Digital realities

Streaming video services were ubiquitous. Hulu is aggressively competing with the biggest players, Amazon and Netflix, for new work. Filmmakers are looking for alternatives to the take-it-or-leave-it Netflix-style contract, and especially looking to hold on to some back-end rights. They would also like some data on performance, which may be even harder to get.

Even with all the new streaming money flowing into the environment, it’s not easier to make a living as a documentary filmmaker. The conclusions of a 2016 Center for Media & Social Impact report are still valid today. As filmmakers Doug Blush, Tom Hardy, Alexandria Bombach, and Bradley Beesley testified, it’s still about renting your equipment out, taking odd jobs, working for hire and maybe teaching in order to fund your passion.

But others are working on changing the ecosystem. Jax Deluca from the National Endowment for the Arts highlighted takeaways from an ongoing, field-wide strategic planning process. Along with film-specific opportunities (think state and local tax incentives) and building representative institutions (the International Documentary Association now has an advocacy staff person), panelists reminded filmmakers to pay attention to larger policy issues, such as net neutrality. Meanwhile, at Google’s diversity summit, Full Color Future, FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn pointedly criticized the FCC’s lack of concern for consumers, and asked creators as well as small businesses and activists to make their voices heard on net neutrality.

Still from “People’s Republic of Desire” by Eric Jordan

Sophisticated visual design is becoming essential to documentary filmmaking, whether for transitions, infographics, animations that whisk through exposition, or emphasis. If you had any doubt about its central importance, look at Hao Wu’s “People’s Republic of Desire,” which describes the intense world of internet-famous celebrities’ streaming showrooms in China (on public TV next year). Another important one for visual design is “Take Your Pills,” a Netflix doc by Alison Klayman on the many faces of Adderall culture in a society addicted to speed, efficiency and individualism. One side effect: Filmmakers have never expected to need much quantitative savvy, but with the rise of data visualization, it’s becoming clearer how important that skillset has become.

Virtual reality

VR got its own large display room, with a few spectacular items, including a music video on steroids, “Beethoven’s 5th,” and a magnificent, alarming visit to Greenland’s rapidly melting glaciers, “Greenland Melting.” But many of the documentary VR exhibits were passive-viewing 360 video, VR’s low-hanging fruit. My fave of that kind was a short “VR for Good” project (funded by Oculus, which matches non-profits with filmmakers) from the U.K. on testicular cancer awareness, Ryan Hartsell’s “The Evolution of Testicles.” It deftly used the form to surprise you, make you laugh, and hammer home the message with humor. You get to go up high in an air balloon shaped like a giant pair of testicles. Very, um, ballsy.

Generally, though, it was often hard to parse why the subject matter and narrative wouldn’t work as well if made as a 2D documentary. “Sun Ladies,” for instance, was an absorbing visit to a military unit of Yazidi women fighting ISIS, and could have been a recruiting video; but the VR wasn’t necessary to the telling.

The Dining Room by Rone

Lester Francois’ “Rone,” about an Australian street artist who paints highly crafted female portraits one- and two-stories high on decaying, about-to-be-demolished buildings, did build an environment (with the gaming software Unity) appropriate to the subject matter. His subject not only makes environmental art, but makes it in places that often are then torn down. Viewers could browse in a virtual art gallery in VR, watch a 360 film about the artist, take VR tours of Melbourne street art, and conduct at-will explorations of Rone’s environmental installations. Motherboard used the same format (and also the Unity platform) for a “museum-like” experience of endangered wildlife in the Brazilian Pantanal wetland region, “Living with Jaguars.”

But no matter what, the limitations are still stark. The equipment is clumsy, access is minimal (perhaps 300 people at a festival), and smart-phone/Cardboard viewing lowers the quality. Makers of course are endlessly hopeful that technological wizardry is around the corner that will be more accessible.

