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Interactive Storytelling: Online lecture by Konstantinos Antonopoulos
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Vibha B Madhava
6:27
Hello and welcome to the online special lecture on ‘Interactive Storytelling’ by Konstantinos Antonopoulos, an internationally-acclaimed visual journalist and social storyteller, hosted by the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.
Konstantinos Antonopoulos has formerly worked with Al Jazeera English, CNN Greece, and other notable media organisations. He has won several international awards for designing and producing web, social, and video stories related to war, crisis, injustice, terrorism, and the state of the economy and the world. He also runs workshops and creates custom training programs for social-storytelling and mobile journalism.
6:29
6:31
Konstantinos Antonopoulos begins the session by giving an overview of his talk around what he calls a 'producer's take on how to do an interactive story'.
6:33
The process of any kind of storytelling starts with a pitch. Antonopoulos: "As a producer, it is about putting things in order and I begin with a synopsis."
6:34
To make things easier for the reader/consumer, it is best to break the story into key pointers which can also become chapters.
6:35
He recommends making a list of primary and secondary characters in the story. Further, he suggests asking questions: how are they affected? do we have quotes from them? and so on.
6:37
Antonopoulos highlights the importance of considering how a story is taken from the draft to the final stage. "As a producer and journalist, planning helps to figure out if everyone is represented adequately," he adds.
6:38
The crucial questions to consider, Antonopoulos says, "What's the best medium for the story? Will it be linear or do you want to give the user freedom to do whatever they want?"
6:39
The checklist, as he terms it, includes answering potential questions about the narrative flow, structure, and platform of publishing.
6:40
Antonopoulos: "You break down the pitch from an idea to a potential interactive idea. Then you fine-tune the idea to build the interactive story. Additionally, figuring out the UI/UX aspects covers 20% of the plan."
6:41
Customising the story is non-negotiable. This involves making design decisions regarding the buttons, scrolling, autoplay, and more.
6:43
As promised in the beginning, Antonopoulos now moves on to talk about practical tools to enhance interactive storytelling.
6:44
He shares his screen to delve into 'Notion', a project management and note-taking software platform.
6:45
Antonopoulos: "It helps to have everything listed down in front of you." He goes on to talk about the storyboarding phase.
6:46
For storyboarding, Antonopoulos recommends 'Milanote', an easy-to-use tool to organize ideas and projects into visual boards.
6:47
Talking about the features provided by the app, he says, "It's an amazing tool that allows you to customise templates. You can do storyboards or mood boards."
6:49
Antonopoulos: "When I talk data sets, I need to come up with a display option for graphics. I usually use a platform called 'Flourish'."
6:51
He elaborates on how this app helps format the data and makes it easier to put on the interactive platform. Next comes design and writing.
6:52
"I'm more of a designer who selects the platform. I move to branding where I decide the look and feel of a story," he says sharing his process on typography.
6:53
Among many free apps/platforms available for interactive storytelling, he suggests Shorthand which he first used in 2013 during his time with AJ Labs.
6:54
While he no longer uses Shorthand anymore, he talks about how "the best thing is that it allows the user to experience a fullscreen immersive experience."
Shorthand is best when the story is linear and there is a need to control the narrative without asking the user to go back and forth. It is primarily visual and not completely interactive.
6:55
The next tool on the list - Vev.
6:56
Antonopoulos: "The best thing about this tool is that you can work as a designer to put everything together in one place."
6:57
It has no template restrictions and allows one to exercise freedom with design. It is thoroughly focussed on storytelling.
6:58
Vev has components like animation tools, custom fonts, and readymade guides. He reiterates that this is a tool that works on a web interface and puts everything in one place.
6:59
7:00
Shorthand is beginner, Vev is intermediate and next comes Webflow as an advanced tool.
Antonopoulos: "It is like a blank canvas. It has a very robust code editor so if you have a coding person then you can add stuff on top of it and create really sophisticated websites."
7:01
He recommends Webflow for those working for an organisation that expects creation of long-form templates.
7:02
With this tool, a visual designer and an experienced coder, Antonopoulos argues that 90% of all editorial products can be tailored as per requirement.
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