Type Rider: game documentary on the history of type - Charles Ayats, interface design
Although moving images play an increasingly important role in web documentaries, the format itself is still trapped inside fixed areas of scrollable text pages. Video contents reside in closed, self-contained environments with only little bonds to other web contents. In order to create true web-native documentaries, we need to break up the format, allow for its dynamic reconfiguration and connect it on all ends with the rest of the web. We need to look at film as genre-independent, non-linear information architecture, with time as the main controlling instance and spatiotemporal links as the primary navigation. Developing a better understanding of the technological environment is hereby a key requirement for producers, filmmakers and storytellers.
Different degrees of interactivity are now possible and are changing the way documentary storytelling relates to reality.
We will examine game mechanics of interactive experiences and try to find the essence of an immersive, interactive-in-a-playful-way webdocumentary experience.
Technological evolution brought several transformations to the way we communicate and tell stories. The challenges, in this context, for the production of narratives are several, being one of them the way in which we can fulfill the expectations of audiences in a fragmented environment of experience.
Are media companies prepared to answer the landscape of technological transformations and audience changing behaviors?
What type of new narrative formats are starting to accommodate audience expectation?
Transmedia narratives are stories told using several platforms and where each one conveys the content with its best features. This way the story can be introduced as a film, expanded in a TV format or comics and its universe explored in a game. All these unfoldings need to maintain an independent character to allow its consume as a single autonomous content.
Collective intelligence is a concept that was born from the debates promoted by Pierre Lévy about the technologies of intelligence. This was characterized by a new way of thinking, sustained by social connections that can be achieved through the use of Internet’s open networks. No one knows everything but everyone knows something. All knowledge is in the Humanity.
Joscha Jaeger is a creative technologist and researcher, working for many years in the field of web-based film and video search engines. He has a strong focus on film as information architecture and believes in the power of open source concepts for moving images. Joscha has been co-organizing the “Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption” (WSICC) at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video for three years, has served as a mentor at the “Popathon” HackJams for web-native storytelling and is continuously developing the “FrameTrail” Open Hypervideo Environment.
Charles Ayats obtained a Master’s degree in Interactive Digital Experience from the École de l’image Les Gobelins in Paris. As an interactive designer of interactive documentaries, he creates participatory experiences, often enriched with game mechanics to facilitate transmission of knowledge, for example Type:Rider (2013) on the history of typography.
Always on the lookout for new formats to tell his stories, he is particularly interested in virtual reality, as SENS VR (2016), an adaptation of a french absurd comic book.
Rafael Antunes is a PhD student in the Communication Science Doctoral Programme at Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias. Recently he was enrolled in the Video 360ºVR Narrative course from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and also in the course on “Elements of Journalism” by Universidade Lusófona. He was invited to participate in the project CIAKL, european course for entrepreneurship for creative industries, an initiative from several universities and media companies from Europe, to look for new business models in creative industries. He presented his Masters thesis on Cinematographic Studies in the same university with the transmedia project “Lápis Azul” and has a bachelor degree on Cinema, Video and Multimedia Communication from Universidade Lusófona as well.
Participated in the Erasmus Program at Budapest’s SZFE (University of Theater, Cinema and Television), Hungary. Participated in the UT Austin | Portugal - Digital media Summer Institute, 2011, course on “Convergence Culture” and also the course on “Transmedia Storytelling in the Contemporary Media” that took place at Universidad Nova de Lisboa. Professionally he works at Impresa Group as a Product Manager in the Direction of Digital Products and Services. He is one of the people responsible for implementing the technology of video 360ºVR in the company. He is also a professor of Transmedia and Video 360 VR in several BA and MA at Universidade Lusófona.
As an author he directed the short film “Moeda Viva” about Pierre Klossowski’s work, film that was selected to be exhibit in Portugal’s National Cinemateca and “Museu Berardo”. “O Tenente” (The Lieutenant), another short film of his, filmed in Super 16mm, about the creation of the Portuguese Republic in 1910, won the 1st prize ICA/Lusófona 2010, prize ZON and the III Festival of Digital in Odemira and also the Augusta Prize for best short film in the Cinema Festival Bragacine. The film was exhibited in the cable channel SIC Notícias and in several national and international festivals. "Um Natal Especial" (A Special Christmas) filmed in Super 16mm, 2010, was exhibited in RTP, Portugal's National TV station. He produced and directed the transmedia project "Mutter" that was showed in SIC Radical, another cable channel. The project main objective was the development of a transmedia narrative that could integrate different platforms and cross narratives. The project got a prize by ZON and was present in several cinema festivals, national and international. Directed and produced the project "Lápis Azul" about the censorship period in Portugal, composed by a fiction film and a documentary. The project was exhibited by SIC and SIC Noticias channels and got distributed also in cinema theaters. This project won the Sophia prize, from the Portuguese Academy of Cinema, for best short documentary film, best original script from Festival Caminhos do Cinema Português and the Augusta prize for best portuguese film in Cinema Festival Bragacine.