Perils of AI

I think the oddest moment I had in the festival was while watching “More Human than Human,” by Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting. It’s about the way AI (artificial intelligence) is all around us and getting big enough to be downright creepy. (Or worse than that: at SXSW Elon Musk went out of his way to warn people to be very afraid.) In the doc, an engineer is demonstrating the speech capacities of the robot he programmed, “Sophie.” To do so, he hits on her…and she winks. Really. I’m still waiting for the robots’ #MeToo moment.

Despite the challenges, SXSW showcased how the documentary form has become an important element of media ecology. Far beyond the “pivot to video” in journalism, documentary is a thriving line for streaming media services, a way of pushing brands, a genre to attract investment to cutting edge media – and of course, as always, a way of calling public attention to important public issues.

This article draws upon research and writing for an article on the SXSW festival in Documentary magazine.

Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor in the School of Communication at American University and the founder of the Center for Media & Social Impact there. She is the author of, among other books, “Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction.” (Oxford).

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Reporting by Reuben Stern, Rachel Wise and Jon Doty

More information:

• Vidrovr was created by Joe Ellis and Dan Morozoff as a spinoff to a system they built at Columbia University called News Rover. According to Ellis, New Rover was a system that “recorded 100 hours of television news a day, chopped up the hourlong programs into specific topic based segments, and then extracted information like … text on screen, people on screen, what’s appearing on screen, what people are saying.” It then sorted all of the information into larger news events, which could be searched and filtered by specific topic or person.
• The Vidrovr system combines speech and facial recognition, enabling it to identify when someone well-known is speaking. Its machine-learning algorithm can also extrapolate that same information from context clues such as environment.
• Vidrovr’s system sorts detected information into several categories that include recognized persons, on-screen text and graphics, scenes detected and tags for each frame of a video.
• NYC Media Lab Combine, which is described as a “launchpad accelerator for early stage startup teams from New York City universities,” held a demo day in April 2016. Video of the Vidrovr team’s presentation can be found here.
• Vidrovr charges a fee to process each batch of video and send back the related metadata. To use Vidrovr’s other technologies like automated recommendation and publishing, clients pay upfront to purchase a license.

Rachel Wise is an editor at the Futures Lab at the Reynolds Journalism Institute and co-producer of the weekly Futures Lab video update.

The Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Futures Lab video update features a roundup of fresh ideas, techniques and developments to help spark innovation and change in newsrooms across all media platforms. Visit the RJI website for the full archive of Futures Lab videos, or download the iPad app to watch the show wherever you go. You can also sign up to receive email notification of each new episode.

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Click on the photo or here to see the full series. Creative Commons photo.

This is a guest post that originally appeared on Storyhunter’s publication The Video Strategist and is cross posted with permission.

We are constantly being reminded that video is one of the biggest and most important forms of online media. But how big is it? At Storyhunter, we’ve gathered past, present, and predicted statistics for social and mobile video to analyze just how important video is and will be to the future of content creation.

Digital Video is Social Video

If you haven’t already begun investing in video production for social media networks, now is the time. When over 100 million hours of video on Facebook and over 650 million hours of video on YouTube get consumed each day, it’s clear that video is an integral part of consumers’ social and online experience.

The post The State of Video in 2016: Social Video, Mobile Video, Heavy Competition appeared first on MediaShift.

Pete Jones is the senior producer at Framestore’s VR Studio in New York–the world’s first dedicated studio of its kind. Since the studio’s opening in 2014, Jones has helped drive a number of milestones in the VR space. His work includes HBO’s massively successful Game of Thrones “Ascend the Wall” experience and over a dozen other projects across Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, and Samsung Gear VR. Jones has ten years of experience in VFX across film, television, commercials, and VR, and has worked with Framestore for over seven years. He recently served as a panelist for the Virtual Reality category in the AICP Next Awards 2016.

Pete Jones, Senior Producer at Framestore VR. Courtesy photo.

How is virtual reality important to storytelling?

Pete Jones: Whether it’s important to storytelling as we think of it now is a hot topic that will probably continue to be debated until the time somebody produces a really convincing example of a VR movie. We need to think about what stories are, as the advent of VR asks a slightly different set of questions from its audience. The paradigm has shifted and we’re now users rather than just viewers, which challenges us to look at what a story actually is.

