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Episode #96: Neil Halloran
186 Plays7 years ago
Neil Halloran is one of those people who, in my mind, is pushing the data visualization field in different directions. In his two data-driven documentaries, The Fallen and The Shadow Peace, Neil uses different ways of showing data to convey...
The post Episode #96: Neil Halloran appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish.
Exploring 'The Shadow Piece'
00:00:15
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into this week's episode because this week, I'm very excited to be chatting with Neil Halloran, who is a documentary filmmaker, a date of his artists, a date of his extraordinaire, has done a number of fantastic pieces, which I'm sure you've seen the fallen from.
00:00:30
Speaker
a couple years ago and his new piece, The Shadow Piece, which is going to be a multi-part data documentary, really interesting and I'm excited to talk to him about all the pieces that go into creating these films.
Neil's Background and Passion for Documentaries
00:00:43
Speaker
So, Neil, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. How are things going? Things are going well. You know, having just launched that Shadow Piece one after two years, I'm just
00:00:54
Speaker
kind of in a daze. Right. I'm getting getting my myself together and thinking about what's next. So I bet, I bet. And this is going to be a multi part film series, right?
Storytelling with Data in 'The Fallen'
00:01:04
Speaker
That's right. And I don't even I don't even know how many parts it's going to be, but it will be multi part. There's a lot that I worked on earlier that I figured I'd want to kind of push out into later episodes. So I know what the next part is, but it gets foggier as it goes on exactly what's going to come next.
00:01:19
Speaker
Well, the piece is really cool and the fall and also is really cool and I want to talk about those in some detail. But maybe we can start by having you talk a little bit about your background and why these documentary films are the way in which you like to talk about data and visualize data.
Data-Driven Cinematic Storytelling
00:01:38
Speaker
All right, so I guess as for background, since college, I've been doing kind of a night job day job thing where the day job has been a web business that my brother and I run together. And then I've been trying to create documentaries for years. And really, the first one that I ever finished was the fall of World War Two. I spent years working on one about
00:02:03
Speaker
the gotten kind of the ethics of drones and airstrikes that I just couldn't finish. It was going to be a full featured one. But with the fallen, I kind of got pulled into World War II having gotten into the bombing of World War II. And I wanted to try to tell the story of this war that has been covered in so many different ways.
00:02:23
Speaker
but with a numbers first, data first
Peace-Building and Data in Storytelling
00:02:26
Speaker
way. But I definitely am interested in using data to tell very emotional and kind of cinematic stories and with using full musical score and all that to kind of really give as much drama as possible to
00:02:42
Speaker
to, in this case, numbers that really warrant the drama, especially when you're talking about huge quantities of human loss. So that's why I got into doing that piece. And then I just want to just keep going with it and also try to tell optimistic stories about some of the progress that's being made. And that's partly where the shadow piece kind of gets more into that as it goes to try to figure out what factors are determining or maybe seem to determine
Comparing Films and Data Visualizations
00:03:11
Speaker
or
00:03:11
Speaker
The numbers hint that they determine more peaceful outcomes, so we can perhaps learn from that and try not to repeat mistakes and kind of keep moving in this direction, or at least the parts of the direction that are working.
00:03:27
Speaker
Right. When you think about creating a film like this, how do you think about reaching an audience to the film versus reaching an audience through a, you know, a static graph, not quite, but like a series of interactive graphs, graphics or a data tool or something that you might see on, you know, the Guardian or the Post or the New York Times? I mean, how do you think about communicating that information to
Emotion Through Data vs. Stories
00:03:51
Speaker
an audience? And how does it differ in the format that you're using? Well, so I definitely
00:03:57
Speaker
strive to create emotional experiences, right? And emotional experiences where the source of your emotion is something that's quantitative, a statistic versus the story of an individual. And that's kind of a trick, right? Because generally speaking, the best way of invoking emotion is to use empathy, try to see the world through someone else's eyes,
00:04:26
Speaker
and kind of feel what they would that person would feel. And so creating emotion for a mass of people or a huge quantity of victims is something that
00:04:38
Speaker
Is that something I think is really important to me to try to figure out how to do? I think it's an important thing for us as data driven storytellers to figure out how to do. I think without using emotion, I think it's very hard to compete with either the news or other forms of media that kind of takes advantage of emotional stories and kind of oftentimes lets these kind of
00:05:00
Speaker
be it the red meat kind of stories or very politically charged stories, people who are using to kind of really use emotion and fear, let them steal all the airwaves and the internet traffic. So I think that it's so important to be able to harness emotion for telling stories with underlying truth and connect emotion to true numbers and kind of scientific thinking. I think it's an important thing for us to figure out how to do well.
