Fader 2.0: What the Consortium Has Been Up To (I)
,As we enter the third month of the Fader 2.0 project, we're happy to announce the development and marketing of our VR editor have been picking up steam. There have been discussions, meetings, workshops, and hacking sessions all over the place: Berlin, Bonn, Lyon, NYC, London, Munich–and picturesque Singen. Here's a short summary of what the consortium has been up to.
Parts of Team Vragments (first and foremost: Ronny Esterluss and Stephan Gensch) retreated to Berlin and Singen/Lake Constance to tirelessly code, fix bugs, improve data handling, and introduce new Fader features, the most important of which is iframe support. That’s right, you can now properly share a fader story on Facebook or Twitter – or embed it in a blog post. Check it out:
In the meantime, Team Vragment's Dr. Linda Rath-Wiggins has continued her studies at CUNY/Tow-Knight-Centre and also created a very informative VR newsletter you can sign up to here (for an archive of all newsletters published so far, go to this site). There have also been several meetings with individual experts and media companies from NYC's vibrant VR/360 community, leading to great insights and a catchy tagline (that we are going to reveal later on).
Team EuroNews recently assembled all partners at their headquarters in Lyon to collaboratively create a Fader template for a special, final episode of their "Tour de France". That, by the way, is a highly recommended series of short 360 documentaries covering the 2017 French Presidential elections from the perspective of ordinary, albeit very different French citizens.
Here's an overview of the individual EuroNews Presidentielle stories in English (stay tuned for updates):
And here’s a first mock-up for the Fader episode (to be released in May):
We also recommend reading this interview: A seat at the table: Google News Lab & Euronews talk to French voters in 360.
Apart from working on their 360-tour and the Fader project, our French colleagues have been busy advancing the cause of VR journalism in general, especially since Thomas Seymat is an official Journalism 360 ambassador now. Congrats!
Here at Deutsche Welle Innovation, we arranged online interviews/surveys with
VR journalists and tech-savvy media people in order to find out about common approaches to the new medium and typical "production pains" involved. The goal, of course, was to come up with useful input for the Fader developing process. To further test the application (and its appeal), we've started preparing a special in-house project–keep your fingers crossed!
We also attended a couple of conferences on the subject of immersive journalism/storytelling (Orama in London, ic4 Spring into 360 in Munich) in order to broaden our horizon, do (offline) social networking and promote Fader as an easy-to-use tool for basically any media organization. Last, but not least, we enrolled in (and completed!) the world's first immersive journalism MOOC, hosted by the Knight Centre.
So much for a first quick update. We'll be back with more info on our manoeuVRes in good time.
