There is already some pretty great content out there for story consumers via 360 video. This week we took some time to learn a little bit about the process of creating 360 videos and considered the ethical concerns they raise. One of the concerns is “staging” because the equipment has to be set up and then walked away from and some go as far as to hide so they don’t interfere with the scene. I see why this is problematic for some people.
There is already so much distrust for media as it is, it doesn’t seem like a good idea to employ story telling tactics that could be construed as deceitful. That being said, I don’t think that makes 360 video an impossible candidate for journalistic story telling. As others are tackling these issues, my classmates and I will be a part of exploring and defining the practiced boundaries in ethics should we pursue 360 video as an avenue of story telling.
360 degree video lends itself to telling stories in which you don’t want to leave anything out. It allows you as the story teller to drop your audience within the setting of your story. Right now, while people wrestle with putting sensitive images within 360 video and whether or not it makes our audience more empathetic or more desensitized, I think the greatest opportunity is just letting people see the world.
The world is so incredibly vast. My travels have humbled me and slowed me down quite a bit. I like to stop and take a look around. I take everything in and try to remember all the details so I can come back to that moment later. I got my strong yearning for travel from my grandmother. She has always had many stories of the places she has been and the people she met while she was there. Now that she is older she can’t quite travel like she used to and she lives vicariously through those of us that are able to travel. She is likely the first to traverse my Facebook albums, my Instagram posts and my snapchat story, at least when she knows I am traveling. And yes, my grandma has and uses Instagram and SnapChat. She is ~hip~.
Old age is not the only thing that holds people back from getting to see the world and listen to the stories that happened in whichever foreign place was the destination. I’d love to use 360 video to show different places all over the world. While I travelled in Europe , there was a company that I came across that did tours for only a donation. As I travelled from city to city we looked for those tours. In my mind I picture a tour guide like that, bringing you around a place and telling you the story right where it happened. Just like I did, viewers have the chance to look around. They choose where to look and what to see right from where they are.
I think that this basic concept would make for a relatively simple field test. The goal of these travel pieces would be to bring you closer to another place, hopefully one that the viewer didn’t know much about before. The phrase ‘out of site out of mind’ came from somewhere so the bigger picture is to close the gap between them and us, and make people empathetic again. I could create a simple quiz or survey about the place of choice and see how people feel before and after watching the piece. The responses to the quiz/survey would be how I determined my success. Did people leave the experience having learned something about a new place? Have I created at least a small connection for them to this new place?
Superblog 