00:05:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's really
Non-Individual Narratives and Emotion
00:05:28
Speaker
interesting. You talk about empathy and emotion because a lot of times when people think about those sorts of emotions and connecting it with data, it's we're going to have a visualization, we're going to have a graphic or a series of graphics, but we're also going to talk to people and we're going to get their individual stories. And so you get that individual component to it. And I think you sort of have some different strategies. I think one of the strategies that you use in both pieces is
00:05:52
Speaker
this vertical sort of scroll, I guess, if you will, or a pan where you sort of see this long trail of bars and the new one of cubes. So can you talk a little bit about the strategies that you use to try to get that emotion and try to make those big numbers something that really shocks the viewer and gets them to care even more? Yeah, sure.
00:06:17
Speaker
I think that, as you say, using kind of individual stories for the source of emotion is an extremely important thing for us to continue to do. And I don't want to belittle the importance of telling those kind of stories. I just think that I would encourage folks who want to work with data to not necessarily feel like that's the road you have to go down to find the emotion, right? So there are just so many different kinds of emotions that we feel.
00:06:45
Speaker
if you just think about all the different kinds of music that you listen to and all the different kinds of emotions that you feel. And it doesn't necessarily always have to be individual empathy. And so I think that when it comes to human loss, if you think about, you know, certain really powerful war photographs, sometimes you can look at a tragic image
00:07:09
Speaker
And part of it is feeling empathy for that character, but sometimes you also just at the spectacle of loss and at seeing loss, it can hit you, right?
Simplicity in Charts for Wider Appeal
00:07:17
Speaker
And so I think that thinking about emotion as lots of different kinds of emotion to work with, rather than always going towards the individual story, I think is an important thing to try to do. And so in the case of panning the camera across a huge amount of growing bars, in that way, you're trying to make these big numbers
00:07:39
Speaker
feel bigger and you can never possibly connect with a thousand lives in an individual truly empathetic way but you can feel the loss through other types of emotions that can be powerful even if they're not seeing the world through somebody's eyes.
00:08:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting the way you frame it and you're also adding in this drama to your documentaries and the emotion comes through from the narration and from the music that sits behind it. I just think it's really interesting the way you try to pull that emotional aspect in by using bar charts and using, you know, unit charts, essentially.
