From 29-31 October, the Frontline Club is hosting screenings as part of the Green Caravan Film Festival, a travelling festival of environmental and socially-conscious films. The full lineup can be found here.

The Wanted 18 recreates an astonishing true story: the Israeli army’s pursuit of 18 cows, whose independent milk production on a Palestinian collective farm was declared “a threat to the national security of the state of Israel.”

In response to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, a group of people from the town of Beit Sahour decide to buy 18 cows and produce their own milk as a co-operative. Their venture is so successful that the collective farm becomes a landmark, and the cows local celebrities – until the Israeli army takes note and declares that the farm is an illegal security threat. Consequently, the dairy is forced to go underground, and the cows continue to produce their “Intifada milk” with the Israeli army in relentless pursuit.

Directed by: Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan
Runtime: 75′
Country: Canada
Year: 2014

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

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.