Screenshot of the interface I developed for News21.Over this past summer I was privileged to participate in the Carnegie-Knight News21 program. Ten weeks in length, it afforded me the opportunity to explore new methods of storytelling, and just as exciting, to explore the use of new technologies in the service of presenting those stories.
The story of Allensworth was my baby. With my partner Nick McClellan, I had the chance to go out to California and film interviews with the residents early on in the summer. Upon my return, I edited the piece down and begin building a custom Flash interface to present the story.
The interface incorporates several innovations that I thought were useful. The premise of it is to blend linear and nonlinear storytelling methods; up top the video that I shot and edited is presented large. Below that, there are supplemental items - photographs, videos, maps, etc. - that can enhance the viewer's sense of the story.
This supplemental view affords a more expansive sense of the story than a linear narrative might convey. As an example, my assigned topic was Latinos in Allensworth. But a century ago, the town was founded as an all-black community, and the sense of history, of electing a black president in 2008, was inescapable. While I couldn’t make that angle a part of the main story, I did ask interviewees about it, and was able to include their responses in the supplemental view below.
There are some other bells and whistles; there’s the speaker bio module, which lets you discover who someone is without resorting to “My-name-is-X-and-I’m-the-Y-at-Z” clip in the video. The interface also reads data from an XML file to show when different people are speaking; it basically shows the viewer where the cuts are, allowing him or her to scrub quickly to a desired segment. There is also an animated closed captioning widget suggested by Nick, my reporting partner; aside from improving the accessibility of the video, it also turns the captions into a control surface, as you can skim through the text of the video, and the video will go to that point.
The player works with XML files and is designed to work with any story; in fact, Nick's story about the political efficacy of Latinos in the Central Valley used the same interface with excellent results.
This was written entirely from scratch, utilizing only Adobe's components for handling video and captions. Knowing what I know now, there are more efficient ways I could have gone about some tasks. But I think it stands as an interesting proof of concept, and one I'm proud to have worked on.
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