Balancing Detail and Drama
00:08:24
Speaker
most of the charts the data visualizations themselves are fairly simple. Do you have a conscious thought process you go through of like I can make this really complicated I could show all these connections. Like I think the nuclear one is a good example where you could show all these connections between countries and between warheads and all this but at its root it ends up being a fairly simple set of visualizations but you get the emotion through the film itself and through the music and through the narration on top of it. Yeah, I am generally drawn towards
00:08:54
Speaker
more simple charts in some ways because thinking about trying to appeal to wide audiences who aren't as well versed in looking at charts and seeing. And so if you are going to show a chart which is more complicated, you often need to take the time to explain it to the audience. And that can, you know, it's hard to carry this kind of emotional drama. So in the case of, say, the new one, the nuclear
00:09:24
Speaker
War piece that it opens with this that the main chart which will be used throughout the series is this It's basically a timeline of deaths. So how many people died per year? And then there's also the population pyramid of people who are alive and in that case That required some explanation right because the I think this is looking at it kind of understanding that this is deaths per year going down Even in that case, I think it's worth spending the time Like if a chart that's static has a little key
Familiar Comparisons in Visual Storytelling
00:09:52
Speaker
To explain it to the audience and you know, the hope is how do you make explaining it in itself? Interesting, right? So in the fall in World War two each unit represented a thousand people. Okay, I want to explain that But how can how can the key itself be dramatic and interesting? So using a sphere of these figures all different types of people, you know different silhouettes of Old and young and men and women the kind of in a sphere to say okay. Here's the here I'm explaining the model of this chart and
00:10:22
Speaker
I'm basically doing the key now of a static chart, but maybe that too can also have some cinematic drama. So generally speaking, the more complicated the chart, the more you're asking from the audience in terms of how much they have to kind of orient themselves around
00:10:37
Speaker
what it is you're showing. And so that just kind of leads me to try to show things that are more simple and unit charts are nice too because you know in addition to kind of you can create other kind of charts with them right so you can create a unit chart and a bar chart together and then you can do this cool thing where you
00:10:53
Speaker
rearrange them, right? And so I'm a big, you know, it's a big thing happens a lot of these, these films, there's a lot of rearranging of units. And then I'm pulled towards that because it looks cool to see something rearranged. And so you have this kind of, you know, hopefully, really interesting to look at eye candy, if you will. But it also seeing
00:11:11
Speaker
a chart rearrange to another, it does also visually show you the relationship between the two, right? And so a rearranging is something that kind of kills two birds with one stone where it's cool to look at, but it also does, it's not empty eye candy. It is communicating a relationship between two charts.
00:11:29
Speaker
You know, the other thing that's interesting is the way you do those comparisons. And I like the way they animate or more for transition, I guess the best word from one graph type to another graph type. But what I noticed that what you don't do is try to make comparisons to other things, like take x 1000 units and say this is you know, it's like putting this many dollars in a box or something like that, right?
00:11:54
Speaker
A good example is what we've seen from a lot of news coverage after Hurricane Harvey is like, this is how much water we're talking about came down from the hurricane. It's a cube this big, or it's a sphere this big. And I noticed that in your films, you don't have those types of comparisons.
00:12:12
Speaker
So does a documentary give you freedom in some ways to do these transitions between graph types that doesn't force you to try to make these other comparisons, these I don't call I wouldn't call them necessarily goofy, but they're sort of different comparisons are like taking
00:12:29
Speaker
this metric and putting it in some other form. And sometimes
Conveying Human Life Through Data
00:12:34
Speaker
I think people try to do that. So it's something familiar with that we're familiar with, like the stack of dollar bills from here to the moon and back, which, you know, I don't know what that means, really. But I just noticed that you're not doing that in your films. And I wonder if you've if you've made a conscious decision not to try to make those comparisons and instead do what I see more of, which is sort of the morphing and the panning and the zooming.
00:12:57
Speaker
I guess I'm not against doing some of those comparisons. It's funny that in the case of the Houston example, I tweeted that cube of water. And then afterwards, I deleted it because I realized that it kind of is a little misleading. It actually is showing the amount of water over not just the Houston area but all of southeast Texas. But by showing it as above the Houston area,
00:13:21
Speaker
it almost miscommunicates what that water would look like, you know, distributed over all of Southeast Texas. So a lot of times that kind of happens when, you know, I think the underlying problem is you have something you want to show and you want to dramatize, you know, what that weighs, you know, what could give some kind of a meaning to these figures. And so a lot of times I'm totally game for anything you can think of to give more meaning to numbers. It's just that oftentimes
00:13:50
Speaker
you know, there's a cost sometimes to doing these various tricks because it, you know, either you have a problem where you're replacing one thing, it's kind of meaningless, but another thing that you can is also kind of meaningless. But yeah, so that's oftentimes the game. I think when you're talking about human life, first accepting that you will never be able to really represent what a single life is, let alone
00:14:17
Speaker
1000 or
Tools and Collaboration in Filmmaking
00:14:18
Speaker
a million. So I think that you kind of playing these games where at one end, you are trying to kind of show relative scale. But at the same time, you're kind of have to surrender to the fact that you're never really going to have that connection. That's not something you can always strive to do. But it is kind of a game and it's not I don't there isn't a necessarily underlying truth behind making some of these comparisons because it's already so far from
00:14:45
Speaker
a connection to the real truth of human life. But a lot of times, I admit, I do something to create an emotional impact because that will resonate with folks. People are drawn to emotional stories and more likely to share them. And you're more likely to remember emotional stories. So a lot of times I am doing something to create an emotional impact, not suggesting that there's always a connection between how you feel and the underlying truth.