Does it have to be driven by a narrative and contain characters and dialogue, or can it simply be an experience? The platform is compelling because it elicits a completely different feeling from other forms of media, and so we must ask different questions of it in order to tap into its potential.

What areas of media do you think VR will have the most most impact on?

Jones: Gaming will be affected fundamentally and early because of the use of real-time rendering game engines to create content it’s all set up for game developers and their target demographic. The applications for the technology are far reaching though, and you can expect to see applications developing for training in all areas, but particularly well resourced fields such as medicine and the military. Social media will never be the same again either, as the power of sitting in a room with someone on the other side of the world is scarily immersive.

How do you think VR will impact journalism now and in the future?

Jones: I think it’s hard to say, as journalism is a craft in and of itself. Certainly there is scope there to transport people to a place and impress on a user the atmosphere of an event, whether it be a sporting moment or a war zone. But as with film and other media with a rich history, language, and craft, VR will find its place alongside those disciplines—contributing rather than competing.

How will it impact advertising?

Jones: VR, when done well, gives the user something that you can’t get with anything else. Anyone who’s put on a headset and taken part in a great experience will testify to that. Harnessing that power, whether to tell a story, to entertain, or to sell cola, can be an extremely effective way to get the message across and get it to stick. If what we expect to happen does in fact happen and we see mass adoption of VR headsets across a number of platforms in the next year, brands will be taking part en masse.

“The Nature of Industry” is a 360° video produced by Framestore for General Electric

Should commercial producers invest more into VR?

Jones: Absolutely. If you’re not already being asked about 360° camera rigs, tracking volumes, and binaural sound—you will be!

How should brands and marketers approach VR?

Jones: That’s the big question, but the projections for growth are very encouraging. The key for marketers is finding the best fit for their brands, as VR is such a massive area that covers video, gaming, mobile, installation, everything across all art and entertainment! The eternal question for every idea is “is this a good fit for VR?” If it can’t be done on any other platform, like on a computer screen with a mouse, then that’s a really good start.

Storyhunter, founded in May 2012 by a group of journalists, filmmakers and web developers, is a talent marketplace and network for video professionals worldwide. This piece first appeared on the Storyhunter Blog.

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This week we look at a new tool called LucidCam, a camera that shoots 3-D, 180-degree virtual reality. The consumer-level camera is about the size of an iPhone 5 and captures high-resolution video and photos. CEO and co-founder Han Jin says LucidCam stands out from other VR cameras because most record in 2D, 360 degrees. Jin explains why this might be a better option for journalists.

For more information:

• LucidCam raised more than $114,000 through a successful Indiegogo campaign and received more than $2 million from several investors. The company recently partnered with Taiwanese manufacturer Wistron to begin mass production later this year.
• Videos made using LucidCam can be viewed in the Lucid app, which is available on both iOS andAndroid.
• LucidCam is available for pre-order now. Shipping to the U.S. and Europe is expected to begin in December.
• According to Lucid’s industrial designer, the inspiration for the camera’s design came from the Apple Mouse.
• While Jin says shooting in 180 degrees makes more sense — “because you don’t have eyes in your back” — he understands that some people prefer 360-degree experiences and says LucidCam can accommodate that. Because the camera has rounded edges, it’s possible to attach three devices to a special tripod and record in 360 degrees.

Rachel Wise is an editor at the Futures Lab at the Reynolds Journalism Institute and co-producer of the weekly Futures Lab video update.

The Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Futures Lab video update features a roundup of fresh ideas, techniques and developments to help spark innovation and change in newsrooms across all media platforms. Visit the RJI website for the full archive of Futures Lab videos, or download the receive email notification of each new episode.

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It seems everywhere you look in the industry today, you’re bombarded with something related to 4K resolution. Look over here. Attention: You’ve got to see this. Maybe it’s a channel you must watch, a service you’ve gotta have, or a television that is priced so low that you can’t afford not to try this revolutionary new technology.

