The Whale Hunt

Jonathan Harris is a person who is interested in storytelling. In his project “The Whale Hunt”, he captures the story of an epic hunt by Eskimos who live in the northernmost village in Alaska. The Eskimos would set up camp right along the edges of the pack ice so that as a bowhead whale swam by, they could harpoon it.

To capture this story, Jonathan used a camera that took a number of photographs per five minutes. The number of photographs taken was dependant on how ‘intense’ the situation was. For example, the camera took very few photographs when Jonathan was asleep on an airplane but took many when the hunt was underway.

Jonathan’s real project was displaying this story to the public in a form that is easy view. Thewhalehunt.org interface was created for just this purpose, and it allows anyone to view the whale hunt in a variety of ways. The website contains over 3,000 photos and can be accessed by using 3 different means: a mosaic, a timeline or a pinwheel. The mosaic format is essentially every photograph taken laid out in front of you. The timeline displays the photographs as tiny boxes placed in chronological order from left to right. Each column represents photographs taken over a 30 minute time span, so if one column is high, many photographs were taken. This is a great way to find out which sections of the story are exciting and which are dull. Finally, the pinwheel allows you to view the pictures in a similar way as the timeline but each column represents 20 minutes rather than 30.

The website doesn’t stop there however. You can further customize your searching by using the “constraints” icons on the interface. These allow you to select very particular elements of the story: cast, concept, context, and cadence. Cast allows you to view scenes with particular people you have chosen, concept allows you to search for certain elements of the story such as blood or tools, context limits the photos to a location, and cadence allows you to choose parts of the story based on excitement.

When you start the interface and view the pictures it runs as a sort of slideshow. At the bottom you can see the “heartbeat timeline” which shows you where you are in the collection of photos and how intense the action is. There are also two buttons which allow you to manually select to advance or go back in the series of photos.

I really enjoyed this interface and found it very easy to use. I thought the concept of adding an excitement feature was interesting and allowed me to view these ‘intense’ parts, although I viewed the less intense parts as well. I also liked the immersion I felt from the camera-shutter-like approach to the photography, I really had a sense of their surroundings and the action as it unfolded.