Alumni Profile

Posted by Arianna Sullivan in Alumni

“To rethink an entire narrative,” says Jason Jaacks, “and then to see it transform from a page of code to a webpage is a lot like seeing an image appear on paper floating in chemicals in a darkroom.”
Photo by Shayla Blatchford

“As far as the Internet is concerned,” says Cordillera Productions Executive Director Jason Jaacks, “we are dealing with a Model T. There’s no V-8 here, And two weeks ago, we were like the Flinstones.”
The Internet is still young in its development, but changing quickly. As it continues to grow and evolve as the leading tool for information sharing, documentarians like Jaacks are looking for ways to adapt storytelling to the Internet. Jaacks shared these thoughts in a lecture, “Documentary Without Borders: The Future of Storytelling in the Internet Age” on campus Oct. 3.
According to Alenty, an Internet rating company, the average viewing time for a single web page is 33 seconds. Jaacks, a second-year student at the Berkeley School of Journalism and a 2009 graduate of the College of Santa Fe’s documentary studies program, is exploring storytelling techniques to engage viewers with attention spans shaped by the web. In order to create narratives that can hold an Internet user’s attention, Jaacks is experimenting with telling visual stories that have multiple narrative arcs and points of entry and that are interactive for the viewer—essentially interactive online movies.
Jaacks cites Hollow as an example and source of inspiration for multimedia visual documentaries. The ‘movie’ explores the stories of more than 30 residents of McDowell County, W. Va. Online, Hollow consists of several visual timelines, made up of still and moving images, which can be scrolled through at the viewer’s leisure. Along the way are links to the detailed narratives of the stories featured on the timeline. The first time that Jaacks visited Hollow’s website, he spent two hours on it, putting the 33 second average viewing time to shame.
Jaacks began telling stories through several mediums with his senior thesis as a student at CSF. His project, “A Voice in the Desert,” featured the Tohono O’odham Nation, a Native American reservation in the Sonora Desert that is divided between the United States and Mexico. Jaacks’ thesis included a self-published book, a photography exhibition at CSF’s Marion Center and an audiovisual short film with still images and footage from his time spent with the Tohono O’odham people. The point was to “bring in other media forms to put you there, make you feel what I felt when I was there.”
When Jaacks returned to the Sonora to share his work with some of the people he had featured, A Voice in the Desert grew into a larger project called Border Dispatches. Border Dispatches is an interactive web-based documentary like Hollow that allows the viewer to enter different stories of people living on the Mexican American border from different points on a map of the area. Jaacks is creating a final iteration of his trailer of Border Dispatches for his thesis at Berkeley.
“Some stories,” explains Jaacks, “are clearly linear and can be told in a more traditional short-film style. But Border Dispatches was more nebulous. The process of telling the story has been more like weaving together several stories than just telling one. The story, if you really pay attention to it, will tell you how it wants to be told.”

“The story,” says Jaacks, “if you really pay attention to it, will tell you how it wants to be told.”
Photo by Shayla Blatchford

The list of terms for web-specific visual stories that weave together multiple narratives like Jaacks’ are varied. Jaacks calls it a mosaic story, but admits that he stole the term—from where, he can’t recall. Other titles given to this type of storytelling are multimedia, new media, web documentary, interactive documentary and transmedia. The fact that the very title of the kind of documentation and storytelling Jaacks is exploring is so ambiguous is exciting.
“It’s a new medium,” Jaacks says. “It’s open for dreaming! To rethink an entire narrative, and then to see it transform from a page of code to a webpage is a lot like seeing an image appear on paper floating in chemicals in a darkroom.”
The reinvention of storytelling for the Internet is not only exciting for people who have witnessed and fallen in love with the chemical magic of the darkroom, or for that matter the technical magic of code turning into a web-page. The creation of online mosaic storytelling is a collaborative process, which makes it exciting for the journalism industry as a whole.
“Newsrooms don’t even have this figured out yet,” explains Jaacks. “They’re having to reach out to people with very diverse skill-sets. The production of an online documentary requires an art director, a director, a cameraman, a back end developer, somebody to be in charge of narrative structure… not to mention the designers responsible for making a mobile device friendly version of the website. Collaboration is key to making these things happen.”
Moreover, media tools, including the Internet, have become highly democratized in recent years. Anybody can create an audience online—YouTube is proof of this—and the technology necessary to make and edit films has become cheaper and more accessible.
“There are films being made on iPhones,” explains Jaacks, “the barrier to entry has simply dropped.”
The Internet also allows for a great deal of reporting to be done without ever going to the site that a reporter is researching; initial reporting can be done by what Jaack’s refers to as “just cold calling people.” This is more efficient for the early stages of researching a story, but the importance of face-to-face time has by no means disappeared.
“What makes a story rich,” Jaacks says, “always comes back to time—the time spent with the people the story is about. Then you come home and lay out what you’ve got and say, ‘ok, what are we doing with this,’ and the story will tell you the medium.”