This is the weekend edition of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed. The next blog post is Monday, April 19.
In 2018 we highlighted a story from Norwegian journalist, Bjorn Asle Nord, of the Bergens Tidende. Bjorn is now working for the NRK of Norway. That story, Five Feet Under, won many awards for its innovative approach to storytelling. Now Bjorn does it again with a totally different subject, but with some of the same breathtaking imagery and sequencing.
Everyone who aspires to providing for better mobile visual storytelling needs to take a look at how this story develops, and the way the visuals were integrated to make the story take aspects of cinematography that is easy to consume on the small screen of your phone.
Unfortunately, the story text is not yet available in English. However, I think the visuals are so powerful that you can scroll through and appreciate the length at which this team of writers, photographers and researchers went to make this story possible.
The story line
I asked Bjorn to give me a sense of the story content, which he does here: “Human impact on ocean is the issue, underlying universal theme is neglect.
The story includes a lot of “footprints” and we move from Atlantic to Artic, from fjord to coast, hunting them. “
But one story frames the whole piece; Rescue of a whale, one of our eyewitnesses, a nature photographer is trying to save a whale apparently strangled by a rope. It is in the hook, middle and ends on the whale rescue operation – when they discover that a internet cable is drowning/strangling the whale … they succeed to liberate him …..
……The supplier/ the company who owned the internet cable asked him – the nature photographer – (whale rescuer) – to cover half of the costs for the destroyed cable.
It is a huge visual piece with many stories. moving from big oceans to fjords and oceans, driven by images and our eyewitnesses beneath the surface: Underwater photographers documenting what happens – over years – our footprints.
The storyline is: Hold your breath. Join us beneath the ocean surface, hunting for our footprints.
Title: Bluelight for the ocean
This is the teaser – action – video:
I wanted to hear from the principal players involved in this story to tell me what the biggest challenge was from conceptualizing to publishing of the piece.
From Astrid Rommetveit, project manager:
Journalism can be powerful when we succeed in being both investigative and narrative. I don’t think all journalists are aware of how closely these two “genres” are connected. They are brother and sister. When we also challenge traditional formats, and use all available multimedia tools that can fit on a mobile, it becomes really exciting. One year ago, NRK established a group to work dedicated with big climate stories. It is important that someone gets to work systematically with this, because climate journalism is difficult. The content is often abstract and distant in time and space. In «Bluelight for the ocean» we have brought it down to earth (the bottom!), here and now. And we provide photo evidence. This is our biggest project so far and we are very happy to have reached hundreds of thousands of readers with our story.
Here is Bjorn Asle Nord
The overwhelming big topic. Finding a way to structure and frame it – a story that is not one story – but a collection of many small stories. We also had a dogma, the story – scenes and visual – should be underwater and take place beneath the surface.
But to frame it we used this dramatic whale story – with a whale tangled in what everyone though was fishing net/line/rope. It had human experience, life and death, and we found it very metaphorical for what humans do to nature – especially when it ends with the climax- and the resolution: A whale about being strangled by internet – it was a internet cable.
How long did it take for this story to go from conceptualization to publishing:
The story took 4-6 months – effectively 4-5, because of the pandemic. We also made 80-90 percent of it from office/home office – it meant an extremely amount of sources and research
Before we started the whole writing process we also had a big workshop were we identified success factors or so called wow – factors and gold coins to include in every chapter
Getting main themes down:
Bjorn describes the thought process in the early stages of planning the story:
On the workshop at an early stage in the project we decided to search for and implement the following success factors:
Visual catchy. And Arouse emotions. Photos as evidence. Underwater experience – give the readers that feeling. OMG – factors- Wow -factor in each sequence and “gold coins” along the long path as rewards for the readers (could also be like juicy facts /new knowledge). Sting in every chapter- something in the content with news edge. Human experience. Pedagogical. Action that gives some glimpse of hope and solution.
Here is photographer Ronald Hole Fossåskaret’s impressions:
As a photographer, I am always searching for what I like to call “emotional resonance” in my own images. Going down under the surface of the water, especially the deeper parts, we are entering a world not so accessible for most of us. It´s a strange, but fascinating world. And those who dives under are also kinda estranged with their “astronaut” suits. We don´t see faces, human behavior, or clear movement. And, I am not doing the photography myself. And that was difficult for us, we both would like to be there to observe and document. To smell seaweed and hear the whales sing. Early on, we found our eyewitnesses, the photographers. They are your good friend who takes you into a garden or a forest where you haven´t been before. They guide us and show us the truth, a path, a secret. Even if the story was “dictated” by the images we found in our research, there are scenes and images in the text which also are as much or more important than the images. We focused to make text and images play together and build on each other. Bjørn Asle is crafty with the pen and a very strong visual storyteller, and his voice guided us in the most challenging parts, where it literally was the deepest and complicated. We have collected over 5000 images and video for this project. We´ve probably searched and seen the double amount of that.
Why this story is important
While I make this blog a forum for discussions about our craft, and this story is a great example for journalists and designers to dissect, I also believe that a story like the one profiled here reminds us of how selfishly humans have exploited the earth and all its creatures for our own comfort.
This story hits home with its visual directness. Hope many of you share it!
The reactions
Use this hashtag on Twitter for feedback from readers:
The credits
The credits
Text, photos, research:
Bjørn Asle Nord og Ronald Hole Fossåskaret
Design and production:
Harald K. Jansson, Vilde Paschen Knudsen, Ragnar Rognstad, André Håker, Melinda Furulund, Stian Veum Møllersen, Susanne Stubberud Rom og Anders Nøkling
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TheMarioBlog post # 3305