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

The death penalty was re-instated in the United States in 1976. Since then, for every ten people that have been executed, one person has been released from death row after spending an average of ten years in isolation. One For Ten is an online documentary series telling the stories of these innocent people.

This crowd-funded series is being made live on the road; shot in one day, edited the next, and uploaded overnight. The team is spending five weeks travelling from New York City to Las Vegas, releasing two films a week. In the process the filmmakers rely on their online community to provide interview questions, music, artwork and to share the films online in order to reach a wide audience.

Fresh from the road, we will welcome co-directors Will Francome and Mark Pizzey,  producer Laura Shacham and executive producer Christopher Hird to present a selection of their short documentaries. This will be followed by a discussion on the pros and cons of creating short web-documentaries, online distribution and crowd-funding. They will share their strategies for building online communities and grass-roots marketing. We will be looking at how much input they received from their online community, and to what extent it helped shape the result.

Directed by William Francome and Mark Pizzey
Produced by Megan Garner and Laura Shacham
Year: 2013

Between the Lines was a three-day festival that took place at Rich Mix from 1 to 3 March. In a series of follow up events we continue to explore the challenges facing documentary makers, investigative journalists and citizen reporters in the new media landscape.

Presented by:

Supported by:

Questions have been asked on topics ranging from the Taliban’s negotiations with the United States to their position on educating girls.

The Taliban banned girls from schools while they were in power, although there were reports in January 2011 that they had ended their opposition to education for women.

The number of girls in school has risen to 2.5 million since the Taliban were ousted in 2001, according to the government and aid groups.

The questions on the forum are being answered by Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid, who blamed a lack of funding for girls’ schools that were run in accordance with Islamic tenets.

In response to another question, he indicated that the Taliban monitors Facebook, YouTube and media reports. 

The video is a year old, but I’ve been looking for this sort of material for a while.

The IDF started with a blog and a YouTube channel in 2008 during Operation Cast Lead which included airstrikes and a ground incursion into Gaza. The IDF began a Twitter account several days into 2009.

I was critical then, but it looks like things have come a long way since that hastily conceived project.