Flaherty / Continents of Drifting Clouds

A custom online place for the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar.

Continents of Drifting Clouds joined synchronized screenings and live discussion with rooms that remote participants could navigate and reorganize around their own conversations.

Period: 2022
Status: Complete / Archived
Form: Custom virtual seminar platform

program film

Program film

The project

The Flaherty Online Experience was a custom online setting for the 2022 Flaherty Seminar, Continents of Drifting Clouds, programmed by Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka. Built on ohyay after the Seminar’s first online edition, it joined synchronized screenings and live discussions with spaces participants could navigate for smaller conversations or informal gatherings. The design centered serendipity, non-hierarchy, agency, play, accessibility, and connections with natural and Indigenous worlds.

Design notes

I joined the project as Guest Artist, Creative Designer. The central question was who gets to participate in conversations about documentary film, and what voices are heard. Hybridity could expand access and decentralize those conversations, but endless Zoom calls and impersonal webinars made the social problem obvious. We treated the online seminar as a place people could move through and shape themselves.

I developed the portal’s visual and spatial approach. I began by treating Flaherty Farm as more than a visual reference: it already had a history as a hospitable place. I researched maps, diagrams and perspective systems, then designed the reconstructed farmhouse around screenings, conversation, reading and quieter reflection. I worked with the production and technical team to carry that approach into the online seminar.

What others saw

“A virtuosic creative team… designing a special online platform uniquely attuned to the needs of The Flaherty Community.”— The Flaherty

Process studies

A contact sheet of Flaherty Seminar archival photographs, including several views of the carved stone and its making. — Contact sheet with the stone

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Alexander Porter — Guest Artist, Creative Designer / Spatial Research · Alexander Kislyakov — Image Modeling · Archival materials provided by The Flaherty Seminar. Full portal credits on the project page.

The scanned Flaherty Stone shown in Sketchfab's 3D editor with its irregular surface and carved face visible.

Interactive 3D model · Loads Sketchfab

01 / Starting point
We knew the Flaherty Stone through old images. We still had to find it.
02 / How it worked
The search moved from the Flaherty archive to satellite views and footage of the grounds. Once the stone was identified, we captured its irregular surface and preserved its position in the landscape. The resulting scan became the material for its virtual counterpart.
03 / What it opened
The scan gave the portal one location tied directly to the Seminar grounds. Visitors could use the stone as a landmark and gather around it inside the online farmhouse.

Blender viewport with cut-out Flaherty archival figures and photographs positioned inside a farmhouse reconstruction. — Archival images modeled in the farmhouse

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01 / Starting point
How could photographs guide people through a scanned farmhouse?
02 / How it worked
Figures and scenes were separated from their original frames and positioned inside the point cloud. Each composition established a camera view. Selecting one carried the visitor toward that location and disclosed another layer of the archive.
03 / What it opened
The archival photographs became part of the farmhouse's spatial logic. They marked routes through the portal and connected rooms to distinct moments in the Seminar's history.

A wide, elevated projection test keeps the scanned Flaherty farmhouse and its surrounding ground legible as one structure. — Farmhouse projection test, wide view

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Alexander Porter — Guest Artist, Creative Designer / Spatial Research · Alexander Kislyakov — Image Modeling. Full portal credits on the project page.

A dark projection test opens the scanned farmhouse from above, with illuminated rooms holding their position inside the larger structure.

Interactive 3D model · Loads Sketchfab

01 / Starting point
Which perspective would help people read the farmhouse and move through it together?
02 / How it worked
I built a visual study using maps, handscrolls, architectural drawings, games, and other spatial systems. Promising projections were applied to scans and painted tests. I watched what each choice did to scale, occlusion, room-to-room orientation, and a visitor’s sense of where other people were.
03 / What it opened
The selected projection kept the farmhouse visible as one structure. Screenings, conversation rooms, reading rooms, and smaller gathering places could occupy distinct parts of it without losing the route between them.