With Sundance hosting 13 Virtual Reality (VR) experiences under its New Frontier’s umbrella at the start of the year and Tribeca Film Festival showcasing projects like The Enemy in their Storyscapes line-up, we turn to a project that has been among the first to experiment with the use of Oculus Rift in a documentary context. CLOUDS, by media artist James George and …
A year ago iDROPS and myself submitted a proposal to Creative Europe (Media Programme): we wanted to create a series of workshops designed to help professionals to develop their own interactive documentaries. We wanted to create something that would be more like an incubator than an inspirational seminar. Something very hands-on, where you are immersed in a multi-disciplinary environment so …
Last year, DocLab had “Interactive reality” in its title, this year it was “Immersive reality”. We shifted from interactive to immersive, what does this mean? Since our physical reality is already both immersive and interactive, I suppose the novelty here is to question how we want to understand the role of factual storytelling in the digital age tout court, especially …
More than half of The Guardian’s readership chooses the online experience (The Guardian, 2012). That makes more than 6 million monthly web readers, against less than 5 million print readers. What would you do if you had to secure a profitable future to such newspaper? I suppose you would start to look at the potential of media rich content with …
Have you ever observed kids playing with lego blocks? Sometimes they start with an idea (I want to build the tallest possible tower), sometimes they invent a story (I am a princess that is getting lost in an enchanted world) and use the blocks as props to visualise the world they want to create, and then sometimes they already have …
Every edition of Sheffield’s Doc/Fest is different, but for me this year was particularly special because I came with two hats: my usual i-doc observer one, and my new i-doc director/producer one. In other words: this year I presented a project to the Crossover Market and got selected. So, together with Mike Robbins from Helios Design Labs and Sarah Arruda, …
Here is the great news: this year i-Docs and Webdox are exploring the same areas, but in different ways, and in different places. i-Docs 2014 (Bristol, 20-21th of March) was organised around three themes that seemed topical to us: new production models, how to assess engagement and evaluation and new i-docs territories & platforms. We had two amazing days of explorations and, …
The last question of the UX Series is the one million dollars question: how do we understand, and measure, the impact in an i-doc? What is the time-frame we should consider in the evaluation? Is it about the number of people exposed to our message? Is it about telling others about our documentary and issue? It is about changing attitudes? Is …
“The interface is content” says Alexandre Brachet from Upian. What does this mean? The interface is no just a way to navigate through content, it is a way to place the user within a story space, and by doing so it gives roles, it explains the possibilities, it generates feelings in the users… and it therefore becomes a type of …
Mike Robbins, from Helios Design Lab (the guys behind NFB’s Highrise, OFFSHORE and 17,000 Islands) has participated to the UX Series by responding to Question 5: Rapid prototyping and testing: what to test for, and when, in i-doc production? I asked Mike to tell me about the way they’ve been testing their projects and… interestingly enough… I learned that they …
Our previous question in the UX Series was: what is purpose in an i-doc? Purpose is important because it encapsulate, hopefully in one sentence, the shift that we want the user to have while going through our interactive experience. Purpose is NOT our own reason to produce a story, but rather the effect we want it to have on the …
What is purpose in an i-doc, and how can we communicate it? When you design a website you normally start by stating your goal and your product management strategy. You often have a core message, and you then make sure that the whole experience is smooth enough so that your user fulfills his needs (buy a train ticket, find the …
The UX Series is going ahead… and today Daniel Burwen (Operation Ajax) and David Dufresne (Fort McMoney) explore the question: “what can i-doc producers learn from game design”? Two weeks have passed since Paula Zuccotti, Ingrid Kopp and Jason Brush opened the debate on “what can we learn from design thinking that could be useful when starting an i-doc production”. By looking at their contributions, …
Have you ever wondered how to best design the user experience in an interactive documentary? Have you struggled to find the right balance between design methodologies and good narrative? This is what the UX Series is all about: an investigation on how to approach and place UX in the i-doc production process. Now that i-docs are not “new” anymore my interest …
Fort McMoney (Making of) from National Film Board of Canada on Vimeo. Fort McMoney launched at IDFA 2013 and we thought our i-Docs community would be interested in an exclusive interview with its director, David Dufresne (previously known for Prison Valley). Fort McMoney speaks of the environmental issues behind the oil industry through the language of a collaborative docu-game – an ambitious challenge …
