Rob Spence

Four years ago, Toronto-based director Rob Spence lost his right eye in an accident. Now he's being interviewed by the Today Show and Time Magazine. What happened in between?

Let's All Hate Toronto, Rob's 2007 documentary about the city he calls home was a ratings smash for CBC NewsWorld, but now he's focusing his attention on his "Eyeborg Project", an effort to enhance his prosthetic eye with a miniature video camera. Like a true 21st century digital boy, he's become a master of self-promotion and social marketing, and getting his name out there no matter where he calls home, or what the political or financial climate is. I had a chance to sit down over a coffee in Parkdale and talk steak vs. sizzle with the man with the camera in his head.

The Americans refer to you as a Canadian filmmaker, the Canadians refer to you as a Toronto Filmmaker, and the Kingston Whig-Standard refers to you as a Belleville filmmaker. Where do you call home?

Well I grew up in Belleville, so when I'm there I'm from Belleville. I very recently almost moved to New York, but making Let's All Hate Toronto made me like Toronto more. It's a dynamic enough city but not too expensive. Moving to New York probably would have blown my Eyeborg budget on rent alone.

One of the jokes from Let's All Hate Toronto is that Toronto is New York on dial-up. But the connection is getting better, especially when the world is becoming less contingent on being geographically near someone. However there is certainly enough of that face-to-face talent in Toronto. Artists are really good here.

What was it that drew you to film?

There was a guy who got me to start acting in short films in Vancouver. I got into it at a time when Final Cut Pro came in to being, and that was a big time for accessibility. You used to have to get coffee for a guy with a $60,000 Avid suite for a year or two as an assistant, and then you might get to do your own assembles, and eventually go out on your own. But with Final Cut Pro you could immediately start cutting. The people that used Final Cut Pro initially were, in many cases, documentary people shooting on MiniDV, so I kind of gravitated towards documentary.

When you started making films, was the goal to make a living?

It was definitely to make a living. A lot of people did that, and still do that, but people would agree that it's harder now. Where some doors close a lot open: now it's a free-for-all, Wild West digital rodeo.

Let's All Hate Toronto came out in 2007, and when you're a filmmaker you want to get that one film to do well, to set yourself up to sell other projects. At the time we had the best ratings ever on CBC NewsWorld: The Lens, and I thought, "Well, this is a potential repeat client." But then they just stopped doing documentaries all together. They just stopped. So did CTV. Stopped. Particularly documentaries have been devastated. Of course, if you're a determined person you'll make your documentary and you'll get money for it anyways. But the usual way that things have been done in the past, I don't know, fifty years, is just gone. It's very difficult to get funding for a one-off documentary now simply because no one is actually commissioning them.

Do you think that is a result of arts funding cuts?

It's a combination of people not watching that much TV anymore, and PVRing out the commercials of the TV they are watching. Documentary is one of the first casualties of a reduced-revenue broadcast model. That's why with this eye thing I'm focusing a lot more on the digital model: iPhone Apps, even an Eyeborg app, which I'm designing. But with all the press I've got doing the eyeborg project, I've never actually shown the eye working.

I'm telling a story through the press. So the story was: "guy is going to make eye," "guy is making eye," and act three is "guy has made eye." What I've tried to do is build up this brand in anticipation of it, and then I will release the Eyeborg app. The app is not unlike Ashton Kutcher using his iPhone through uStream, only I'm hoping to use my documentary skills to actually have some content, rather than just being me milling around. The goal is to actually make a living with these films.

This is the direction the information age has been pushing things for the last 15 years. Do you feel that this is the right way for the medium to go, or are things changing too much?

I mean, I stuck a camera in my head. I'm pretty comfortable with rapid technological change. But one thing that I have found is that you have to be good at self-promotion if you want to even have a chance. Some people are better at just delivering the steak. They make a good film on the low-down and that speaks for itself. I'm definitely from the school of sizzle. Sizzle leads to steak.

Self-marketing and branding is huge and it's going that way for almost everyone. All the mediums are going into this one place: one big blog with Twitter and Facebook attached. It's all a hub for everyone's personal brand. There are newspapers that are hiring video and film people and it's a skill that's needed more than ever. The trick is to, if not actually get paid for it, then at least make a big enough brand. I don't have a really strong opinion on it either way, but it's kind of going that way.

Resistance is futile. And that's what I'm doing, I'm just putting the internet in my head and going with it. I'm fairly good at it, this organizing. Time Magazine named us one of the best 50 inventions of the year, which is pretty good for a guy who's been in project managing for, you know, not that long. So, diversify, you know?

Did the idea for the Eyeborg project come with the loss of the eye? Or is this something you would have always wanted to do, technology permitting?

