What is the future of storytelling?
This question is being asked a lot these days. The availability of new tools and new media strategies have brought about many experiments in storytelling. Whether incorporating social media, gaming, augmented reality, audience participation, or transmedia narratives, various elements are being pieced together in different ways to create new experiences. I recently attended a two talks at MOMA about the current state of Interactive Documentaries — specifically, documentaries native to the web.
Part I of “A Field Guide to the Interactive Documentary,” was hosted by Zach Wise, the multimedia producer responsible for much of the innovative work at The New York Times. The two projects Wise showed really stood out: Johnny Cash Project, which creates an ever evolving music video from over 250,000 (and counting) user contributions, and the NYT’s “A Year at War” project, which enables visitors to navigate their own journey through a breadth of video content, articles, and original documentation to learn about the stories of the U.S. military at war in Afghanistan.
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