Interested in learning more about digital documentary? Below you’ll find resources about the field, funding, festivals, digital tools and storytelling platforms, as well as community media. We plan to keep this guide as comprehensive and up-to-date as possible, so if we’re missing a resource, please drop us a line to let us know.
Whether portals to interactive projects or blogs on the state of online documentary, the following sites map the field of digital nonfiction storytelling and are good places to both orient yourself and discover new work.
International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) DocLab
The National Film Board of Canada
Tribeca Film Institute Sandbox
From day-long hackathons to month-long incubators, the organizations listed below run workshops that jumpstart and/or nurture digital projects.
Bay Area Video Coalition Producer’s Institute for New Media Technologies
Sundance New Frontier Story Lab
The toolkits, libraries, programming languages, and resources listed below have been built with digital storytellers in mind.
These organizations support and distribute community and participatory media projects. Many additionally provide best practices and toolkits to community mediamakers.
The following festivals number among the growing number of institutions that showcase digital work.
CPH:DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam – DocLab
Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) – UXDocs
Sundance Film Festival New Frontier
Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes
The following organizations fund digital storytelling and/or social action projects.
National Endowment for the Arts Media Arts Grant
Tribeca Film Institute New Media Fund
Listed below are some of our favorite examples of the growing body of published work about digital documentary. These resources, which range from books to websites to manifestos, provide everything from maps of the field to best practices for makers.
Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment by Carolyn Handler Miller
Documentaries and How To Make Them by Andy Glynn
Interactive Storytelling: Third Joint Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2010, Edinburgh, UK)
Interactive Factual by Sandra Gaudenzi
MIT-IDFA Moments of Innovation
Narrative as Virtual Reality by Marie Laure-Ryan
The New Digital Storytelling Series: Interviews with Leaders in the Field – a collaboration between the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Filmmaker Magazine
Perspectives on Interactive Documentary Storytelling by Submarine Channel
Web Docs: A Survival Guide for Online Filmmakers by Matthieu Lietaert
These online storytelling platforms have been designed for people interested in creating interactive digital projects.
*Please visit the Tools section of our DocuBase for more platforms and tools.