Well as soon as I lost it about 4 years ago, there was no hesitation. "This is what I'm going to do," I said. If you talk to people who lose their eye, which is about four or five percent of the world, (which is actually a good niche market for me), the first thing they say is "you know what I'd like to do, I'd like to put a camera in there." The Six Million Dollar Man already did it, so did The Terminator, kind of. Then if you take a look at your cell phone, the camera is right there. You're looking at your prosthetic eye... it's not a really "out there" idea. Anyone who loses an eye is going to think of it really quickly. I just actually did it.

You made the jump.

Yeah, and it was a pretty steep learning curve. But there's always somebody who knows something, or if they don't know it, they know somebody who knows it. Kosta Grammatis really gave me a big boost helping me do it. He's just so young and clever and just too stupid to know that it was impossible. Kosta saw an article of mine on Wired, which is a great example of me self-marketing, and we just built the first crappy prototype in two weeks. We built it on my coffee table. We ordered parts and came up with a half-decent, but crappy, prototype and we've just been upgrading that ever since.

If all mediums are merging into one big thing, is there still going to be a home for straight-up documentaries like Let's All Hate Toronto?

Yeah, but I also think there's going to be a home for one-eyed television. People have specific interests and can find their audience now. They don't have to be geographically limited. Four or five percent of the population is a pretty big percentage of the population.
I made a little film with this really cute one-eyed girl, where we went to film a movie review of Avatar in 3-D. We didn't actually know what was going to happen. We thought that maybe James Cameron's new, polarized 3-D glasses would work. It didn't work. It wasn't a complete jarbled mess like the old kind of 3-D glasses, but we just ended up seeing a 2-D movie. So we asked for our money back and said that we weren't 100% satisfied with our 3D experience, and they gave us our money back. So the moral of the story is, one-eyed people out there, my people, they can go see 3-D movies for free.

So if I start making regular one-eyed film installments like this, I just snagged a pretty good percentage of the population, possibly. So why not try? I think there's a home for a lot of things that never had a home before, but you have to build a brand that can extend itself. It's the same thing with your films: you have to build this brand. So if you build a good online portal to the best documentaries in the world, then everyone will go there because it's a place where you can sell your documentaries. You have to be heard above all the noise. It seems sometimes three quarters of what I'm doing is marketing as opposed to actual filmmaking.

Would you say that "be heard above all the noise," would be your advice to up and comers?

It depends. I mean, that's my style. A lot of me actually doing my marketing is in my films. That's part of the humour of it: this yahoo let loose with this funny press release and says to Meredith Viera: "Yeah, I want to fight injustice with my camera-eye." It's like I'm a human media virus.

Somebody else may want to do something totally different. They may need to look into their actors' eyes and get that beautiful performance, and the film will market itself, or they get somebody else to do the marketing for them. But for sure you've got to get it out there. It used to be that you could send it to one or two little festivals and it would find it's own home. It's always that you've had to market the bejeezus out of your films, but now you have to find the right place for it online as well.

You've talked about subjects in the past with a lot of tongue in cheek humour... Where's the humour in this? Is this Eyeborg project as funny to you?

Sure. It's very funny. I mean, sticking a five dollar LED light in my eye has this incredible effect on people.

We were filming with the red eye, just running around, and this cyclist knocked over my cameraman. He was in the cameraman's face and I tried to talk to him, calmly. He turned to me and started saying "Fuck y--" and stopped, because my eye was glowing red. I've read so many comics, and it's like that moment where the hero has one glowing hand and people say "I don't know who or what you are..."

Experiencing that for me is part of the whole fun of making documentaries. A lot of what you do in documentaries never makes it to the screen. Just doing it, making a documentary, is ridiculous. You can run around and ask people anything. If I want some interesting health care advice I just pretend like I'm making a documentary. Like if my skin has a weird rash, I phone and say "Hi, I'm making a documentary about skin rashes, could I come in and get an interview with you?" It's just a license to be as curious and ridiculous as you want.

What about the ethical implications about all of this? The privacy of people and all that?

Ethics Schmethics.

Well there's that.

Well, here's the interesting thing about all that. People kvetch and bitch that a center-left documentary maker is ruining everyone's privacy. My role can be that of the provocateur in that sense, in that at least they're thinking about it more. But people are broadcasting their lives on Facebook, they're oblivious to an extra 50,000 security cameras going up around the city, and one dude with an eye-camera is the problem?

Kind of like with "Mr. Toronto," I don't mind getting people upset about it, because then at least they're thinking about it more in the first place. I'm not going to ruin anyone's life. I'm an ethical guy. But I've been going around to a lot of conferences. What's interesting is you go into a big room and you ask people "how many people here have a small, discreet video camera that they could use to secretly tape a conversation over coffee with somebody?" And everybody's got one.

It's just because it's in my actual eye that there is this feeling of a human contract, like that place is a sacred place for communication. It's the window to the soul. And if they find out it's the window to a live streaming video somewhere, there's an extra sense of betrayal, even though I would choose not to do it. People have that exact same option with their iPhone, but that isn't considered a big dangerous potential hazard to privacy. It's the placement of it that freaks people out.