Web documentaries

A new way to tell your story

The average person spends less than a minute

on a web page.
Many of our clients have complicated stories to tell, but are unsure
how far to simplify their stories for audiences that are notoriously
uninspired by complexity or short on time.
A possible solution?
Web-documentaries or web-docs.
Web-docs are an emerging form of media that use digital
technology to increase audiences attention and deepen their
interest in a topic by a more considerable degree than most other
methods.

Simply put:
Web-docs are like digital
Choose Your Own Adventure
stories.
So, how do they work?
Web-docs are interactive, multimedia documentaries hosted on
the web. They are still an emerging field, so there are few rules,
but they tend to offer audiences more choice and control than
traditional media.
Simply put: They are like digital Choose Your Own Adventure
stories through the use of clever interactive menu options. Webdocs put emphasis on what the story makes people do, rather than
what it says to them. They provide audiences access to greater
context but ultimately leave them in control of the journey they
take.
They can be produced on an independent do-it-yourself basis or
by broader crews of collaborators and so far, have mainly been
used in journalism and art. Current usage of the medium has
demonstrated that, by putting the viewer in charge,
web-docs can retain even the most fickle of audiences
engagement for ten minutes, and sometimes longer...

It is hard to understand how addictive they can be before youve seen one
for yourself. Here are some of our favourite examples:

The Guardian produced a web-doc about bush fires in Tasmania in 2013 obtained
400,000 views, with the average viewer spending 17 minutes on the site. Thats very
high for one article, said Francesca Panetta, special projects editor at the paper, at a
recent event on web-docs hosted at City University in London.

The Cadillac example: Highrise, a multi-part web-doc produced by the National Film
Board of Canada, in part for The New York Times, about the history of vertical living
and issues of social equality in an urbanized world, has garnered 8.4 million shares
on Twitter and 2.9 million shares on Facebook, according to its producer, Kat Cizek.

Pioneered in Europe, web-docs have already had political influence.

Nowhere Safe, produced by Frances Samuel Bollendorff, documented poor housing

in the country, and images from it were used during the 2012 presidential elections
when housing became a pivotal campaign issue.
The idea was always to fight the idea that the public on the web wont stay for
more than 20 seconds, says Bollendorff who started as a photojournalist
documenting social problems around the world, but moved to web-docs after
growing frustrated with the use of his images in magazines without further context.

Dirty Money, made in-house for the World Development Movement, draws
attention to funding for harmful mining in Indonesia by UK banks, and has
garnered 7,000 views since November 2013, with viewers spending an average of
seven minutes on the site and 10% of them signing up afterwards to take action.
Those numbers may not seem terribly impressive on first glance, especially when
compared with alternative methods of engagement for digital communicators in
the commercial sector. But when you realise they are purely organic views,
produced on a shoestring budget without any promotion or marketing budget
behind it, it becomes a realistic and affordable option for non-profits on limited
budgets.

National Public Radio (NPR) collected stories from the Mexican-American border
in Borderland, which presents readers with statistics of border crossings in
real-time as they begin their journey through the documentary.

When Main Street became a talking point to counter Wall Street in the 2008
US Presidential elections, a group of radio producers and graduate students set
out to prove that there wasnt just one Main Street USA. The group recorded the
stories of hundreds of towns across America and then encouraged others to send
in their stories. The site currently features more than 800 streets across the
country.

Where do we think web-docs are headed?

Development in web-docs is currently being led by academics, artists and
journalists and is generally a niche media.
We at Brickwall think that this could soon change.
There is broad potential for web-docs across a variety of third sector and
commercial markets, particularly in fields where nuance is of special value or where
you might have a tendency to over-communicate to your target audiences because
you have so much to say (!) It can make it hard for your audience to find the exact
information they are looking for.
The challenge is in organising your messages and creating an engaging narrative
out of them.

Web-docs have potential in fields

where nuance is of special value
and where context and personal
storytelling can help fill in a
broader picture.

Producing these requires a new way of working, says Kat Cizek, who made the
Highrise web-doc. Web-docs require strategic insight from both those
commissioning the project as well as those producing it, along with a creative
willingness to try something new. The medium cuts across a combination of areas
of digital communications expertise, and this is where we step in.

Web-docs can be an inspirational project for an organisation looking for an

innovative new way to tell its story but that does not necessarily mean they require
the creation of an entirely new set of communications materials. It might be a case
of creating a narrative that links your already existing materials together in an
engaging way for your audience.

If your interest has been piqued, give us a ring.

(In the meantime, there are also plenty of other examples of interesting web-docs out there to explore:
Hollow, a web-doc about a depressed small town in Washington State, which has been decimated by
economic changes since the 1950s, was produced by a Masters student at Emerson College, Elaine
McMillion, and funded with $25k on Kickstarter.

Alma, produced by Upian & Arte TV in 2012, is a first-person confession by Alma, a member of one of
Guatemalas most brutal gangs. It won the Sheffield Doc Fest Innovation Award in 2013.
Question Bridge, produced by Hank Willis Thomas in 2013, is a transmedia art project that seeks to
represent and redefine black male identity in America.
And if youre still hungry for more, the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Docubase project has
become a repository for web-docs, worldwide, with lots of other examples.)