Face it, we are all faced with 4K FOMO (fear of missing out). You’ve got to beat your neighbor, friend or drinking buddy in the footrace to 4K (also known as Ultra HD or UHD). Nothing is going to hold you back.

Make no mistake — 4K content is gorgeous. 4K content looks fantastic and will likely have you experiencing deja vu, remembering the first time you saw 1080p HD content. You want to rub your eyes, or at least blink a few times, as the level of detail and colors seem to leap from the screen. I’m a believer and self-admitted early adopter and own a 4K television myself. In my case, the adoption curve has made the HD channels on my DirecTV look poor. This happens when a channel is overcompressed a bit to save bandwidth to provide for other channels, yet you’re watching on a television capable of rendering 4x the pixels as your service provider is pushing. With 4K, it seems I’m not the only one in the proverbial pool. More consumers are buying in – research shows acceleration in 4K television purchases over the past 12 months, and these rates are expected to increase as prices drop. It doesn’t take a market analyst to predict that for 4K the future is bright, literally and figuratively.

Stock image via Pixabay and used here with Creative Commons license.

A gripe about hype

My gripe today, in a Clint Eastwood “get off my lawn” Grand Torino sorta way is with the overhype many in the streaming business employ to position 4K as something that is happening right now (get it NOW or you’ll be left behind). This is pure marketing fodder, hyping the specification in the hopes that they win business by appearing to be ahead of everyone else, on the bleeding edge of technology. This is akin to using fool’s gold to mislead potential customers into thinking that 4K streaming is something they must invest in now.

And there is some truth to the notion, if you are in the market to buy a television or if you are a service provider with the need to deploy encoders to deliver 4K channels for your subscribers. For the uninitiated, this would be the DirecTVs, Verizons, Time Warners of the world who provide your channel lineups. They are adding infrastructure to process these new 4K channels they are delivering (or planning to) to their subscribers. But OTT or mobile streaming of 4K content? Unless you’re Netflix or Amazon, 4K isn’t a reality anytime soon in production or at scale.

Here’s the why:

It’s more expensive to create and deliver

4K is more expensive to create and deliver by orders of magnitude. The relative return on investment today just isn’t there. From a practical perspective, 4K streaming presents more business challenges than technical challenges today. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll need to improve on the technicalities and architectures through which 4K is created and delivered (and more on that in a second).

But let’s stop and talk technology briefly. If you look at data from the Top 10 ISPs in North America, the average Netflix stream is delivered at roughly 3.5 Mbps. This is sufficient and works well for HD streaming today. By comparison, the same content delivered as a 4K stream requires 15 Mbps of throughput. Even in today’s hyper-competitive content delivery network market, this means that the average streaming customer would see their streaming and storage budget increase by orders of magnitude.

At a time when many are still in the process of turning their streaming infrastructure from a cost center to a profit center utilizing things like dynamic ad insertion, increases in the overall cost model is generally something not up for consideration. This isn’t to say this is a proverbial brick wall and that streaming is a #never4K proposition, but it will take time for broad market adoption and availability.

It takes more to process

So while we’re talking about the cost to deliver 4K video, we can’t leave out the other expense with this content in both time and investment. 4K content costs more to process across the entire workflow. To shoot, edit, store, and encode/transcode video in 4K resolution is expensive – a great deal more than HD, as I’ve outlined earlier. Encoding by itself can take as much as six times longer to encode in 4K. Sure, these metrics will change over time as we get a better handle on how to process 4K, but today’s cost will be largely prohibitive for the majority of companies who would like to “kick the tires” of 4K.

The reality today is that only premium content owners can afford the cost in kicking said tires. In fact, Netflix charges more for it. Today’s business models just don’t support 4K workflows for many beyond the Netflixes, Amazons and a few others. It is the Louis Vuitton of streaming video at the moment.

What about HDR?

What will move the needle? As is usually the case in technology, an acronym may hold the keys to something innovative and market moving. Perhaps that neighbor or drinking buddy may have told you, 1080p video with HDR also looks amazing. What is HDR? High Dynamic Range expands the range of both contrast and color significantly. Adding more depth of color and contrast to HD provides for some beautiful content. In fact, in many side by side displays I’ve seen, 1080p video with HDR looks better than 4K.

