During the course of the year I’ve been developing Stage 2 of the project. I’ve been experimenting with combining the videos that you can see in the gallery with social media content — images from Flickr ( Creative Commons licensed) and live comments from twitter. I’m working with a version of the open-source Popcorn Maker authoring tool that’s been customised for me. This is what my authoring environment look like.

Working with a simple timeline, I define moments to call up flickr images as this screen grab shows. The challenge is that now we have created a customised interface I can’t immediately see what will result from these combinations. To do that I deliver a script to the developer and he has to code that script onto the interface he has made me. It’s rather a primitive working method, and  it’s meant that things have moved slower than I’d hoped. But it’s proving interesting to be experimenting in a very new territory.

Before the advent of HTML5 — the latest version of the web coding language — video sat on the web in a player separate from other web data. It was  rather like a TV screen in the corner that isn’t hooked up to the broadband. In HTML5 video in now encoded into the page — so you can make links between a point on a video timeline or a place within a frame in the same way that a hyperlink allows a connection between a word and another place on the web.

Web video can then now be ‘mashed-up’ with other web content. My project looks at how I can use flickr and twitter content as documentary material, and how I can effectively combine that live content with video in a new kind of montage. There are lots of challenges. How do you need to frame things to be sure that the content that appears tomorrow or next year will continue to make sense? How do you work with or around the random and X-rated elements that are bound to appear. (Re random, I’m thinking I can signpost the search terms I am using. Re X-rated; I might just have to give a warning. )

You can see in this still of Mongolia footage how montage here is a spatial rather than a temporal device. The montage is also live rather than fixed. At the same time I’m trying to figure out how to edit the original videos leaving space so that they will make sense once combined with these others elements. There is a lot going on, and it’s tricky to hold the different aspects in mind simultaneously.

In a way the method, though painstaking, seems apt. As I experiment with the basic building blocks of cinema, I’m reminded of an earlier era of film-making — when you had to draw visual effects onto film with a chinagraph pen, and then wait to see what they would look like when they came back from being developed at the lab. I’m hoping the results, once I get there, will be fruitful.

Meanwhile, I would like to note my apologies to the film-makers who have sent me material for the long wait. I do hope they will feel it was worth it.

The Popcorn Maker I’m going to work with in stage two of the project is now live. This wonderful tool, developed by Mozilla, “makes authoring interactive media pages as easy as point and click.”

I’ve been trying out combining the video sequences with other feeds. The tool makes Flickr, Wikipedia, Twitter available as well an enabling you to add annotation and subtitling. It’s fascinating working with it, being able so readily to juxtapose the video with other content on the page.  I’ll post some content soon.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to report that The Are you happy? Project is included as work-in-progress in the Jean Rouch International Film Festival in Paris.

In the last two weeks I’ve been filming in Cardiff — the footage will be posted very soon — and I’ve heard from potential collaborators in India, Serbia, Zimbabwe, Columbia, Romania, Tasmania, and in various UK and US locations. It’s going to be so interesting to see how these sequences compare.

High on my agenda is finding someone who can shoot in Paris, where the Rouch and Morin film was made, perhaps in the same streets where Marceline Loridan and Nadine Baillot did their street interviews in 1960.  If you have any contacts there who might be interested, please do get in touch.

Very interesting to come across Inquiring Nuns — a 1968 film by the US production company Kartemquin — who are still going strong — in which two young nuns ask people on the streets of Chicago are you happy?

The title seems to sum the film up well as the nuns gentle but insistent probing turn these street interviews into a philosophical inquiry that is also very revealing about the USA of its time. I hope we can bring that kind of seriousness to interviews we are doing for this project.  I wonder what type of person might work as an effective interviewer today. Any thoughts?

As we launch our call for contributions little did I imagine that the question; “are you happy?” might suddenly be topical, as it has become with David Cameron announcing plans to include happiness in measures of national well-being.

This isn’t a new idea — the former King of Bhutan introduced a concept of “gross national happiness” way back in 1972, and the idea of measuring national well-being beyond the economic has risen up the political agenda in Western democracies in the last few years. Cameron’s initiative has split commentators  – between those who see it as a cynical move to distract from the harsh realities of Coalition government cuts, and others who don’t question the idea itself but wonder how the Government will manage to negotiate the issues of inequality that are at the heart of this territory.

So the question is both a perennial one and very much of the moment. What do you think? Are you happy? Please take a few minutes to answer. Try and be true to your experience. We’re very interested to hear what you have to say.