Announcement:
Award Winning Documentary Filmmaker and Tisch UGFTV, Marco Williams, seeks a web designer to collaborate on the creation of an interactive website. The website is conceived as home to several companion elements to Marco’s latest documentary, The Undocumented.
This is a professional opportunity. Designer will be compensated commensurate with job requirements, experience and expertise. Designer will be expected to 1) collaborate on the conceptualization of the website but also 2) to either create the actual website or manage those that create the site.
Marco is looking for someone to start immediately. Please send resumes and references to Marco.Williams@nyu.edu.
Synopsis of film:
The Undocumented is a ninety-minute cinema verite documentary that exposes a little known consequence of United States immigration policy. Since 1998 more than 2000 dead bodies and skeletal remains of illegal border crossers have been found in the desert in southern Arizona.
The film tells the story of Marcos Hernandez an undocumented Mexican living and working in Chicago. Marcos came to the United States, crossing through the Sonora Desert in southern Arizona. Each month he sends money to his mother in Mexico City, for medicine for his brother, Gustavo. Gustavo needs a kidney transplant.
But Marcos’ has another reason for coming to the United States, an even more pressing reason. He came to search for his father Francisco who disappeared in the Sonora Desert trying to enter into the United States undocumented. Marcos’ search for his father forms the narrative thread for the film. Chronicled over the course of Arizona’s deadly summer months, the film weaves Marcos’ search for his father with the efforts of humanitarians and Border Patrol agents who fight to prevent migrant deaths, medical investigators and the Mexican Consulate who work to identify dead border crossers, and Mexicans who struggle to accept the loss of a family member.
The film’s aesthetic is cinema verite. Unlike other documentaries, the film does not engage in a passive dialogue. The film’s characters don’t talk about migrant deaths. They are immersed in it. They patrol the desert. They rescue migrants from the brink of death. They discover migrant bones picked apart by wild animals. They wheel body after body in and out of are refrigerated storage room. They express their distress over the loss of a missing family member. And when the film arrives at the home of a migrant family in Mexico, that family is captured at the very apex of their grief, the arrival home of the coffin.
Interactive Website:
TheUndocumented.com acts as a point of entry into a multi-platform, informational hub that aggregates knowledge and resources related to both Marco Williams’ film The Undocumented as well as the larger issues of migrant deaths and U.S. immigration policy.
The end goal is to create an educational/informational nexus, in which the film’s website delivers, through interactive elements, a wide variety of embedded information and educational assets while simultaneously promoting the documentary and providing a gateway to related organizations’ websites and resources. The concept is to aggregate the prospective audiences for The Undocumented.
The central portal for this transmedia endeavor is a website– TheUndocumented.com — which is still under construction. When completed, the site will be home to the following interactive media platforms:
1) The Map of The Undocumented, an interactive map that highlights the over two thousand recovered human remains found in the Sonora Desert in southern Arizona;
2) The Migrant Trail, an on-line video game that targets youth ages 13-25;
3) The Chronicle of The Undocumented, which is a web series culled from the material not used in the actual documentary.
The Map of The Undocumented map will consist of red dots that will denote the place that remains were found by year, by gender when possible, and with GPS coordinates. A select number when ‘clicked’ will provide additional information, specifically personal artifacts found with the body.
The Migrant Trail is an online game, inspired by the classic educational video game “The Oregon Trail”. The Migrant Trail highlights the reality of the dangers facing desert border crossers and Border Patrol agents. Players assume the role of either an undocumented immigrant or a United States Border Patrol agent and face numerous physical, environmental, and criminal obstacles as they navigate the US/Mexico border.
The Migrant Trail is specifically designed for educators to reach youth audiences and inform their understanding of immigration and border issues. The game merges entertaining ‘game-play’ with meaningful education and when combined with the accompanying website’s educational resources, educators (and community groups) can incorporate the game, film, and website into a comprehensive curriculum.
The Chronicle of The Undocumented web-series will consist of scenes that will provide a chronological story but will also invite viewers to watch in categories– the desert, Mexico, Mexican Consulate, and the Medical Examiner. The ultimate wish is for users to construct their own documentaries from the material.
Integration of Multiplatform Elements:
All of the above elements will be interconnected. Watching a scene from web series will have a hot link to a coordinate in the map and vice versa. Playing the game might lead to a map point or an episode in the web series. The goal: to engage audiences via the portal that interests them, and in so doing invite them to explore, to interact with other medial platforms.
An all-inclusive educational/study guide, in pdf form, can be downloaded directly from the game/film website. Developed in conjunction with outreach partners Active- Voice and Facing History, the guide will contain lesson plans for secondary and university classrooms, templates for guided conversations, and background historical information on US/Mexico immigration and border policy.
There will be other support materials on the site related to the entire immigration narrative, including how to write a congressperson, death tolls, resources about immigration, and more. Social media will be a linchpin of the site. Facebook, twitter et al will provide added portals for engagement and to broaden the audience and the conversation.
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Marco Williams
marco.williams@nyu.edu
Associate Arts Professor
Undergraduate Department of Film and Television
