Jumping Fox

Documentaries are no longer passive experiences that viewers sit back and watch from start to finish. New approaches are making the user an active a participant and using alternate forms of navigation to add more context to stories.

The user is the director

Journey to the End of Coal is a new web-only documentary following two journalists speaking with workers in China’s coal industry which merges classic journalistic interviews with navigation and interaction approaches more commonly associated with first-person gaming.

As users watch the presentation it will frequently stop to offer them a range of options of how to continue. Stay here and speak with this person? Go somewhere else? The user is actively deciding on the path of the narrative, choosing locations to investigate, the people to speak with and which questions to ask.

It’s technically impressive as a project, using full-screen flash to present streaming video and still photography as an immersive environment.

Map showing locations, with current location (far left) marked in red.

Forcing the users to make decisions is at times more emotive, as you can choose the angle that’s pursued (within the limits of the questions recorded in the interviews). You feel like you’re interacting with the subjects, but that connection comes at a cost – it’s equally frustrating having to keep prompting people to reveal more rather than passively sitting back and watching a video or reading a story.

There’s also the nagging feeling that if you don’t ask every question presented you might miss the crucial answer or angle that drives home the documentary’s point. Making the user play the role of journalist and search for the answers by asking the right questions also makes it easy for them to miss them entirely.

Many ways to navigate

ABC Australia’s Gallipoli: The First Day documentary takes a series of video and audio sequences that would otherwise be viewed in a linear or menu-driven sequence, and has arranged them on a 3D map to put the documentary sequences in context of the locations they relate to.

Google Earth 3D map chapter view of the ABC's Gallipoli: The First Day multimedia

The map in this case is based on Google Earth’s technology, so they’ve also released a ‘layer’ file for the downloadable Google Earth desktop application, allowing users to view the documentary content from within the standard map application – and interesting extension to the idea that makes their content available outside the confines of the ABC’s website.

That in itself marks maybe the biggest shift in approach of the three.

As the reach of broadcast media shifts and users grow more accepting of mashups, you’ll reach more users with relevant information that’s available in digestible pieces wherever the user is, even if that’s outside the walls of your own website.