As the second half of 2016 rolls on, expect to see more HDR in both televisions and perhaps in streaming offerings, as some seek a cost effective solution to show compelling content without the (for now) steep adoption cost of 4K content. Controversial comments, to be sure – but I maintain that we’ll see 4K content in its due time, sooner on the large TV screen and on other screens eventually.

Again, I’m a 4K believer; one of the reasons I love the video space is the constant pace of innovation, where we’re continually raising the bar and finding ways to make streaming exceed expectations. But I also believe in architecting and delivering solutions that are reliable, cost effective and innovative, without smoke and mirrors or vaporware.

Will 4K have a relevant seat at the streaming table? Yes – very likely. 4K as a strong addition to core video technology has more benefits and legs than the last great technology to come along, sending people scrambling to market themselves, their wares and push their customers to adopt. Remember 3D anyone? 4K holds more promise in its little finger than 3D had in its entire body, but mass market adoption of 4K streaming is still a few years out.

That’s not to say that if you are a programmer or service provider and want to ensure a smooth path toward the future of your streaming platform, you should ask your technology partners whether they can check the 4K box. But it is unrealistic and irresponsible to create or increase upon FOMO in the marketplace today with so much 4K marketing-speak. Like a good Guy Fieri burger on television, today’s 4K streaming marketing is a bit hyped up and over-the-top (pun intended). For now, I’ll take mine with all the fixins, but easy on the hot sauce and hype.

And then out of the blue, a quadruple kitchen sink burger shows up in the form of 8K content. We’ll handle that monstrosity next time.

Matt Smith is the Chief Evangelist for Anvato – the leading, turnkey platform solution that enables media companies, content providers and broadcasters with a robust, powerful and complete toolset to enable their content to reach any screen, anytime.

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“This is going to be the year of a lot of bad VR,” predicted the New York Times’ Sam Dolnick. The reason? Headsets just went on sale, and media productions are rushing onto different platforms to make it worth your while to buy one. But there’s also going to be some good stuff.

It’s still a time of great experiment. After all, the basic grammar of this immersive form is still being worked out, as a recent Documentary article points out. But makers were drawing on experience in sharing tips at the festival.

1. Make it a destination experience–one they’d like to return to. The New York Times, which is making a well-publicized landgrab for journalistic VR, announced its launch of Seeking Pluto’s Frigid Heart, its simulation of the surface of Pluto, using NASA data. The available clips looked impressively returnable-to.

2. Think of yourself as a tour guide to the experience, more than the storyteller. Storytelling is still a headscratcher of a problem in VR, while taking people on a journey is much simpler conceptually. As Jessica Brilhart, Google’s head VR filmmaker, said, “Don’t try to force your viewer to go anywhere; reward them for doing so.” Jake Silverstein, editor of the NYT magazine, said, “Story isn’t the center of VR.”

3. Pay attention to the sound, and use the capacity of the medium for directional sound.  Musicians and sound designers were all over Tribeca’s VR showcases, because sound has been recognized as central to the experience, especially directional sound that enhances the illusion of presence and that creates more specificity. One of the featured VR pieces was a father-daughter story told in music, inside a car (and produced by Pearl Google’s Spotlight Stories),

4.  Virtual reality can be alarmingly effective. Although real-life VR video—a Palestinian mother’s story of loss, a heartwarming story about African entrepreneurship—generally underwhelmed me (and made me feel guilty for being underwhelmed), in one case social-issue VR video really worked for me. 6X9, produced for The Guardian newspaper, puts you inside a solitary prison cell for only a few minutes, just long enough to make you really glad you can leave. In the process, it creates a variety of short messages on the surrounding walls, as well as fantasy wall patterns and ghosting meant to emulate hallucinations engendered by extended solitary time. The combination of experience and information is intensely affecting, without being overwhelming. An Australian VR experience, Collisions, combined video and animation to recreate a real-life 1950s atomic bomb blast from the viewpoint of and within the physical environment of an aboriginal elder. It was a remarkable point-of-view experience, giving viewers a chance to imagine not only the event but the elder’s relationship to the land before and after it.

