New Media 4: Multimedia

Multimedia projects are perhaps the most innovative branch in the development of new media. Working on larger projects with people from different professional backgrounds, these projects are often experimental in nature, pushing the boundaries of what a story can be.

Even the meaning of a multimedia project is open to interpretation, since it is up to the creators to define what different media they are using. The only requirement for a project to become “multimedia” is that it incorporates more than one medium or content form.

Multimedia projects are projects that incorporate different content forms, like video, photography, text, audio, and graphic/web design.

So, what about a movie with music in the background? Isn’t that multimedia, too? While you could argue it is, music has been an inherent part of filmmaking, even before filmmakers used speech. It is an established way of combining media. Using videography in tandem with text and animation, however, could easily be labelled as multimedia.

Multimedia projects draw from the strengths of different media to tell a story. For example, if you want to tell a story about migration, there are different meaningful media you might want to use:

Photography can be used to give users—the people who interact with the story—a sense of place and environment; music can give an emotive and sonic impression of place, heritage or personal tastes; illustration can bring together people or ideas that have never met in real life. By combining the strengths of different media, a new story emerges.

Three examples

1. The Story Behind an Identity Theft
   1. “Lurking behind a simple email in our inbox is a network of fake websites, letter box companies and more than 100 victims around the world. We untangled a web of fake accounts and followed the digital breadcrumbs back to two Danish fraudsters. This is how we tracked them down, step by step.”
   2. Produced by Pointer, 2019
      
      
2. In My Nature—Hike With Cyborgs
   1. A multimedia story about learning to relate to nature in new ways through technology
   2. Produced by Are We Europe, 2021
      
      
3. Pollinator Park
   1. “Europe 2050—Following a cascade of ecological crises, our world has been deprived of pollinating insects, healthy ecosystems and wealthy flora. Amidst this dystopian landscape lies a lavish green beacon of hope: Dr. Beatrice Kukac’s Pollinator Park, a safe haven for pollinators and an eye-opener for its visitors.”
   2. Created for the European Commission, 2021

Students divide in groups to dive into and analyze one of the three multimedia stories. Groups will later share and discuss their findings with each other.

1. Divide the class in 6 or 9 groups

Story analysis

1. Assign a story to every group so that every story is being covered by the same number of groups.
2. Rather than reading the story from beginning to end, groups should pay attention to how the story is told and how different media are used. The printout questions focus on storytelling strategies and techniques over the exact contents of the story.
   
   Groups will explore and engage with their assigned multimedia story for 10 minutes before they fill in their worksheet.
   
3. After engaging with the story, groups answer the questions in the worksheet.

Printout questions

1. What is this multimedia story about?
2. What is the goal of the story?
3. What media did the creators use to tell the story (audio, video, illustration etc.)?
4. How does it use these media to tell the story? Answer per medium from question #3.
5. What skills does a team that creates a story like this need? How many people do you think worked on it?
6. What do you estimate the costs of the project to be?
7. What do you think of the way the story used multimedia to achieve its goals?
8. What did you like the least about the story?
9. What did you like the most about the story?

1. After groups have filled in the printout, they come together in feedback groups consisting of 3 groups. Every bigger group contains a group that covered story #1, story #2, and story #3.
2. Groups present the highlights of their printout to the other 2 groups in their feedback group. After each short presentation, there is room for questions by the other 2 groups. This process continues until all 3 groups have presented their printout.

1. Can fact-checkers be impartial?
2. Who is responsible for fact-checking: writers or publications?
3. Why is “lateral reading” a key activity while fact-checking? See the section about the Stanford research about fact-checkers.
4. What should a fact-checker do if information is not verifiable through fact-checking?
5. Is it a problem if somebody motivates something that is true with evidence that doesn’t support the claim?