PUBLIC MARKS with tags upian & lang:en

Established in 1998, Upian is a design studio and interactive production company known for its award winning projects including Alma: A Tale of Violence, Prison Valley, and Generation Quoi? For this interview three of Upian’s producers — Alexandre Brachet, Margaux Missika and Gregory Trowbridge — take us behind the screens as they describe their process and the development of their projects.

Working with a team of designers at the French creative studio Upian, Plana and Fougere, say they intended to create a final product—with a sensitive and innovative approach to a narrative— that would be interactive and accessible. The final product, which took two years to develop, is incredibly in-depth—allowing its audience to explore the story through the innovative web piece, two books and a film, all available in four languages.

An unusual and original approach to documentary filmmaking is paying off for Gaul's Alexandre Brachet.

This is an interesting and moving application of interactive storytelling that will hopefully help break down the barrier separting peaceful, ordinary people

'Gaza Sderot' (2008), subtitled 'Life in spite of everything', is an ambitious web doc portraying the daily life of twelve people in Gaza (Palestine) and Sderot (Israel), from October 26 to two days ago. The state of the art website, by Upian, let's you browse scenes by time, place, people and topics -- all the while visually emphasizing the border cutting through the two places.

Arte.tv is currently producing a fascinating web documentary Gaza/Sderot: Life in Spite of Everything. Every day during its running time, two short (a couple minutes each) videos are added to the site - one shot in the Palestinian city of Gaza, the other in the neighboring Israeli town of Sderot, just across the border. The videos are presented in an innovative format, side by side, separated by the “/” representing the border between the two cities. Context is key here: to watch one video without the other would be to miss the bigger picture.

Today the first documentary commissioned for the internet by Arte France starts its broadcast. GAZA SDEROT – Life in spite of everything is an experimental 60 day interactive project designed the interactive production company Upian.com and produced in Paris by a French documentary production company Bo Travail!, together with Arte France and its web team.