Freelance/Student £125
Members £100
The Web as we know it has been with us for the last 15 years. In the last three, online readership has well surpassed paper consumption, and some major institutions such as the Guardian and the BBC had to create entire new departments to shape their digital future. Education is moving online, apps are monitoring our health, games are been used to train our teenagers and Virtual Reality is trying to make us witness situations we would never be exposed to in our normal lives. What is going on here? How has digital media changed the way we communicate our stories? And, more importantly, how can we, as authors, make the most of such changes?
This one-day workshop will cover the following:
- Introduction to interactive storytelling
- Possible levels of interactivity & the role of the author
- Short & long form: online news versus interactive documentary
- User generated content: a trend or a new way to engage with your audience?
- A question of terminology: the transmedia trend
- Emerging genres
- Case studies of: web-docs, serious games, data visualization, mobile news, personalization, social apps, non-fiction VR & more.
- Idea generation for interactive stories
- The bottom up approach: from the user to the idea
- Using personas
- Balancing authorship with co-creation & participation
- Using a design question as a way to stay focused
- The need of different skill sets in an interactive team
This interactive session will be divided in two:
1.In the morning, attendees will be given an overview of the state of the art in interactive non-factual narrative. Case studies will be picked together depending on the interests of the group and debate will very much be at the center of such exploration. Success and failures will be exposed, and the notion of user experience will be put in practice
2.In the afternoon, attendees will embark on a hands-on activity. Splitting in groups they will participate to an idea generating session that will put the user at the center of the creative process. The workshop is designed to experiment user centered approaches to storytelling in order to understand the full potential of the interactive form.
Sandra Gaudenzi consults, researches, lectures, writes and blogs about interactive factual narratives.
She is one of the co-directors of the i-Docs conference and Head of Studies of !F Lab – an EU training initiative for interactive documentary makers. As an academic, she is a Visiting Fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Centre (UWE, UK) and collaborates with Westminster University towards the opening of a new MA in Interactive Factual storytelling in 2017. She also co-convenes WebDox, a yearly conference on interactive storytelling, and co-hosts a regular event in London, The Flying Monkeys with the aim to create a community of professionals that can work together and move forward the current field of interactive factual narrative.
Follow her on http://www.interactivefactual.net, www.i-docs.org, or www.iflab.eu
Image via Shutterstock/ Rawpixel.com; Sandra Gaudenzi
]]>Interactive reports that hold short-attention spans online are the holy grail for web editors. Loc Dao, an executive producer and creative technologist at the National Film Board of Canada’s digital studio, has come up with a few recipes for success.
At the Frontline Club on Wednesday 8 October, Dao shared the lessons learned on the road to brilliant projects like the NFB’s Seven Digital Deadly Sins partnership with The Guardian in June, and Bear 71, which challenged the nature of the medium with its mash of video, gaming technology and interactive installation at its 2012 Sundance Film Festival debut.
In conversation with his collaborator at The Guardian, Lindsay Poulton, a producer in the paper’s Special Projects, Multimedia division, and Janine Steele, Operations Manager at the NFB, Dao discussed how there’s still much to explore as technology opens up the merger of video, photojournalism, animation and multiple other forms to push the bounds of interactive storytelling.
Good stories transcend platform
Helping produce 630 interactive stories in three years at the Canadian Broadcast Company’s innovative Radio 3 division in the early 2000s, Dao staked out the vanguard of interactive reportage.
“Over those three years we learned a lot of lessons,” he said. “But the three I always remember and still find useful for digital storytelling [are]: Good stories transcend platform. Users will read, listen and watch all at once. And don’t play videos in a small window unless you have too.”
Interactive storytelling @frontlineclub with @locdao "users will read, listen & watch" #digitaljournalism
— Kathleen Prior (@KathleenAPrior) October 8, 2014
Hunting for new mediums
These lessons have held true in the blend of photo essay, soundscape and interactive animation of The Last Hunt, the NFB’s first photo essay created for the iPad’s touch interface and gyroscope.
