Adam Westbrook brings the digital age to life

The notion of 'educational videos' for most of us conjures memories of unconvincing electrons spinning listlessly around a clump of protons and neutrons, or else a bearded narrator imparting some narrow field of canonical history to us through crackly speakers. Thankfully a new bout of filmmaking seems set to re-ignite the sparks idling between our brains’ neurons by making learning fun again, with  Adam Westbrook appearing near the helm.

His ‘Delve’ video project, which digs up often-overlooked and always interesting stories from history to shed light on our modern world has become a regular feature on Vimeo’s Staff Picks and, still in it’s infancy, seems set to expand. Approaching a wide range of history and culture from a slightly different angle he shows us that Da Vinci was actually a bit of a "loser," Kaiser Wilhelm II was obsessed with boats and we can thank the often forgotten genius of Claude Shannon for much of the information age (below). 

We had so much fun watching these pieces and his similar clips featured on Instagram (then trawling Wikipedia on the back of them) that we decided to catch up with Adam to see where Delve began and how he puts his quirky ‘video essays’ together.   

You can see Adam's work and other unsigned directors on our Scout page.



I get the feeling this video series is a passion project as well as being educational, where did it start from and how long has it been in the making?

Delve is very much a passion project, but it has taken a while for me to turn it into something real. I first came up with an idea for a new kind of history video back in 2008, but it's taken six years to figure how to make it work! The project as it looks now started about a year ago, and grew from a very personal realisation that I wasn't reading enough books. It struck me that I could use a video project to force me to read more and to do it with purpose.

I believe passionately that we all need to take our education, our enlightenment, seriously in order to overcome the challenges ahead of us. I also believe that good storytelling is a really powerful way to engage people with complex ideas, and my vision with delve is to combine those things and set sparks flying in peoples' minds.

Although the films fall into the “education” category, they are not really explainers or tutorials. Instead I try and set up a mystery and make the subject fascinating so that people feel compelled to delve deeper into the subject. I hope each video is the start of a learning journey, rather than the end.



How do you come across your subject matter and what makes you keep or discard an idea?

One of the missions of delve is to make complex ideas fascinating, by wrapping them inside a really good story. So I am always looking for complicated topics, the sort of things that most of us dismiss as boring. I am also attracted to unexpected or surprising ideas: if I get a rush of enlightenment when I discover something new, I really want to share that feeling with others. Once I start work on the story design some ideas don't stand up to the process and I need to scrap them. But most importantly, I only pursue stories that say something important about ourselves and our lives today; that's what the past, and storytelling, is there to do.  

Were you already familiar with Claude Shannon and his work beforehand?

I only discovered Claude Shannon very recently and completely by accident in a book I found tucked away on a library shelf. Once I understood Information Theory, I knew straight away that I wanted to translate this concept visually on the web.  It was a complex idea that is directly relevant to our lives today, so it had the right ingredients to make a delve video essay.



Considering how much we all rely on the digital world for everything from lifestyle to work, do you think of this man as the origin of our contemporary world to some extent?

Shannon was only building on the work of several other mathematicians before him, including George Boole, Gottfried Liebnitz and Harry Nyquist. They provided a lot of the raw research, but it took Shannon's left-field approach to connect the dots with data communication. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say his work has a far greater impact on our day-to-day lives than Einstein's theories, and yet strangely Shannon is practically unheard of.

Your other video essays look at obscure parts of history, or the forgotten sides of famous figures, that are largely overlooked – do you like to present history with a twist?

I think understanding our past is extremely important as our world gets ever more complicated. There's the old line that those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it; that is true, but history also helps us in other ways. It can inspire us, it can give us hope, it can show us how to live today, and yes, it can also warn us. But the learning of history, in school and on television needs a big shake-up. It is too focused on big men with big guns, dates, battles, armies and conquests. The real lesson of history is that it is all just the story of human beings like us, and how they responded in difficult situations. I don't necessarily look for history with a twist, but I do search for the human story which is often overlooked by the grand narratives.



On that note, are you hoping that Shannon is overdue a revival?

I'd love to see him get wider appreciation; I'd also love to see more people getting to experience the wonderful revelation of understanding how our information age is powered by such a simple concept.

How do you approach the design and layout of your films?

The most time in the process is spent on designing the narrative: working out the best arrangement of the events in the story to make the idea come alive for the audience. It's the thing that I find the most difficult and it can take weeks, but in the end, everything in the finished film (ideally) should happen for a reason. I also spend a lot of time on the storyboarding of each essay: not necessarily the framing or look of each shot, but more how they combine and juxtapose to express new ideas.



