When I get the chance, I’d like to spend some time exploring and thinking about this interactive web project: The Genius of Caring
The Genius of Caring is a web based interactive story sharing project that features documentary portraits of those whose lives have been touched by Alzheimer’s and other caregiving intensive diseases. The site also allows users to contribute to our story archive, the Care Gallery. The project offers a uniquely intimate glimpse into the caregiving experience and creates an intimate portrait of a community connected through compassion.
Site Description
I briefly explored this project this morning. I’m particularly interested in critically assessing their care gallery. Would this work for generating stories, reflections on The Farm?
Artist and social innovator Mariette Sluyter’s Bread opens the oven door on the practice of baking bread and highlights the way it connects to our cultural emotional wellbeing. An experiment in human connectivity and interactive storytelling, Bread allows us to take a peek into the lives of six older women from very different backgrounds, all of whom share a passion for bread making.
Bread focuses on six different women who bake bread. You can watch a video of each of them baking bread and telling a brief (3-5 minute) story about their lives in voice-over. You can also read their bread recipes. So far, I’ve watched the videos and read the recipes for 3 out of the 6 women.
This project is very compelling. Both the theme and the structure of the project aren’t overly complicated. Full screen videos of six different women baking bread in their homes + voice-over narrations about their life. The main page is a grid of images of six kitchens. When you scroll over the kitchen, a picture of the woman who bakes in that kitchen appears. Click on her, and a full screen video of her baking starts playing. At the top of the video screen are links to the break recipe and “all stories.”
I like how the video combines silent footage of the women baking bread with background music and voice-over from a separate interview. As I write this last sentence I wonder, How does the choice to mute the kitchen scene, both the sounds of the baking and the women themselves, shape the story? How would we experience the story differently if we could hear those sounds? Does muting the actual noises of baking disconnect us from the physical process of making bread? Would it be possible to create a video project where you gave the audience the choice of hearing the kitchen noises…and maybe even some of the raw footage of the interview?
STA just sent me a link about a recent (December 10, 2013) Rolling Stone interactive article. It uses parallax scrolling in some interesting ways, so I’ve decided to offer a quick analysis of it here.
After scrolling through the entire story my first thought: Is it responsive? The answer: Yes. But the responsive version is more limited, lacking many of the fancier features of the full site, features that make it immersive, like sound and background video. Still, I’m glad to see that it’s responsive (unlike most? all? of the sites that I’ve analyzed on this blog). And the story does have some creative ways of translating its interactive features from laptop to mobile. Here are two:
1. Check out the different ways the story displays facts about “the dirty truth of cheap meat”:
In the laptop version, as you scroll down the page, the image of the outdoor feed lot appears as “fact” bubbles pop up and the sounds of cows mooing play. Very slowly the image zooms in as most of the bubbles disappear. Combining the moving image with the sounds of the livestock and the dis/appearing fact bubbles, creates an immersive (and entertaining) effect. Does it encourage the user to spend more time paying attention to the facts? Not sure.
Full Laptop VersionMobile Version
In the mobile version, you scroll down to a static image of the feed lot with a text description. There is no music and the “fact” bubbles don’t pop up. Instead one of the bubbles appears, with the instructions: “swipe for more facts.” Swiping allows you to read all of the facts, one at a time. While it isn’t as much of an “experience,” with no moving images or sound, swiping individual fact bubbles does enable you to spend more time reading and thinking about the facts.
2. Check out the different ways the story displays undercover footage about how animals are raised on factory-farms:
In the laptop version, the videos are embedded in an image of different cuts of meat. When you click on one of the video icons a slide show (in a light box) appears. You can then click on the video to watch it, or click through to the next video.
Full Laptop versionMobile Version
In the mobile version, there is no image to click on. Instead, the series of videos, with descriptions, appear as you scroll down. You can read the descriptions and tap on the video icon to watch the footage.
Comparing the different ways of displaying information on the laptop vs. mobile makes me curious. Does one version work better? What is the relationship between the mobile and laptop versions? How can I take into consideration their differences as I’m crafting my stories?
In the Chicago story, I like how the filmmaker uses text with images and voice-over. The words move around the screen and get bigger throughout the narration.
Yesterday I discovered, Lost and Found. Developed and produced my NPR’s Picture Show, it’s a cool interactive documentary/photo story about the amateur photographer, Charles W. Cushman. I don’t want to do a complete analysis in this post. Instead, I’d like to highlight a few aspects of this documentary that I find compelling, engaging and useful.
1. I really like the overall layout of this site: the fullscreen slideshow at the top, featuring Cushman’s beautiful color photographs; the easy slide down to a text description and a big “play” button which starts the brief and compelling story (a slideshow with voiceover); and finally, the “a little bit more” section that includes information about the photos and the archive of Cushman’s photos at Indiana University.
2. I especially appreciate how the story has a navigation bar at the top with four different sections. When you click on the one of the sections, the story (almost) immediately scrolls you to it. This feature is great for two reasons. First, it allows the reader to flip through the sections without having to watch the entire story repeatedly. Second, the quick scrolling between sections allows you to move around the story without having to wait too long for pages to load.
3. I think this interactive documentary does an excellent job of getting user’s excited about Cushman’s photography and of inspiring them to visit the online archive at Indiana University.