5. Video is several kinds of a challenge. Video carries with it implicit linear storytelling, as it records in real time. It requires gigantic amounts of digital space. Any distortion sets off alarm bells in the viewer’s brain. (360-degree video is a lot easier to do than VR, though.) “Animation and VR are made for each other,” said Maureen Fan of Baobab Studios (they made the short animated VR experience Invasion!).

6. Less can be more. One of the most minimal VR experiences was the exquisitely designed Sens, built upon a graphic novel that is equally minimal. In both, a trench-coated man (you will sometimes become this figure in the VR) explores a world where a white landscape is occasionally interrupted by black arrows — follow them — which lead to buildings, ruins, a beach, and eventually, in Chapter 1, to a magic carpet ride. The experience plunges you into a world of indistinct and perhaps unknowable meaning, and gives you a wondrous experience of discovery unattached to goals.

7. More can also be more. One of the most satisfying VR experiences was the elegant, well-designed game Land’s End, from the same people who brought us Monument Valley. It shares some of the same characteristics—delight in discovery and arrival, solveable mysteries, beautiful, improbable magical landscapes. Deep VR, a scuba-like trip through an imaginary cave with experience synched with breathing rate, was so hypnotically entrancing that I whimpered when they tapped me on the shoulder to signal the end of my time with the experience.  The music was key to the enchantment. Allumette, a grim look at an alternative future in which the Little Match Girl lives and dies again, allows viewers to poke around in the adorable, elaborately constructed town in the sky, which provides her no social safety net.

8. Be prepared to make your work for several platforms and constantly changing equipment. Cardboard, Oculus, Vive, mobile and the web all require different versions. Rigs change daily, it seems. While we wait for the field to shake out, resign yourself to a lot of adapting.

Google cardboard. Photo by Maurizio Pesce on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

9. Respect the current limits of the technology. Today’s VR allows for limited movement, and movement in virtual reality can cause enough cognitive dissonance to make you nauseated. So you want to avoid “PPSs” (potential puke shots).

10. Expect glitches. A lot. Many of the demos at Tribeca suffered from tech meltdowns, which drove everyone crazy and made long lines to use the equipment even longer.

This post originally appeared on the the site for the Center for Media & Social Impact, School of Communication, American University.

Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor and Director of the Center for Media & Social Impact, School of Communication, American University, and co-author with Peter Jaszi of “Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright” (University of Chicago Press). You can give feedback at cmsimpact@american.edu.

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Screenshot of Time Labs Oscar diversity data visualization, “See the Entire History of the Oscar Diversity Problem in One Chart”

Time’s data visualization showing the small scattering of nominations for actors of color, and its even smaller subset for winners, reaffirms the validity of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag not just for this year, but for many years past. According to Time, “the full 92-year history of the Academy Awards shows that Hollywood’s highest honors have lagged the population on issues of race and representation.”

Fast Company uses similar data in a video infographic that turns the homogeneity of the Oscar gold into a damning indictment on its lack of diversity. Mother Jones, the Economist, and others have weighed in with similar presentations of their own, often with comparisons to the general audience as a whole. A new study out by the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism also confirms what Hollywood critics have been saying all along: that the Oscars are just the tip of the iceberg. Annenberg’s comprehensive data reveals the lack of inclusion for women, persons of color, and LGBT representations both in front of and behind the camera.

Missing in all this data, however, is a consideration of the actual roles that actors of color are getting nominated for, and occasionally winning. The data and data visualizations merely count the yes’s and the no’s, bean-counting when the question of “how” is as important as “how many.” The issue of minority representation is nothing new. The gangster, the nerd, the exotic vixen, the terrorist, and the noble savage are just some examples of familiar and tired racial tropes that are too common in the media. Indeed, apart from historical roles, recent Oscar wins simply reinforce stereotypes.

