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

By Nicole Hunt

UN-Arab League Joint Special Envoy Kofi Annan is back in Moscow on Monday for a meeting with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Despite a Russian-backed agreement signed in Geneva at the end of June, international action on Syria has been slow-moving ever since, despite the US and the UK taking a strong stance against Syria and China just a week later at the Friends of Syria meeting. Annan’s meeting with Lavrov comes on the heels of a reported massacre in Treimsa on 12 July, in which at least 200 Syrians were killed.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton begins a two-day trip to Israel, where she’ll discuss the Middle East peace process with Israeli and Palestinian officials. The visit is Clinton’s first in two years, and comes ahead of a trip by Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney next week; in addition to the diplomatic meetings, Clinton will surely be hoping to shore up some support for the Democrats from wealthy ex-pat Americans in Israel.

Monday also marks the 70th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, which saw over 13,000 of France’s Jews deported to Germany, where most ended up at Auschwitz. Paris is marking the anniversary with a Day of Commemoration and the release and exhibition of meticulously kept records related to the roundup. The documents had previously been kept secret to hide the extent of the collaboration between French police and the Germans under the Vichy regime during World War II.

Abd al Rahim Hussayn Muhammad al Nashiri, the Guantanamo Bay detainee charged with the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, appears for a three-day motions hearing on Tuesday. Fifteen motions due to be heard, including one requesting that Judge James Pohl recuses himself or is disqualified from the case, one to dismiss the charges, and one requesting that the proceedings are broadcast via traditional media, rather than the military’s current closed circuit system.

Former US President George W. Bush is a contributor to a new book published Tuesday called The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs. The idea of Bush Jr. sharing his thoughts on economic growth has raised some eyebrows among those who remember that the economy wasn’t exactly the strongpoint of his presidency.

The UN Security Council is due to adopt a resolution on the UN Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) in New York on Wednesday, two days before the mission’s three-month mandate expires. Given that the mission has been suspended since 16 June, and in the wake of ongoing violence and the Houla and Treimsa massacres, any renewal is likely to be dependent on a change in the form the mission takes or tougher sanctions on the Syrian regime.

Indians go to the polls on Thursday to elect their president for a five-year term. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee resigned from his post last month in order to run for the UPA party, and now looks likely to win. Mukherjee has been campaigning hard to convince the electorate to follow tradition and vote for whichever candidate their party leaders back, and indeed to make sure he’s the one smaller parties are throwing their support behind.

The month-long Muslim festival of Ramadan is likely to officially start on Friday, though Muslims will begin to observe it from sundown on Thursday. The exact date for the festival’s beginning is still a bit up in the air, as the beginning of the lunar month is dependent on the sighting of the new moon.

Apple’s iPad goes on sale in China on Friday, the launch having been delayed due to a naming dispute with Chinese firm Proview. China is Apple’s second-strongest market (after its home ground in the US), but while the release of the iPhone 4s last year caused havoc, Chinese analysts are predicting the new iPad won’t fare as well, as cheaper, ‘gray market’ versions have been available from Hong Kong for months.

Francesco Schettino, the skipper of the Costa Concordia who has been nicknamed ‘Captain Coward’ after he allegedly fled the ship as it went down in January, is scheduled to be back in front of the court in Grosseto, Italy on Saturday. The court is expected to be presented with the results of the analysis of data from the ship’s Voyage Data Recorders (or ‘black boxes’). Schettino has recently appeared in several TV interviews, most recently apologising for the disaster and admitting to being ‘distracted’ at the time.

The 19th biennial International AIDS Conference kicks off in Washington on Sunday. Bill Clinton, Elton John, Bill Gates, Whoopi Goldberg and Aung San Suu Kyi (via videolink) are among those attending to discus

s the major challenges facing the global response to AIDS and to preview new scientific research. Norway marks the first anniversary of the 22 July attacks, which saw 77 people killed in a bombing in Oslo and a mass shooting at a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utoya. Right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik , who has admitted carrying out the attacks but claimed they were justified, recently stood trial for the killings; the verdict in his case is expected on 24 August.