Photo Credit: Center for Media and Social Impact

The Center for Media and Impact Studies always puts on a thought-provoking conference. I recently joined them for the two day convening Story Movements, which explored how a wide variety of storytellers — journalists, filmmakers, game designers, and more — are pushing change forward with cutting-edge technology and creative new approaches.

The first day consisted of Ted Talk-esque presentations by some successful mediamakers, covering their successes and failures, and how they can to land on the models they chose for telling their stories. You should check all of them out, but my personal favorites were the game SPENT, VR game Injustice, and Youth Radio’s Oaktown.

Day 2, we were split into small groups for a mini-hackathon. Working from a prompt on a specific issue area — ours was mass incarceration — we came up with an idea for a media prototype that could help change people’s attitudes towards our prison system. 

I left Washington, D.C. with some inspiring takeaways from the two days. So without further adieu:

1. It’s really hard to be creative in a vacuum. We began our hackathon with a one-sheet including facts and figures about mass incarceration — who is imprisoned, how that population has soared in recent decades, opinion polling. But honestly, it was really difficult at first to brainstorm and think outside the box without a deep, intricate understanding of the issue. This is why Kindling Group always starts with a robust discovery process with every new film or campaign — researching audience, conducting stakeholder surveys, and talking to experts in the field. Eventually we came up with a neat if not entirely original idea for a SimCity spinoff, teaching the user about the costs of imprisonment. But without a wealth of knowledge to draw from, it’s hard to know if an idea or prototype will add tangible value.


2. Virtual reality isn’t just a buzzword. I am always wary of hopping onto a medium or tool that is trendy before getting a real sense of its power and pitfalls. But I came away from Story Movements convinced that VR is not just a trend, but an incredibly powerful tool for good. The trailer for Injustice, a project that displayed at Tribeca this year, illustrates just how effective it can be at creating empathy: In a movie theater, when someone points a gun at a character, you don’t put your hands up! But in VR, you are the character – and you can see how users viscerally react to what’s happening in the story. I can think of few better ways to generate empathy for a person or situation foreign to you.


3. Always iterate. Kindling Group has participated in a hackathon before, creating a prototype for a virtual reality gaming experience for our film @home. We ran into some challenges with the structure and concept of the game — but as Pokemon Go and other new augmented reality games have shown, there certainly is a market for this kind of game as a tool for good. Having seen the success of other VR and gaming tools of late, it’s a reminder that the first version of a prototype is, more likely than not, going to be quite flawed — but if it’s a project or issue you’re truly passionate about, don’t be afraid to start again.


4. Be true to yourself. I personally am not a gamer — that kind of thinking, and competitive tendency, just doesn’t come naturally to me. But immersive storytelling like VR, or mapping projects that allow you to explore at your own pace, are intuitively interesting to me. Sometimes documentarians feel pressure to jump into transmedia projects that don’t play to their strengths. My new mantra is to follow the transmedia opportunities that I would play in my own free time.

And there you have it! Always glad to share interesting reports from the field.