“We started with photos and text and with this project have now added interactive animation,” said Dao. “You’ll get a sense, especially when you get to the animations, of being a lot closer to the story by actually physically being able to manipulate it. I think we’ve stumbled onto something that’s a nice marriage of the tactile experience with the storytelling experience.”
The interactive documentary
With the launch of Bear 71, which followed the life a grizzly bear and her cubs through motion-sensitive cameras as they came in contact with humans, Dao believes his team struck on a new medium: the “interactive documentary”.
“We wanted to get off the screen . . . and move into the physical environment. When we launched our first StoryWorld at Sundance, we were actually on the street at Sundance and had an interactive installation,” Dao said. “We installed these surveillance units. You would come up to these and it would recognise your face and take a picture of you, and then all of a sudden you would be connected live to someone at another unit.”
The Living Story
“We were really interested in working with the NFB because they’re . . . at the forefront,” said Poulton, of the Seven Digital Deadly Sins partnership with The Guardian, which pushed forward the notion of ‘interactive documentary’ when it launched in June.
“The videos pull you into the project,” Dao said of the interplay of seven short segments filmed with characters like Bill Bailey tied to data journalism and first-person narrative writing which document the negative side of behaviour online. With equal experiences on desktop, smartphone or tablet, the project became a living documentary that continues to collect data through its shareable polls. It was spread through short video snippets on Vine and Twitter and has so far attracted 315,000 unique visitors and 30,000 shares from 218 countries.
The reason for its success, said Steele, wasn’t the technology, but the stories it told.
“We try not to let technology lead our project development,” she added. “We really try to be technology agnostic. We really try to start from story and build the best form, the best platform technology to tell that story.”
Do check out NFB's interactive documentaries: https://t.co/Mt4WGgT57Z Thanks for great talk @locdao @frontlineclub yesterday. Inspiration!
— Enable The Great (@annabeltroost) October 9, 2014
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Technological developments have influenced the way stories are crafted. The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has been at the forefront of major developments in cinema since 1939, both creatively as well as technologically. Their projects are also true testaments to a filmmaker’s desire to transmit images and words in a meaningful and passionate way.
Today, with opportunities offered by new media, stories can be told in a non-linear fashion through different platforms, or made interactive. Do these new technologies truly revolutionise the way we document the world, or merely change the relationship between the maker and the viewer?
Award-winning executive producer and creative technologist of the NFB Digital Studio Loc Dao, will explore the possibilities these developments offer through some of NFB’s most innovative projects. He will go back to the start of interactive magazines and photo essays, which led to the interactive documentary and storyworlds.
Loc Dao is co-founder of the groundbreaking NFB Digital and CBC Radio 3 studios and their industry shifting bodies of work. The combination of his experience in digital strategy, editorial, web development, content production and architecting large scale internet delivery systems, brings a rare multi-dimensional approach that pushes the boundaries of what can be done with story, form and platform. He has received over 60 awards most notably Digital Producer of the Year, nine Webby Awards, two New York Festivals Grand Prizes, three Online Journalism Awards, a Prix Italia, the FWA Site of the Year 2012 and a Cannes Cyber Lion.
Loc Dao will also be speaking at the Power to the Pixel Conference on Tuesday 7 October.
This event is in partnership with the Canadian High Commission.
35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London, E1 6LA.
Presented by:
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The boundaries of documentary are shifting dramatically in a converging digital world.
Between the Lines will offer three days of powerful films and lively debate on the issues and opportunities raised by the internet, trans-media and merging documentary conventions. Speakers include Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald, director of the Centre of Investigative Journalism Gavin MacFayen, MIT Open Documentary Lab founder William Uricchio, filmmakers Penny Woolcock and Kim Longinitto.
Who owns the news? Why are some documentary makers becoming investigative reporters? How does corporate and charitable sponsorship influence filmmakers? Is citizen journalism the future? Has the contract with the viewer changed in recent years?
Take advantage of the special ‘Early Bird’ discount until 22nd February.
Early Bird rate: £100 (£80 concessions)
Full Price Passes: £120 (£90 concessions)
Visit the Between the Lines website for the most up to date programme details.
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