Immersive Journalism goes one step further!

  As immersive journalism is experimenting new ways to create “immersion” (see Eva Dominguez’s article on this for LaVanguardia) Nonny de la Pena goes one step further. With Hunger in L.A. she  combines filmmaking, augmented reality, and journalism to recreate a real incident that took place two years ago at a food bank line in L.A. This is a fascinating project …

Will Wright is building a new reality-game

Will Wright (the man behind the Sims, SimCity and Spore) is now thinking to use crowd sourcing to mix reality with game world… this new type of hybrid could become a new genre…  Have a look to this news article from Reuters…  

How can 3D worlds be used in documentaries? A review of One Millionth Tower

Kat Cizek, and her NFB team, have just launched Highrise’s latest baby: One Millionth Tower. This is the fifth experiment in four years of what is now becoming a networked documentary, rather than a simple idoc. When Highrise started at the NFB in 2008 it was described as a “multi-year, multi-media documentary” but I have to admit that the whole concept was not very clear …

“La nuit oubliee” a French web-doc for LeMonde.fr

The 17th October 1961 a group of Algerians got killed by the French police. Fifty years after the event French newspaper Le Monde commissioned Olivier Lambert et Thomas Salva (the guys behind the brilliant Breves de Trottoirs) to do a historical web-doc on such mass crime.  Have a look to La nuit oubliee, just out – and produced by a newspaper! …

Get ready to submit your projects to TFI – January 2012

The Tribeca New Media Fund will re-accept submissions in January 2012. This is what you need to know about them (from tehir website): ABOUT The TFI New Media Fund provides funding and support to non-fiction, social issue media projects which go beyond traditional screens – integrating film with content across media platforms, from video games and mobile apps to social …

The talented user (users as documentary agents)

The purpose of this post is to nudge discussion on the role of the user in interactive documentaries (i-docs), and specifically to consider what capabilities we might want those users to have. I shall refer to those capabilities as their ‘talents’. And I’ll begin with a suggestion that the key distinction to be made between interactive and non-interactive documentary is …

Some Thoughts on Social Change through Story-telling

In addition to their obvious contributions to non-fiction narrative media, the unique characteristics of interactive documentary may find another area of usefulness in cultural and social anthropology, especially as paradigm shifts continue to evolve regarding the power relationships between those being “studied” and those who are doing the “studying.” Beginning in the 1960s, traditional techniques for conducting ethnographic field research …

An exclusive interview with Katerina Cizek

Highrise is probably the most exciting interactive documentary umbrella of the year. One of its sub-projects, Out My Window, has just been nominated for an International Digital Emmy in the Non-Fiction category. And now Out My Window presents its own off spring: Participate which showcases your photos and stories out of highrise windows around the world. Katerina Cizek, Highrise’s Director at …

The i-doc as a relational object

Highrise – multiple bridges into the layers of reality What are i-docs, and why are they more than just documentaries done with digital technologies? You will find all sort of new terminologies that can fit into the i-docs family: webdos, docu-games, collab docs, transmedia docs, cross-media docs… or just interactive documentaries. This can seem all very confusing, but really what …

When documentary space becomes a whole city

Most people would agree with the idea that digital media has totally changed the way we produce, distribute and view documentaries. It is easy to see how digital cameras, digital edit suites and online distribution have become the norm in the documentary world, it is harder to see how much new media has infiltrating the whole concept behind what John …