Gaza Sderot is one of my first personal encounters with an interactive non-linear documentary. The user experience is very exciting for me. I like the interface of the film because it denotes the physical divide between the cities of Gaza and Sderot, and helps place me in an appropriate mind-frame to consume and process the content which is to come.

The clips are quite visually pleasing tome, as they give an insight into two cultures through the personal lens of the residents. The film shows footage of their daily livelihood, intercut with interviews and music. I find that this makes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict very personal and emotive.

One of the first things I noticed was that when one city’s clip finishes playing, the remaining city’s clip autoplays. I still am unsure how to think about this function, as Seth pointed out in our labs that autoplay can be very counterproductive in an interactive piece as it reduces the audience’s physical participation. However, in this instance, it also helps give the artefact a sense of flow and rhythm (which, in my opinion, ends up being one of the positives of the piece).

The short two-minute clips hold your attention for just the right amount of time. Viewers are given the opportunity to continue the story by character, date or city. There is also an option to browse clips by ‘topic’ which is like a thematic tag cloud of various keywords.

I read on SBS that the producers of Gaza Sderot created a television documentary from the videos afterwards, but it was not as well received as a linear version didn’t have the same impact. They quote, “it’s great to see online work that really uses the uniqueness of the medium to tell what can feel like an old story in new ways.”

I think it is great that this type of documentary is archived online and remains here into the future. As the world evolves around us, perhaps one day this will be looked back upon as a very sensitive look into the tenuous times in Israel and Palestine. Because it is immortalised online, we are able to continue interacting with, commenting on, and sharing the footage. For me, this harks back to the point mentioned in the first week of IM1, that interactive documentaries are designed to be grazed on. I think I will enjoy revisiting this work in the future and gaining a different experience from it each time.