that’s still chomping away at my electronics, my circuit boards.”

While we must wait until the results of the competition are announced to release the film publicly, you can sign up for our email newsletter to be notified when and where you can see Sanjiban.

Our whole team feels incredibly blessed to have shared this time of celebration and grief with his family. Our thoughts and sympathies remain with the family, and we offer best wishes to Sanjiban on his travels.

Director, Producer, DP Ben Pender-Cudlip

Editor Kristen Salerno

Associate Producer Casey Atkins

Sound Mix Kristen Salerno

Sound Engineering Audrey Knuth

Original Piano Composition John Sellew

Composer David Guerette

Guitar Neil Dean

Ben Pender-Cudlip founded Unrendered Films and directed Sanjiban. He finds creative constraints—such as creating a film in only five days—exhilarating.

Sign up here for our email newsletter to be notified when Sanjiban is released.

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We’re pleased to release The Ten-Block Walk, a collaboration with librettist and theatre artist Christie Lee Gibson to promote a new opera of the same name. Read more about how we conceived and created this short time-lapse video.

We’re pleased to welcome our new intern, Kristen, to the team. She’s a talented editor and will be spending most of her energy shaping a feature documentary collaboration with amazo productions; stay tuned for more news on this front. Other duties will include audio editing and spending some time behind the camera learning DSLR shooting techniques.

Kristen is a graduate of Emerson College, where she was director of programming at the Emerson Channel, and she has worked for Pearson Education in Boston and Psychic Bunny in Los Angeles. Kristen plays the saxophone, and she insisted on smiling for her headshot, unlike a few of us (see, nonfiction is serious business).

A conversation with Chris Abbas

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For the first installment of “Remarkable Short Docs” we present Cassini Mission, an eerie trip to the moons of Saturn through repurposed NASA footage. Designer and director Chris Abbas spoke with Ben via phone and email.

Ben: Cassini Mission is stitched together out of thousands of still images, shot for scientific—not cinematic—reasons. How did you discover the potential there?

Chris: Late one night, I discovered a huge library containing raw images of Saturn on the JPL Cassini Solstice Mission website. At a glance it seemed like the images were displayed in sequential order, so I downloaded some and played them back at twenty-four frames per second. The result was incredibly interesting to me—it was like watching a timelapse in space—so onward it went until I was finished.

Ben: What software did you use, and what was your workflow to deal with so many still images?

Chris: There was a slow back and forth process between Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Pro. A lot of time was spent feeling out how the shots lived next to each other as the frenetic nature of the footage was quite challenging to edit.

My method for asset management was perhaps a bit ridiculous … I pulled down a little more than 200,000 images over the course of a week with a Firefox extension named Scrapbook. Part of the process involved sorting the imagery (the script retrieved images that were small, medium, and large), so I made a simple Automator script that would sort all the files for me based on image resolution.

Once organized, I had to go through every sequence and sort them manually—moons, stars, planets, fly-bys, calibration processes, and so forth.

Ben: What are we hearing in this—what’s the music, and what’s behind the sound design and sound effects?

Chris: The music is from the wonderful Nine Inch Nails album “Ghosts I-IV,” used under a Creative Commons license, and the sound design actually comes from Cassini itself, courtesy of the radio and plasma wave science instrument. The spacecraft recorded radio emissions near the poles of Saturn and NASA translated them into an audible frequency. It seemed like a natural fit for the sound design.

Ben: Most of the astronomic images we see are are so sterile and scientific—in comparison, Cassini Mission feels a little bit like a handheld camera in space. Almost like there was a human behind it, in other words. What is it about this aesthetic that you enjoy?

Chris: I enjoy the honesty and realism of the imagery the most. In their unfiltered state, the photographs feel true to life. You’re absolutely right that most scientific and astronomic imagery we see today is seemingly perfect. And that’s wonderful; I’m glad we have the technology to do it. However, that level of perfection can enable us to overlook the reality that thousands of extremely hardworking people put a camera (among other brilliant things) into space, then sent it to another planet, and proceeded to beam those images back to Earth. The raw, unretouched quality of those photographs reminds me of the great challenges we endured to achieve such a feat.

Ben: How many of the visual effects (those cool circle artifacts, the weird graph on the right in some shots, etc.) are “in-camera,” and how much did you add digitally?

Chris: All of the artifacts and lens aberrations were captured in-camera … space is really, really dirty it seems. The digital enhancements were minimal, limited to color correction, pan-scanning, dust-busting, and resequencing some of the bracketed exposures. There is also one shot at the end—Saturn rotating and drifting away—that is a composite.

Ben: I knew that you were the type of guy who pays crazy attention to detail when I noticed that there’s some chromatic aberration on the credit text. Can you describe what I’m seeing? Why did you do that?

Chris: Initially, the type didn’t feel right. There was an unnatural crispness, this artificial quality, that did not feel appropriate considering the aesthetic of the raw footage. After some time, the solution became clear: I needed to see the type through a lens the same way Cassini saw the cosmos through its lens.

Ben: I look at your work on Vimeo and see you experimenting with ideas of scale and extremes of magnification. For example, your work on the House title sequence and God of Small Things deals with very small objects, and Cassini Mission is about incredibly large objects. Why do you think you’re drawn to this? Is it something about telescopes and microscopes?

Chris: I’d like to say all this work revolves around subconscious themes in my mind, but alas, I’m afraid it was a matter of coincidence. There is something very interesting, however, about the vast, astronomical distances in space and the vast, astronomical distances at the atomic level.

Ben: Speaking of the House title sequence, can you talk a little bit about your job at Digital Kitchen and how that interacts with your personal work? What do you do there?

Chris: I feel lucky that I’m able to wear a few different hats at DK. Depending on the project, I may be a director, animator, compositor, designer, illustrator, and sometimes (if I’m lucky) a camera operator. I suppose my job interacts with personal work in that they both ferociously fight for my time and energy … Kidding aside, it’s the brilliant people I spend my days with that affect my work the most.

Ben: You told me that sometimes when you finish work, the last thing you want to do is stare at another “glowing rectangle.” Where do you get your creative energy, and what gets you into creative flow? How do you stay there?

Chris: This is a tough question. I feel like there are several tiers of inspiration from normal to extreme, all dependent on a plethora of variables ranging from sleeping habits to who you spoke with last. It’s difficult to say where my creative energy comes from. I can’t be absolutely certain; however, I often feel a desire to express myself. Perhaps that is what keeps the furnace burning.

Chris Abbas is a designer at Digital Kitchen in Seattle. His portfolio is at giantkillerpandas.com.

Remarkable Short Docs is a regular feature spotlighting original nonfiction works and interviews with their creators.

We’re hitting the new year running with a clean new look, thanks to some fellow creatives here in Boston.

This shiny new site is courtesy of our friends Dan and Amy at Height & Hands. It not only looks great on your computer, but on any size mobile device; try grabbing the corner of your browser window and making it smaller. Web designers call this “responsive design,” but we call it just plain showing off.

Our new letterpress cards were hand-printed by the good folks at Albertine Press. Originally invented by Johannes Gutenberg, in the fifteenth century, letterpress printing is used nowadays for short-run, high-polish jobs, and you can feel the impression that the type makes in the paper. “Artisanal” is a word that gets thrown around a lot. We think it’s the right fit.

Our branding and copy was developed with D’lynne from Exponent Collaborative, with copyediting and proofreading by Teresa Elsey.

• Height & Hands is a tiny, Boston-based design shop.
• Albertine Press is a Boston-area design and letterpress print shop.
• Exponent Collaborative is a marketing, PR and design collaborative.