In the entire history of the Oscars, there have been only eight lead actors of color who have won. Of those, half of them were in historical dramas which demanded ethnic and non-white identities for casting accuracy: Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Ben Kingsley as Gandhi, and Yul Brynner as the King of Siam. The only recent wins have been Denzel Washington for his riveting 2001 Academy award performance in Training Day, where he played the thug, and Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball, a film exploring race and racism.

Oscar award winners Denzel Washington in Training Day and Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball

The data and the visualizations hide the fact that, without historical figures, the Academy is left to award strong performances in movies that are about race itself or to stereotypes. But even films about historical figures aren’t immune from exclusionary casting. Ridley Scott made questionable choices in Exodus: Gods and Kings by whitewashing the roles in ancient Egypt, with Moses and the Pharaoh’s court played by mostly white actors, and the thieves and slaves played by non-white actors. But Scott’s misfire aside, there’s value in the histories of communities of color played by actors of those communities. It just seems that we need more than that.

Whether or not the #OscarsSoWhite spotlight on Hollywood marks a tipping point remains to be seen. But journalists and audiences alike should recognize that data and visualizations chronicling the (hopefully) more diverse casting for future Oscars don’t reflect the more important measures of progress if they are simply counting wins and losses. They could, in fact, lull us into a false sense of forward movement if we are satisfied with tracking dots. We should be demanding data points that are better and not just more numerous.

Russell Chun is an assistant professor of journalism at Hofstra University School of Communication, where he teaches multimedia storytelling and data journalism. Twitter @russellchun.

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Is interactive documentary about letting a viewer choose their own adventure (Ted Biggs and Angad Bhall’s The Deeper They Bury Me), about making work that viewers provide input to (Kyle McDonald’s Exhausting a Crowd, Ross Goodwin’s word.camera), or about creating systems, such as games (Tracy Fullerton, Walden: A Game), that viewers can tell their own stories with? All of the above, it seems. And more: Virtual reality was the new toy.

Some takeaways from the conference experience:

1. If you’re using virtual reality, have more than a gee-whiz reason.

Photo by Phil Whitehouse on Flickr and reused here with Creative Commons license.

Being able to look around in the image still isn’t like being there (nausea is still an issue), and anyway being there isn’t any royal road to understanding. Sending viewers to virtual refugee camps or to a Liberian hospital where Ebola was subdued (Gabo Arora and Chris Milk’s Waves of Grace) doesn’t necessarily make them any more empathetic than drawing a picture for them with words or photos or showing them a movie. The touching story of a survivor living with PTSD from a terrorist attack (Darren Emerson’s Witness 360: 7/7) isn’t discernibly more touching for having strapped on the lunchbox-on-face VR equipment and been able to look around her bedroom. That doesn’t mean the stories weren’t well told and touching; both central characters and their narratives were compelling. But they would have been compelling without the VR.

2. Leverage the capacities of the medium.

A lovely animated VR work, Drawing Room, by Jan Rothuizen and Sara Kolster — winner of the Digital Storytelling award — does that with grace.  Viewers got both to browse Rothuizen’s physical workspace at will and share his creative questions, and also go with him to dreamspace in the sky — all without nausea.

3. Make sure something’s at stake.

Dries Depoorter’s Sheriff Software put viewers in the position of being snoops. It showcased publicly-available police webcam feeds, and allowed you to report crimes such as jaywalking. (I didn’t see anyone reporting a scofflaw.) Simply scanning the webcams was a chilling reminder of how pervasive and public such information is.

4. Make the audience part of the event.

Vigorous Twitter chatter raised questions that the hosts sometimes engaged. Even more fun, May Abdalla and Amy Rose from Anagram (remember Door into the Dark?) put surprises under everyone’s chair and provoked a conversation about what kind of experience could become part of their next effort.

