Theo Anthony S All Light Everywhere Gets Interactive Companion Website

The website introduces a new medium to unpack cinema embedded in the language of the internet and the nonlinear ways audiences experience documentaries, research, and the web. It features a custom interface that allows users to scrub through a thumbnail view of the film, alongside corresponding articles, quotes, links, and archival materials.

A collaboration of Memory Studio and A Lot of Moving Parts, the site was made possible with the support of Sandbox Films. In the film, as images of an aerial surveillance system wash over the screen, the voiceover states, “Every image has a frame and every frame excludes a world beyond its edges.” The website expands the film beyond the borders of the frame and situates the film within a living network and tradition of other thinkers. “While making ‘All Light, Everywhere,’ we always told ourselves that we weren’t saying anything new, but finding new ways of asking old questions,” said director Theo Anthony in a message accompanying the announcement. “All Light, Expanded is our way of paying respect to all the people who have asked these questions before, who inspired us to ask them ourselves. By digitizing, compiling, and visualizing five years of our research, we hope to both reaffirm our lineage to the past and to create an accessible resource for future audiences to build on.” “As a mission-driven film company, we always hope our documentaries inspire audiences to dig deeper into the ideas explored by the films we support,” said Sandbox founding director Greg Boustead. “However, things like ‘impact campaigns’ and ‘educational resources’ can feel like empty buzzwords. This project reimagines what a so-called educational toolkit can look like — it’s beautiful, complex, and as formally experimental as the film it is based on.” A Lot of Moving Parts, an NYC-based creative studio, designed and developed the website with the support of artist and technologist Bhavik Singh. Together they figured out how to structure over 400 references that included archival images, videos, notes, and quotes. “We had to work across multiple dimensions: temporal, spatial, conceptual, and relational,” says Seth Thompson, principal of A Lot of Moving Parts. “The most rewarding part was taking the non-linear structure that was particular to the medium of the film and figuring out how to translate it to the affordances of the web. Ultimately, the website required designing a unique interface from scratch and figuring out how to make static data visualization techniques dynamic, with code.”

“All Light, Everywhere” is currently available on VOD platforms and in contention for the 2022 Documentary Feature Oscar. Read IndieWire’s review here.