00:15:14
Speaker
So in the case of these various comparisons, I'm not against doing things that create more feeling of impact, even if there is sometimes problems between the actual reality, reality, and how they feel. Yeah. That's a great point, because I think a lot of those comparisons are
00:15:33
Speaker
billions of dollars or inches of rainfall and you can sort of play around and it doesn't have the same impact when you're talking about live loss, which I think is the topic that you're focused on. So that makes sense to me.
00:15:47
Speaker
So I want to ask about the process that you go through when you make these films, both in the terms of the tools that you use to create the film, but also as you go through, are you running things by? Do you have other people that you bounce ideas off of? Because I could imagine when you're dealing with these serious issues of human life and nuclear disaster that
00:16:12
Speaker
you can run a risk of offending someone or putting something in that, you know, may not ring true or may sort of, you know, make things seem a little more trivial than than they really are. So can you talk a little bit about about that process of both creation and the tools that you use, but also how you go through the entire creation process and using other people sounding boards?
Respectful Representation and Emotional Engagement
00:16:35
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, I think that that point about not offending folks is something that I am
00:16:41
Speaker
like constant fear of, to be honest. And so especially, I mean, I think you're when you're taking something which is as sensitive as human life, and then you're adding, you're adding, you know, a musical score to it. And then even you're adding, you know, cool looking computer graphics, I'm often feeling like what I'm doing, in its very essence is distasteful, right. And so
00:17:02
Speaker
And I struggle with that a lot. And so, especially when I'm working with Andy, my composer does the music and the sound, you know, the poor guy, he's always like sending me a sound and I'm like, Oh God, shoot, someone will hear that. It doesn't sound right. It's going to seem like you're not being respectful enough. Like it's too graphic or it's too this and that. It's so subjective. So sometimes something I think will sound like it's not being sensitive enough. But then if you have something ahead of that,
00:17:29
Speaker
suddenly doesn't sound as bad afterwards. And so it's very difficult when you're dealing with questions of taste and an emotion and all these really sensitive issues to come up with any kind of set of rules or to know how to navigate this. And so it's something I'm just always worried about. And so it's a matter of a
00:17:50
Speaker
when you come upon something fresh. So a lot of times you're in the moment and you don't realize how bad something is until you give it two nights sleep and then you see the game, like, oh God, what was I thinking? Or as you're saying, like showing it to other people and trying to get some feedback, I'm always begging folks for feedback. And the problem is that kind of feedback that you're talking about is often the hardest feedback for people to give, you know? So it's something that I'm constantly worried about.
00:18:19
Speaker
And so I don't have I don't have a good answer for how do you avoid doing things that are not quite tasteful because it's so important yet so hard to to define in any kind of, you know, set of set of real rules.
Seriousness in Data Narration
00:18:37
Speaker
But if you totally avoid the topic, so if you say, OK, I'm not even going to get into this and I'm not going to I'm not going to add a musical score or drama to something this serious, I'm just going to keep things really dry.
00:18:49
Speaker
That also has problems too, because then you could say a chart of World War II deaths that's nice and clean and minimalistic, you could look at that and say, well, that's not conveying the weight of what this represents enough. And so it is hard to kind of weigh those two things, like the very dry representation versus the more heavy and emotional one.