Where do you get the majority of your footage and how do you edit it together?

Each video essay is a mixture of archive footage and images, stock footage, some small sequences I shoot myself, and motion graphics animation. All the archive material is in the public domain, and I spend quite a lot of time on the Prelinger Archives and the Wikimedia Commons looking for the right pieces.

The motion graphics sequences are made inside Adobe After Effects, which I started using this year, after five years working with Apple Motion. Then everything is brought together inside Final Cut Pro and that's where the majority of the editing work happens.

Each film tends to through at least three edits. The first version usually just contains the storyboards and whatever stock footage I intend to use, to create a sort of animatic. This helps me refine the images and the script. With each stage I'm able to take more and more out of the narration, as the pictures start carrying more of the meaning themselves. Once I've created a finished draft, I usually send it out to three or four trusted friends who give me their feedback. I also take a week off and don't watch it myself so I can come back to it with a clear view.



Can you describe what you consider a “video essay” and what makes it unique from more ‘traditional’ documentaries or educational films?

The video essay has been around for quite a long time and has its roots in the city symphonies of the 1920s and the new wave of documentaries in the 1960s. These days video essays are mostly film critiques (for example, Tony Zhou's excellent essays on cinematic technique). Kirby Ferguson, for me, was the first one to show the potential of the video essay for more complex subject matter with his groundbreaking Everything Is A Remix series. His current project This Is Not A Conspiracy Theory is also recommended viewing.

A video essay, generally, is similar to a written essay, in that it tries to make a point to the audience but through images rather than through words. For me, the challenge of a video essay is trying to conjure up what images combine to convey a complex idea, rather than what words.

Why choose the video essay as a genre as opposed to any other – a written article or documentary for example?

The video essay is a really exciting, and as yet, virtually up-tapped form. It is also a form with very few rules, tropes or restrictions so it really appealed to me when I was looking for ways to approach the delve project. If I thought about making a “documentary” my mind immediately started picturing talking head interviews, which I didn't want to do; if I imagined “educational films” I instinctively veered towards straight explanation.

The “essay” part of it also suggests taking a point of view and making an argument, or at least coming to a meaningful conclusion, so this nomenclature also frees me to tell stories that say something, freed a little bit, from the bounds of journalistic objectivity.   



What tone are you going for in these essays? Is it connected to the audience you’re trying to reach?

I am still working out the tone, and experimenting with each new story. Above all I want the films to be honest and authentic, even if that means being earnest on occasion. I am avoiding using too much irony or meme-based humour as lots of online video does at the moment, as to me, that often feels disingenuous.  

Have you had much feedback on them so far?

The feedback on the first few video essays has been positive – or at least, if people don't like the videos, they do believe in the big idea! The best feedback has been the emails I get from people who say an essay changed them or affected them in some way. Knowing that an idea you had has reached another person through the medium of video is really awesome.

As the project continues I want to develop the experience the audience has of watching the videos. I'd love to build more of a community around learning, reading and discovering smart ideas.



The Delve Instagram page is full of tiny fun-fact style videos snippets of history – can you tell us a bit about using this medium and is it something you hope to expand on?

The Instagram channel started just as an experimental side project. A bigger video essay will usually take about 6-8 weeks to make, and I wanted to have something else that I could make a lot more quickly to break up the process. Shortly after starting I thought it would be fun to adapt EH Gombrich's A Little History of the World into Instagram videos. At the moment I am explaining world history from 3500 BC to the present day in 15 second episodes. I'm up to 476 AD at the moment, after 24 chapters.

They are very different to an essay – you have to be ruthless in choosing one idea about, say, the Romans and convey it in just 15 seconds, and usually just 1 or 2 images, or a very simple animation.

What can we expect to see next? Do you have many new videos scheduled or are there other projects in the works?

I've just published a new essay, about the origins of World War One, called Cause and Effect. It's been a big challenge; narratively and visually it is the most sophisticated piece I have made, so I'm just watching to see how it goes down. I'll shortly be starting work on a new one, hopefully to come out at the end of the year. I also have a couple of exciting collaborations in 2015 which will see more ambitious video essays being made and hopefully they'll continue to reach  and inspire more people.

It is great fun being a one-person-show, but I know going alone puts a ceiling on how much impact delve can eventually have.