Festival2012/Submit/Interactive storytelling with Zeega
- Title of session: Interactive Storytelling with Zeega
- Your name and affiliation: James Burns, Kara Oehler and Jesse Shapins, Zeega
- Session format: Learning Lab
Contents
What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?
Zeega is an open-source HTML5 platform that came out of the idea that people should be able to make interactive stories on the internet without having to program. We don’t believe technical knowledge or budgets should be a constraint for exploring the creative possibilities of the web. Zeega’s team of journalists, documentary artists and interactive designers will share Zeega's latest tools and work with participants to create interactive experiences with original and web-based audio, photos, videos and text.
How do you see that working?
We will begin by introducing the genre of interactive storytelling and Zeega’s web-based editor. The session is designed for media-makers that love experimenting online; no programming experience required at all. There will be a common pool of media around a relevant news topic that everyone in the workshop can access and then edit.
This Learning Lab will give creative media artists the insight and skills to create robust interactive projects that effectively engage with audiences and the chance to experiment with new tools and technologies.
The Learning Lab will be lead by Kara Oehler, a Peabody award-winning journalist and recognized leader in the field of interactive storytelling. She will discuss effective principles of web-based storytelling, including sharing examples of work -- some short form and some long. Kara will be joined by other members of Zeega’s team, including Co-Founders James Burns and Jesse Shapins
How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?
The initial presentation will be brief, only 15 minutes. Afterwards, we’ll break into small groups with each person storyboarding their piece and working on their own project within Zeega. All participants will draw upon the session’s common media pool and augment it through additional media collected online. If there are 15 people, we’ll do three groups of 5. If there are 50, we’ll do three groups of 15. At the end, we’ll reconvene to showcase all of the work made by participants.
How long within your session before someone else can teach this?
15 minutes.
What do you see as outcomes after the festival?
Participants will be able to effectively understand the opportunities of the new genre of interactive storytelling, acquired basic skills in storyboarding a basic narrative and familiarity with cutting-edge tools for authoring and publishing their own interactive stories following the festival.
