One Year In: Learnings from Contrast VR
It’s been just a year since Al Jazeera launched Contrast VR as its immersive media arm tasked with using innovative technology to tell stories and transport viewers to the communities hit hardest by inequality and conflict.
Along the way, we grew from a team of two to a team of six, produced over 55 short social videos from over 30 countries, attended over 10 film festivals, trained over 100 journalists and freelancers, and released a handful of premium virtual reality documentaries.
As virtual reality journalism continues to expand into an integrated department of most major news platforms, we’re still at the beginning of seeing how newsrooms can create mixed reality stories for a wider audience. Beyond the numbers, our first year has been a transformative journey. Here are some of the most important things we’ve learned so far.
Focus on character driven stories
Looking at how most newsrooms and media companies utilize 360 videos, it’s easy to see a trend. Most immersive content is marketed for it’s access to a location (and story) that might otherwise be inaccessible, which can often lend itself to stories rooted in a sense of voyeurism. Often, we see immersive stories that take you into dangerous (or exciting) locations, or stories that take you into some of the most vulnerable communities.
At Contrast VR, our work strives to shift the focus of immersive storytelling away from bringing access to the inaccessible, but rather towards telling stories from characters who represent resilience and strength in their communities.
“With a lot of our stories we’re trying to show our audiences how people survive in spite of the situations they’re faced with. Rather than victimising them, we try to show life through their perspective, while making sure our audience understands the overarching political and cultural context that has created those realities,” says Zahra Rasool, Contrast VR’s Editorial Lead.
Work with local communities to report on an issue
At Contrast VR, we pursue telling authentic and international stories. As I’ve mentioned, not only do we focus on showcasing and highlighting characters who innovate and inspire — we also recognize that these communities know their issues best. We work with as many locals and professionals on the ground to make sure each documentary is informed by more than just ‘an outsider looking in’ point of view, but rather a diverse set of perspectives.
Whether it’s training and equipping journalists in Yemen to document their own narratives in 360 video, working with local organizations and talent in Nigeria, or creating initiatives to train and equip young filmmakers to each document a story from their own communities (i.e. Stories After Syria or My People, Our Stories), Contrast VR works closely with local communities to advance conversations about some of the most pressing issues of our time from a more nuanced perspective.
Think about impact for each project
We think of success as more than just two million views on Facebook. Rather, we think about how we can use our stories to create meaningful impact. Did people walk away better informed about the issue, motivated and passionate to enact change? Did the film successfully reach people who initially were not aware of the topic, as well as reach those who are in positions of influence?
Our virtual reality documentaries covering the Rohingya refugee crisis, I Am Rohingya and Forced to Flee, are examples of Contrast VR’s priority to focus on impact. With I Am Rohingya, we saw impact that led all the way to the doors of the UN Security Council. We were able to partner with Amnesty International to hold private screenings of Forced to Flee with individual members of the UN Security Council, before Amnesty International presented them a list of recommendations on how to respond to the Rohingya refugee crisis.
Meaningful stories deserve meaningful response and action. We take this to heart in our storytelling, making sure that our work has an afterlife beyond viewing the virtual reality documentary.
Get creative with post production
Editing 360 videos can be a delicate art — one has to balance finding ways to guide the viewer through the narrative (whether through visual or auditory cues), and leaving room for the viewer to explore the space freely.
Our post production lead, Maria Lauret, says “People, at first, view the post-production process of virtual reality and 360 videos as extremely technical. However, after editing dozens of social videos and documentaries in this format, you realize that it is actually a very artistic process. You become more open to creating different visual and sound cues to making your story more compelling. In fact, in the 360 video space, you have a lot of freedom and potential for creative applications to help guide the story.”
Throughout this year, we’ve found the use of animation as a powerful tool for accentuating the impact of the medium. In I Am Rohingya, we utilized animations to illustrate Jamilada’s painful and violent journey as she was forced to flee to Bangladesh from Myanmar. In Oil In Our Creeks, we transformed 180º of the 360 space to juxtapose what the land in the Niger Delta looked like a decade ago, before the oil spills in 2008 polluted and transformed the area.
Leverage partnerships to augment VR storytelling
Virtual Reality production is not just a different way of shooting, it also requires a bigger budget because of the technology in question. That’s why Contrast has created a partnership model for our editorial strategy. We work with organizations that are interested in the same issues and utilize those relationships to create compelling and impactful stories.
For example, we’ve had partnerships that helped us reduce the technical barriers of entry to make our content and storytelling more accessible to the everyday consumer and filmmaker. In our partnership with Samsung, we created a blossoming initiative to train and equip various filmmakers around the world with portable, easy-to-use Samsung Gear 360 cameras. Through our partnerships with Oculus, HTC, Samsung VR and Jaunt, “we have been able to harness the potential of these platforms to provide our content to a much wider audience,” says Sebastian Billard, who works on operations.
In our editorial partnership with Amnesty International, they asked us to go back to Bangladesh to follow up on the Rohingya refugee crisis (after they partnered with us to release our previous documentary, I Am Rohingya). Together, we produced and published a second VR documentary, Forced To Flee, published in December 2017. We were able to utilize each other’s vast audiences to reach millions of people; we also partnered to hold individual meetings with members of the UN Security Council to screen the VR documentary.
Collaborate and distribute across platforms
Collaboration within the larger Al Jazeera Media Network has become an important avenue to leverage expertise and distribution.
Since a large part of our philosophy rests on the democratization of technology and storytelling, we work towards distributing our content as widely as possible through various social channels, and desktop and mobile platforms. Instead of focusing solely on the virtual reality documentary, we create an ecosystem of content that surrounds the issue, including short linear video clips, online articles, behind the scene blogs, and photo galleries.
Contrast VR, as Al Jazeera’s immersive media arm, is positioned uniquely in a vast and extensive network that spans over several channels, brands and programmes. For our two latest virtual reality documentaries, Stories After Syria and Yemen’s Skies of Terror, we were able to use our network to reach different audiences such as the English speaking audiences of Al Jazeera English and AJ+ as well as Arabic speaking languages through Al Jazeera Arabic. For more details on how we collaborate and distribute across Al Jazeera, you can read about it here.
Always look forward
The medium itself is constantly evolving, as are our ways of interacting with it. We look forward to continue creating immersive stories that find new and innovative ways to bring audiences inside the most pressing issues of our time. Be sure to stick around for our upcoming augmented reality and virtual reality projects.