5. Remember, if it’s interactive, the user is important. Really, really important. 

So you really, really need to consult them (this is what Paul Ford calls WWIC). This was William Uricchio’s core observation, as the grandfather of DocLab and much more interactive documentary work at MIT’s Open Doc Lab.  Creativity is a social process. Being creative in an interactive environment is a user-centric process.  And inevitably, as Sandra Gaudenzi noted in the twitter chatter, involving the user also involves you in clarifying your expectations, goals and, um, metrics.

This post originally appeared on the the site for the Center for Media & Social Impact, School of Communication, American University.

Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor and Director of the Center for Media & Social Impact, School of Communication, American University, and co-author with Peter Jaszi of “Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright” (University of Chicago Press). You can give feedback at cmsimpact@american.edu.

The post 5 Takeaways About Interactive Documentaries from IDFA’s DocLab appeared first on MediaShift.

Don’t have a lot of time to spare but still want to listen to the Mediatwits? Then check out our Digital Media Brief below!

Mediatwits: Full Episode

Digital Media Brief

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MEDIATWITS BIOS

Mark Glaser is executive editor and publisher of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He is an award-winning writer and accidental entrepreneur, who has taken MediaShift from a one-person blog to a growing media company with events such as Collab/Space workshops and weekend hackathons; the weekly “Mediatwits” podcast; and digital trainings, DigitalEd, in partnership with top journalism schools. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.

Andrew Lih is a new media journalist and associate professor of journalism at the American University School of Communication. He is the author of “The Wikipedia Revolution” (Hyperion 2009, Aurum UK 2009) and is a noted expert on online collaboration and journalism. He is a veteran of AT&T Bell Laboratories and in 1994 created the first online city guide for New York City (www.ny.com). Follow him on Twitter @fuzheado.

SPECIAL GUESTS

Eric Elia is President of Cainkade, a product design, and development studio based in New York and San Francisco. He joined Cainkade in 2012 after over 10 years as a pioneer in the online video space. Most recently, he was part of the founding team at Brightcove where he first oversaw product design, then founded and ran the in-house consulting business. Previously, he led the design, development, and strategy for the Comcast online service. Follow Eric on Twitter @ericelia.

John Heinsen serves as Vice President, New Media for the Producers Guild of America (PGA) and sits on the Executive Committee of the Producers Peer Group of the Television Academy. His company Bunnygraph Entertainment, work with writers, talent, and technologists to create serialized formats for television, interactive/web, and mobile platforms in what he calls “Storytelling through Advanced Content”.

Will Richmond is editor and publisher of VideoNuze, a widely followed online publication which provides daily original analysis and curated news for online video decision-makers available at www.videonuze.com. Earlier in his career, Will spent 8 years at Continental Cablevision (then the 3rd largest U.S. cable TV operator), where he was VP, Business Development and part of the founding team of Continental’s pioneering broadband Internet access service “Highway1”. Subsequently he served as VP, Business Development for CMGI’s iCast and for Narad Networks.

BACKGROUND

For cord cutters, the dream is to be able to watch shows on networks such as HBO or Showtime without buying a cable bundle with a bunch of channels they don’t watch. And we’re starting to see the idea gain traction with HBO Now, and Showtime on Hulu. The reason streaming services are gaining ground is evident. According to a report from Business Insider, 79 percent of millennials surveyed said they used Netflix while only 3 percent did not use any streaming video service.

At this point, it’s likely we’re going to be seeing more money pouring into streaming video. Bloomberg is reporting that Amazon is working on adding on-demand networks available through its Prime Instant Video service. Vimeo seems to be hoping to emulate the success of Netflix and Amazon with its own line of original series. Even more worrying for networks and cable providers have been the loss of subscribers. In the last two years, ESPN has lost 7 million subscribers, while Netflix has increased its subscriptions by 40 percent in the same time.

How much power will the streaming services gain in the future, and what moves will producers have to make? Have you cut the cord to cable because of streaming video? How should streaming rights be negotiated?

Jefferson Yen is the producer for the Mediatwits Podcast. His work has been on KPCC Southern California Public Radio and KRTS Marfa Public Radio. You can follow him @jeffersontyen.

The post Mediatwits #181: TV Rights Up for Grabs in the Streaming Age appeared first on MediaShift.