Research into interactive documentary narrative

Storming Juno interactive documentary.

Stormig Juno is an interactive documentary for the web. It shows, images, video interviews within the documentary in which you navigate to by an interesting 360° menu.

The video starts with an intro video telling you what the story is about and what is to come if you progress further into the interactive piece.
I really like this intro video as they have used this central mask to pinpoint what the stories are about, there is not too much going on but you feel really engaged in just this small area.

For the intro video they have used a narrator who tells you what the interactive documentary is about, I really like this idea and will want to include it my intro video. It gives a clear idea on what the piece is about but remains engaging at the same time. The video is not that long only about 30 seconds.

Once the intro video has finished you come to this splash page, this page interacts with the mouse. When you move the mouse over the image it moves slightly back and fourth as well as adding to the interactivity.

The way you navigate from page to page is amazing, it's as if you are set within the scene, you can navigate around 360°. The scene is also set in 3d, there are layers on which the the closer things are on layers closer to you and ones which are further away.

I think that it would have been made like this where each layer is 360°, the closer the object the closet it is to the center.

Around the scene there are dots in which you can click and which take you to a specific scene. I think that you may miss content this way as you can easily miss the points to click and possibly forget which ones you have clicked. However the points are quite obvious but do not detract from the scene. I quite like this idea as you can have more information in a smaller area.

If you click on the points you are taken through the scene and weave in and out of objects, It would have been easy just to create in instant jump however, the designer has thought about it and made it more interesting for getting from one scene to another.

The page that appears after you have clicked on the points takes you to interviews with the people who are to do with the button you clicked. It has a similar style to the splash page where you could move the mouse and the page would respond. The broken tile effect works well with the video content. If you were just to have videos sat on top in standard rectangles it would deter from the visual style and not work as well as it does here.

When the videos are hovered over a green halo appears around them as well as more information. Having information appear before you may click on the video can give you an insight to what the video is about as well as introducing the person in the video.

Some of the videos feature images that come up as they are talking, this gives the audience something else to look at while listening, it can also be used to show exactly what the person is talking about.

The videos use multiple framing's of the people who are being interviewed, usually when there is more emotion the camera is zoomed in more and the person is larger in the frame. 

For the video interviews extra options are available from looking at their biography to more photos and turing subtitles on and off.

A small touch is the back button, when rolled over the image changes and makes a noise, its i nice added touch.

I find this interactive documentary a very useful piece of research, i like all the little features like the moving back button and having a large image in which there are points to click which take you somewhere else. Also the way that the menu has been created by clicking on certain events/objects.