00:19:16
Speaker
That's a really interesting point. That you can make the static graph, if you will, of depths, but is that in some ways also not reflecting the seriousness of the topic? And then you're adding narration, and if you're adding narration and music on top of it, you know, do you swing too far back the other way?
Breaking Norms in Data Visualization
00:19:35
Speaker
I can see how that would be a constant concern.
00:19:39
Speaker
The other question I wanted to ask was why I called you up in the first place, was our Twitter spat on 3D. Now I know you use 3D in the films, but I suspect it's for a different reason than why a lot of us yell at people who are using 3D in their static charts.
00:19:59
Speaker
I mean, you've already mentioned some of your data viz approaches. But can you talk a little bit about breaking some of the rules that a lot of people say, here are the rules about data viz. You can't break any of these. But you do break some of them, and yet they work. And I think because you're in a different medium. Yeah. And again, I want to say that a lot of this trolling I was doing to you on terms of 3D charts was ingested. And I think that advice that you give to folks to avoid
00:20:27
Speaker
using 3D is really good advice. And especially because, again, if you're adding eye candy for the sake of making it look cool without anything behind it, or sometimes, you know, you can go and always examples of when 3D actually kind of obscures what it is you're looking at. And I should also say that in the case of, say, the nuclear war, the new piece, it's in 3D, but then it's pretty quick to then flatten out those cubes. So now it becomes a 2D chart, because
00:20:55
Speaker
3D is just not, so it's good advice to avoid doing that. So in the case of breaking those rules, in part, it's to
00:21:05
Speaker
as I said, big things feel bigger, which is something I'm often trying to do in part is to kind of create this cinematic drama that I'm oftentimes trying to do. But always being wary of the dangers when you start breaking these rules, because you don't want that to get in the way of the underlying information that you're trying to convey. You don't want to make things harder to understand. So yes, if you're going to break rules, just always be conscious that
00:21:34
Speaker
As long as there's something on your shoulder telling you don't do this, then at least you're aware of the problem you could be getting into as you do it.
Funding and Future Aspirations
00:21:42
Speaker
But if it does serve a purpose that is beyond just the eye candy factor, then I say at times, give it a shot and see what happens. Yeah. Before we go, can you talk about what you're thinking about and what you hope your schedule might be for the next set of these?
00:22:00
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of that depends on time and resources. And it's just a hard, I'm just continue to struggle to figure out how to do this. So I'm going to be kind of bound and trying to do a little bit of client work in addition to my own work. And I'm trying various, you know, fundraising tactics from
00:22:20
Speaker
from Patreon campaigns to allowing people to optionally purchase a viewing ticket, all this really tacky, tacky stuff. But it is just kind of me trying to figure out how can I remain independent and do these products I'm so passionate about, but also kind of figure out economically how to make it work. So it really depends on that. So I would like to just go straight into the next one and have a schedule where I can produce them
Conclusion and Support Appeal
00:22:48
Speaker
once a year is kind of a good goal to have a new one every year. They do take a long time no matter how you slice it or how many resources I have. And it can stretch out past that depending on how much time I can devote to them. Right, right. Well, I think they're both great, the fallen and the shadow piece. And I hope folks will support them both. So, Neil, thanks for coming on the show. It's been really interesting. Thank you so much for having me. This is exciting.
00:23:17
Speaker
And thanks to everyone for tuning in. Please make sure you check out Neil's pieces, The Fallen, The Shadow Piece. Please support him. He has a Patreon page where he's looking for support, so please go out and do that. And I'll put a bunch of links that we talked about in the show on the show notes page.
00:23:32
Speaker
If you'd like to support the PolicyViz podcast, please rate the show and review the show on your favorite podcast provider. I now have t-shirts on sale on the PolicyViz website. So if you'd like to help support the show to support all the great guests that I have and coming up.
00:23:48
Speaker
There's sound editing to take care of. There's web support. There's all sorts of things, so any support is appreciated. So I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Please do watch the show. Please do reach out with questions or comments or suggestions. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.