inspired & good

Some brilliant use of the vertical scroll in the story of baseball player Dock Ellis - illustrations and animating through scrolling - lovely. On tablet don’t get the “curtain” effect but still looks good.

Thanks to multimediashooter.com for their great article dissecting the long scrolling story…

Visual Storytelling in the Age of Post-Industrial Journalism  (PDF, 66 pages)

The study is definitely worth a read through (http://www.worldpressphoto.org/multimedia-research - loads of extra content here) the rise of screen based media consumption with some impressive figures (gathered mostly from western sources) - still a good analysis of trends towards mobile and how presentation of news has/is changing. 

This is a snapshot into what is happening now - multiple touchpoints, open access, tablets, mobile and abundance of content with streaming media the biggest growth area.

A key point I took from this was that there was no strict correlation between video length and popularity. The length of YouTube’s most popular news videos was fairly evenly distributed — from under a minute (29%), to one to two minutes (21%), two to five minutes (33%) and longer than five (18%). So if you have really good engaging story, people will stick with it way beyond 30 seconds - if you have a video of a penguin jumping up and down then 30 seconds is probably plenty!

Most multimedia is produced by in-house teams within media organisations - and their main distribution channel is themselves. That said they are also utilising social media esp youtube. NYT and WSJ are expanding their video production, the Times roles out 3-5 videos per day.

There was much talk of importance of mobile and the importance of responsive design on a variety of levels - and yes we are looking at that in regards to P3 ;) Less focus on apps which have been generally disapointing in viewerships and more focus responsive web pages. Scrolling over “pages” - click away and you loose people. 

Actionable takeaways include making more use of our slideshows within content to give context, producing more audio slideshows (passe but popular), and from this producing audio (distributing using social audio sites like soundcloud). 

There are also some really interesting links to some really good visual storytelling sites including:

http://www.worldpressphoto.org/photo/unknownspring-1?gallery=4178

http://www.worldpressphoto.org/photo/alma-1?gallery=4178

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek

a couple of fab apps:

http://vyclone.com/

https://stipple.com/

A great article/tutorial on hacking open source maps by Young Hahn (working at MapBox - the tool the tutorial is presenting) on alistapart.com. 

Storyplanet - good potential application for building interactive stories - in beta, sign up to be a tester…

Beautiful trouble was funded by kickstarter now has an experimental navigation attached to the online content - it’s kinda fun and the content is super interesting.

The EU Shark story - nice illustrated horizontal scrolling multimedia story by the shark alliance.

Dramatic photography with parallax scrolling, this could be a gritty new cop series but no - it’s the Milwaukee police news. Thos most wanted aren’t extras - they’re really the most wanted. 

Still in beta, easel.ly is an infographics generator and editor - loads of templates and elements to work with and because it’s beta it’s free! Useful tool though great infographics are made with great info!

Using webGL - ecosphere is a beautiful representation of twitterings during the Rio Earth summit. Not mobile friendly (as yet).

I love this site! Great example of Google maps and user generated content.

Take a look!

Some great links  - thanks folks! 

Slick design and storytelling on this South Hill community site from Canada by Jeremy Mendes and Shannon Mendes.