Canadian transmedia documentary maker Ann Shin (pictured) of the Fathom Film Group is back from an undercover shoot on the Chinese-North Korean border for The Defector – Escape from North Korea, for TVO.

“It was a nerve-wracking trip to be sure,” director/executive producer Shin tells Playback Daily, following the Asian production leg for a film about North Korean refugees making their way across China to possible freedom in the West.

Weeks earlier, before setting out for Asia, Playback spoke to Shin about her anxiety over the safety of herself, her camera crew and the North Koreans being followed as they attempted to reach freedom via a U.S. Civil War-style underground railroad of Canadians and Americans that reaches across Asia to North America.

“There have been lots of questions around that keep me up at night. The stakes are, if you get caught filming without a permit, you face jail. You can be detained if you don’t give up the filming. [But] the stakes are higher for those we’re following,” she told Playback Daily in a pre-trip interview.

Shin had reason to worry before the Asian shoot for The Defector, which previously had a working title Pyongyang Express: Escape From North Korea.

The Defector production crew and their cameras eventually met up with five North Korean defectors that had recently crossed into China – four young women and a man.

“We travelled together from there, separating when things got particularly dangerous,” Shin recounts.

Their Chinese fixer had to constantly point out CCTV cameras to be avoided, and the production crew and subjects had to break into smaller groups to not draw attention when moving through particular neighbourhoods.

When they got to the Laotian border, Shin and her crew separated yet again from the five defectors, who were without proper papers and so needed to cross illegally on foot.

Shin recalled another emotional moment when, during a six-hour nighttime hike, a young woman began to sob bitterly.

“She had left her mother and sister in North Korea and it was her plan to get enough funds to hire the guides to help them come over as well,” she explains.

But her tears now flowed from the realization that, if she as a young woman was finding the trek tough-going, then surely her frail mother could not repeat the journey to escape the country’s prison camps and brutal regime.

Even worse for the young woman, she now knew she would never see her mother again.

Shin, while accepting the dangers inherent in shooting on the ground in Asia, defends the risks taken by her documentary crew as essential to showing in great detail the plight of North Koreans that we only mostly glimpse from satellite images taken from above, or by the occasional mobile footage that makes it to YouTube.

Now her job will be using the footage taken so far in Asia to further build out an immersive website full of animation and graphics in full 360-degree digital environments to underpin the documentary and online project.

The multimedia project also recently launched a Facebook application as part of its social media strategy to allow North Koreans to tell their own stories of travelling through hostile Asian countries to escape repression.

And also in the pipeline is an interactive website to be launched in spring 2012 where viewers can go on a point-of-view journey in China as if they too were walking as a defector to freedom.

The Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund is helping finance the transmedia project, as it explores new digital tools for audience engagement. Shin also received funding from the Rogers Documentary Fund and CMF.