NEW YORK – A unique partnership between the National Film Board of Canada and the New York Times’s Op Docs is hoping to take online documentary storytelling to new heights.
The two organizations have collaborated on a new immersive documentary series about residential highrise buildings that will debut next month as part of the Film Society at Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival Convergence program.
Entitled “A Short History of the Highrise,” the series tours the 2,500-year global history of vertical living and issues of social equality in an increasingly urbanized world. It unfolds in four short, interactive films, like chapters in a storybook, with rhyming narration, photographs brought to life with intricate animation, game play and responsive videos that create immersive, exploratory experiences.
The first three films, “Mud,” “Concrete” and “Glass,” draw on The Times’s extraordinary visual archives, a repository of millions of photographs that have largely been unseen in decades. The fourth chapter, “Home,” is comprised of images submitted by the public, set to music.
Optimized for viewing on tablet devices, viewers can navigate the story extras and special features within the films using touch commands like swipe, pinch, pull and tap. On desktop and laptop computers, users can mouse over features and click to navigate. Smartphone users can view the four films via the New York Times Mobile Web site.
The series is produced by Op-Docs, the Times editorial department’s forum for short, opinionated documentaries, and the NFB as part of its ongoing Highrise project, an Emmy Award-winning multi-year, many-media collaborative documentary experiment.
“Cinema and interactivity are influencing each other more and more,” said NFB senior producer Gerry Flahive in a release. “In our Highrise project, we’ve always been platform-agnostic, embracing the potential of both. This collaboration with Op-Docs has given the NFB and The New York Times a chance to further advance online documentary storytelling.”
The films were written and directed by Katerina Cizek, documentary filmmaker and “Highrise” director. The interactive elements were produced by The Times’s graphics team, under the direction of Cizek and The Times’s Jacqueline Myint, interactive art director and developer for the series, and by NFB senior producer Flahive and series executive producer and New York Times commissioning editor for Opinion video Jason Spingarn-Koff.
“A Short History of the Highrise” will premiere on Sept. 30 at 7 p.m. ET at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. A video trailer is available at: NYTimes.com/Highrise. The series will be accessible on NYTimes.com in October.
