The problem
Innovation hides its makers
The systems ISI helps create become so familiar that their origins fade from view. A history of inventions alone cannot explain the people, uncertainty and accumulated work behind them.
Cloudwalkers
ISI and the Inventors of the Future
The people who helped build the internet reflect on the desire to connect and the responsibilities that follow when their ideas reshape everyday life.
The question
How do we make connection visible?
Fifty years of research sit behind systems people use without knowing who built them.
The film needs a human thread that connects those achievements.
01 · Why
The people behind the systems
As ISI approaches its fiftieth anniversary, the institute wants to make a film.
Its researchers help build technologies that become part of ordinary life.
Their work becomes familiar infrastructure, while the people behind it often disappear from view.
About the film
Cloudwalkers tells the story of USC’s Information Sciences Institute through the people whose research helps shape the internet and the technologies that follow.
Across five decades, researchers return to questions of connection, knowledge and responsibility. The film brings their experiences together, linking the early internet with the dilemmas surrounding artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and the systems people now depend on.
Making the film
The challenge
Fifty years, one human thread
The film needs to connect decades of research without giving every achievement equal weight. It must preserve curiosity while acknowledging the consequences of technologies that change how people live.
Through story
Connection becomes the story
The filmmakers follow the desire to connect: machines with machines, researchers across disciplines and people across distance. That recurring impulse gives the history an emotional structure.
What came out
A film and a public conversation
The documentary premieres at USC on March 11, 2025, followed by a discussion with researchers featured in the film. ISI also lists the film as available on Amazon Prime Video.
Frames
Frame 01 / 10
00:00:00:00
Drafting by hand
Washington, D.C.
The Lincoln Memorial
Among the visitors
A wall of code
Medicine and imaging
A robot on the sidewalk
Motion tracking on court
The gym
A face in low light
Selected frames
04 film stillsCredits
- Client
- [TO CONFIRM]
- Director
- Dan Druhora
- Producers
- Dan Druhora, David Beier, Adam Tyree, Yannis Yortsos, Craig Knoblock
- Cinematographer
- Jonathan Pope
- Editor
- Rommel Villa Barriga
- Production designer
- Anca Cocan
- Featuring
- Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn, Paul Mockapetris, Eve Schooler, Deborah Estrin, Terry Benzel, Kevin Knight
- Where to watch
- Amazon Prime Video