With Glowing Hearts, the documentary film made by Jon Ornoy (left) and Andrew Lavigne, has spawned a series of Web episodes and video blogs.

Pessimists can point to the Internet as proof that humanity is brawling, hateful, and bad at grammar, but increasingly it’s documentary filmmakers, often seen as the downers of the cinematic world, who are using social media and technology as tools for hopeful engagement.

The emerging producer-director team of Jon Ornoy and Andrew Lavigne of Animal Mother Films thought they might want to make a film about the Olympics but weren’t sure how. Then they went to an event at the New Forms Festival that introduced them to work being produced by the Downtown Eastside media activists called Fearless City.

“Fearless [City] was out in the Downtown Eastside with cellphones,” Lavigne recalls, interviewed at a friend’s coffee shop. “They were live-streaming those images into the Great Northern Way campuses, where VJs were remixing them and posting them and sending them on the Internet, and at the same time there was a group in Montreal doing the same thing. It was this big party celebrating technology, and this group from the Downtown Eastside was participating in it. It was fascinating.”

Now, after a year following four Fearless City activists, Ornoy and Lavigne have reached the postproduction phase of their documentary, With Glowing Hearts, about the marginalized group realizing self-empowerment by creating their own media during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. More than a film meant for theatre audiences, With Glowing Hearts has also morphed into a related series of Web episodes, video blogs, and commentary, intersecting with Fearless City’s mission to bridge the digital divide. Lavigne plans to include content generated by the film’s subjects themselves (especially prolific Fearless City contributor April Smith of AHA Media), whether it be their own Twitter posts or video clips.

From his perspective as producer, Ornoy sums up their mission this way: “We wanted to show something that was positive, that was happening despite this bogeyman of the Olympics being here. That there was this positive energy about. That people were trying to do constructive things.”

Gibsons-raised documentary filmmaker Velcrow Ripper echoes that approach by way of Skype video conversation from San Francisco. “As a documentary filmmaker, it’s really easy to come from a place of despair,” he says. “I feel like every documentary filmmaker has a responsibility to offer hope.”

Ripper’s depth of vision as an artist stems from his understanding that to make a powerful, affecting documentary, he must do more than engage the head. “I want to engage the soul,” he explains, and he believes the best way to touch people is through art. He describes his films as the centre of a whole social-media awareness campaign. Much of the campaigning takes shape as people connect via Facebook, Twitter, Nings, and YouTube, sharing his video flashes or his film subjects’ calls to action. “They’re all interrelated and different ways of keeping the conversations that I’m exploring alive, two-way conversations so people can post back.”

Notably, Ripper’s Fierce Light trilogy (beginning with Scared Sacred and Fierce Light; he’s working on the third film, entitled EVOLVE LOVE: The Meaning IS Life) began as a Web site in 1995. “I was so excited about the nonlinear nature of the Web,” he explains. “The fact that it allowed interactivity. That it wasn’t just like a film audience staring at a screen, you telling them, but the audience made their own choices of where they could go and they were actually able to talk back. Something very democratic about that.”

And yet with all the points of convergence and platforms for his work, Ripper is confident that there is room for his singular vision as an auteur as well. Although his films’ contributors may increasingly include Facebook friends he has never met in real life who have connected him to interview subjects all over the globe, his films’ artistic visions remain his own. “The idea of authorship is not something that needs to be discarded in any way, shape, or form. For me, my particular mode of creation is art, and I will continue to make one-way media, like my feature documentaries. And supporting democratic media doesn’t mean I have to throw that away.”

On the contrary, what he’s doing—with filmmakers Ornoy and Lavigne falling in step—is creating more, with the hope that audiences, on-line or otherwise, will take it from there.