Ideas Become Reality At The Storytelling Innovation Lab

Our first Storytelling Innovation Lab with Mozilla took place May 13-17 under the Tribeca Hacks banner. In just five days the teams created some really impressive web-native projects and made their code available to others on GitHub.

It was important for us to open source the code as part of the impetus for doing this lab was to push what is possible with web-native storytelling and to share this knowledge widely. Our hope is also to encourage others to take the code and create new work from it. We were delighted that the Frontline/ProPublica team published their project, Your Hospital May Be Hazardus To Your Health, after just 4 days work, an incredible feat when you consider that this included the video shoot and the tech build.

The lab brought together the best aspects of hackathons—pressure, collaboration, adrenaline—with the best aspects of a longer term lab—more time, peer support, pitch training—and we were really thrilled with the results. Ben Moskowitz from Mozilla did an incredible job pairing filmmakers with the tech and design support they needed to create their projects under some fairly intense time pressure. Thank you to the Ford Foundation for making this possible. The feedback from the teams and from the guests at the presentations has been fantastic and we are inspired to do more of these in the future.   Here's a look at the projects:

The Gun Show Maxim Pozdorovkin, Joe Bender, Roxanne Guo, Tony Gerber, Dan Schultz

A multimedia forum for the national gun debate.  

Tomorrow We Disappear Jimmy Goldblum, Adam Weber, Ryan Berkey, Nell Shaw Cohen, Jacob Brennan, Jeremiah Grant

A feature-length documentary about India's last colony of magicians, acrobats, and puppeteers.

Geeta’s World Vaishali Sinha, Abhimanyu Nohwar, Gretchen Hildebran, Dave Seifried, Brian Chirls

Starring a 21-year-old female taxi driver from New Delhi, Geeta's world is a web video project that inspires and enables a global audience to challenge gender norms and reclaim a stereotype within minutes using interactive tools.

Border Dispatches Jason Jaacks, Steve Fisher, Erik Reyna, Amit Kapadia

A community storytelling platform that explores the U.S.-Mexico border region.  

Act Here Nadeem Mazen, Ben Ipsen, Victor Toyens, Emily Boyes-Watson, Joseph Curley

An interactive layer easily applied to any video on the web, allowing viewers to directly participate in the projects that inspire them - launching calls, introductions, and collaborations directly.  

Do Not Track Brett Gaylor, Dethe Elza, Gregory Trowbridge, Sebastien Brothier

An interactive trailer for a web documentary about tracking and privacy that tracks you while you are watching it.

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Your Hospital May Be Hazardous To Your Health Tom Jennings, Michael Neiling, Sabrina Shankman, Mindy Yuen, Marshall Allen, Olga Pierce, Al Shaw, Sam Bailey, Fola Akinola, Sonja Bozik, Matthew McVickar, Justin Falcone, Nick Krusick

ProPublica and PBS/Frontline launch an interactive investigation to explore six myths about hospitals and patient safety, telling the story of patient harm in America.  

89 Steps: A Living Los Sures Project Christopher Allen, Alison S.M. Kobayashi, Johanna Linsley, Drew Schorno, Greg Schorno, Robert Richter, Greg Mihalko

In 1984 when Los Sures was made, Marta Aviles was a single mother of five making ends meet. 89 Steps looks at a new dilemma in Marta’s life thirty years later.