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Sky's the limit for interactive docs UK indie Skyworks yesterday soft-launched an interactive website using technology that heralds "a completely new way of delivering a documentary," director Colin Mills tells Adam Benzine.  Aerial footage specialist Skyworks this week teamed up with fellow UK indie Earthware and technology companies Microsoft and Mydeo to showcase a new method of documentary-making, which it says has the potential to radically change the factual landscape. The companies have launched countrybehindthecup.com (left), an interactive documentary website that combines Skyworks' aerial footage, Earthware's mapping technology and Microsoft's Silverlight and Bing platforms. The site starts off playing video in a linear fashion, but allows users to leap to different sections on a timeline, as well as going 'off piste' to explore hotspots on interactive maps. Colin Mills (below), Skyworks' director and head of new media ventures, explains: "We saw the opportunity to combine not just video, but also to look at how a documentary might be approached in quite a different way, where you can divide it into notional chapters, and the person who's looking at it can experience it not just in a purely linear sense, but can also take a little bit of time out and explore around it."  The project uses a 13-minute chunk of Skyworks' 52-minute documentary South Africa: An Aerial Journey, which is distributed by TVF International and has been sold to markets such as Korea and Canada. If it proves successful, Skyworks will upload more segments of the doc to the project. "Most times, the classic broadcast idea of '360' has really just been to take a documentary and stream it on the web, maybe with a few outtakes and things, but ultimately what you're getting is linear," says Mills. "What we were trying to do was say, 'How could we approach it totally differently?'" He stresses that the project is so far just an experiment, and has not been launched with commercialisation in mind. "We are just doing it bit by bit, we're not putting the whole thing up at once. We're just illustrating how it might look," he says. "It will grow to some extent according to public demand and interest - we're interested in how people react to it, whether they like it, whether they think it's a bit too much of a gimmick, or whether, in fact, it's something that enhances their experience. "What we've tried to do is essentially divide the documentary, which is something of a travelogue around South Africa, highlight the key points and overlay some information, so you have video and mapping and everything working together. You can essentially choose whether you want to watch it in a linear way and just let the map do its own thing, or whether you want to interrupt it and browse the map, see what's nearby and look at some of the other information on display." While the project is still in its infancy - Mills says the partners only began work on it about four weeks ago - Skyworks has already had initial conversations with broadcasters about applying the technology to future TV docs. "We're in the very early stages," he says. "We are having some conversations, we've opened some very tentative discussions with the BBC, based on what we're doing for the World Cup, but this has literally just been invented. "The way people use the internet these days is very much about multi-tasking. That's why we believe that this could transform certain types of documentaries in a variety of different ways. I'm not sure quite how that will be in the short-term - this is really only just starting." Adam Benzine 18 Jun 2010 © C21 Media 2010 
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