Futures Lab update...
Futures Lab update #83: Pushing forward with long-form, interactive multimedia
Best practices Engagement Innovation Reporting Social media
Reuben Stern, Rachel Wise | November 12, 2014
This week we explore how documentary video and interactive technologies can be combined to tell new kinds of immersive, in-depth stories online.
PART 1: NPR's "Planet Money Makes a T-shirt"
This Emmy Award-winning project, created by NPR, raised more than half a million dollars via Kickstarter to travel the world and document how T-shirts are manufactured. The resulting interactive documentary allows viewers to smoothly transition from watching video segments to reading text, photos and graphics. NPR's supervising visuals editor Kainaz Amaria explains the team approach used to build this kind of immersive project.
Reporting by Tatiana Darie, Reuben Stern and Rachel Wise.
[To skip directly to this segment in YouTube, click here.]
Additional NPR resources:
The NPR Visuals Team also develops data-driven tools and shares the code for others to use, including the source code behind the T-shirt project.
PART 2: "Hollow"
"Hollow" is a multi-storyline experience that examines the future of rural America by focusing on a single county in West Virginia. Director Elaine McMillion Sheldon tells us how the project involves the audience via multimedia elements and integration of social media tools.
Reporting by Tatiana Darie.
More information about the project:
As MediaShift reports, the original plan was to make a documentary and not an interactive project, but the director "realized there was more information she wanted to present than could be conveyed in a traditional documentary." She also saw the interactive format as a way to enable to community to continue documenting their own story after the filmmaker left. Additional information about the project can be found on the project website and on the project's Kickstarter page.
PART 3: "Fort McMoney"
"Fort McMoney" is documentary game that allows viewers to build player profiles and influence the course of the story, which is based on a real-life community in Canada. Director David Dufresne explains how the project simultaneously entertains and informs.
"Kupuna" combines personal portraits with interactive historical and geographic data to picture the small Hawaiian town of La'ie.
"17,000 Islands" is an interactive experiment in image-making that looks at Indonesia's 17,000 islands. The project invites viewers to edit the film and form a new narrative.
"Clouds Over Cuba" is a multimedia documentary that retraces the Cuban missile crisis, including archival documents, photos and video. The project's last chapter offers an alternate history timeline that shows what might have happened had the crisis evolved into a nuclear war.
A few tools for creating interactive storytelling projects:
The Creativist allows users to comine text, images, video, maps and other elements to present stories in different formats such as e-books, video or articles.
Sway is an app designed by Microsoft that integrates video, photos and text into a cohesive layout that users can edit and adjust to suit their design preferences.
Zeega allows users to upload media and mix the different elements to tell a story.
And for even more information:
MIT's Open Documentary Lab publishes conducts experiments and research that focus on "collaborative, interactive and immersive forms" of documentary storytelling
Reuben Stern
Director of NYC Partnerships
Reuben Stern is RJI's director of New York City partnerships and is the director of the Missouri School of Journalism's New York program.
Rachel Wise
As video editor at RJI's Futures Lab, Rachel Wise co-produces and edits the weekly Futures Lab video updates, and produces other video projects at RJI.
17000 islands canada clouds over cuba david dufresne elaine mcmillion sheldon fort mcmoney futures lab futures lab update hollow kainaz amaria kickstarter kupuna mediashift mits open documentary lab npr npr visuals team rachel wise reuben stern sway tatiana darie the creativist youtube zeega
FL#200: Experimenting with interactive VR at Crossover
FL#199: Language recognition via Speechmatics
FL#198: Ideas for social video from VICE Media