Bear 71 is a real female grizzly bear, which was tracked by Canadian wildlife conservation officers from 2001 to 2009. Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison have taken the tracking data and images from motion sensor cameras around the bear’s habitat, and fashioned them into this documentary. How to curate a webdoc and design a journey through it with regard to rhythm and pacing is a question that’s been holding my attention recently, which makes it neat that Bear 71 has appeared now with an excellent demonstration of this.

Where a lot of webdocs dump a range of content onto an interface and hope the viewer will spend more than five minutes poking around, Bear 71 guides the journey with an overarching narrative. Right up front, there’s a notice informing the viewer that the documentary will take twenty minutes. A voice over, in fact Bear 71 ‘herself’, begins explaining the situation while the viewer watches a short video of her capture and tagging. The viewer, along with the bear, is then ‘released’ into the wild - able to roam the same restricted habitat and explore the sparely designed landscape. Clicking on roaming animals or fixed motion sensor cameras will bring up another window with video or stills and text information.

This exploration, though, is underpinned by ongoing narration by Bear 71, and occasionally accompanying videos also interrupt the visual landscape when an important part of the story is reached. These interruptions, as well as the habitat boundaries that the viewer reaches occasionally, reflect the constrained existence of Bear 71. Bigger ideas of surveillance, humans’ relationship with nature, and the impact of technology and development on the wild are teased out in the narrative, and as the bear is surveilled so can the viewer choose to be - by turning on your webcam you can watch yourself and your own data projected onto the map you roam. However, I couldn’t quite bring myself to try this option - clicking ‘yes’ to ‘you may be recorded’ is a bit beyond my trusting capabilities of any website, so I watched a data-less human roam after the bear instead. To begin with, it can be somewhat distracting reading information on screen while trying to listen to the story, but this becomes easier and I quickly fell into a rhythm of roaming, clicking, watching, then waiting for one of the several pauses in narration before reading.

Every single part of Bear 71 - the design, flow, rhythm, and content for example - is absolutely relevant to the story and the bigger ideas at stake. The viewer stays within the story bubble the whole way, even while being able to roam seemingly at will. This, I think is what makes Bear 71 stand out above a lot of webdocs being produced. There’s a recognisable journey to take, with a beginning and an end, yet the viewer can interact and feel a part of the world within the screen. As an aside, the music and sound design are also inspired, linking in with key moments in the documentary beautifully. Bear 71 is an excellent, tightly designed short webdoc - no more and no less.