The Five Foundations of Immersive Content
by Shorthand
The response you’re looking for is “wow”—not “ugh.”
In today’s digital world, long-form content can no longer simply consist of words. Audiences demand expressive experiences; they want great storytelling that engages them with strong visuals, video, interactivity and more to connect them to the content they care about.
Immersive content has the power to captivate your audience—to inspire, inform and even persuade people with rich, vivid narratives. And more brands than ever are turning to these kinds of tools to get people to connect emotionally and spend more time with their stories.
Regardless of whether you’re using visual storytelling to showcase journalism, a shopping experience, or an annual report, the right tools make it simple to create impactful projects. But the results will only be as good as what you put into them.
That’s why it’s essential to keep in mind the elements of successful visual storytelling. While there’s overlap with traditional content creation, producing great immersive content requires a more multifaceted approach—and more advance planning. If you write a story and jam in some images as an afterthought, you risk creating an experience that is confusing, boring, or both. Definitely not the “wow” you wanted.
These are the foundational elements you need to consider for your next (or first) project.
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Now on to the foundations…
You want to create an experience that is beautiful, absorbing, and seamless. That’s nearly impossible to do without thinking ahead—or wasting a bunch of time and resources.
Start by thinking about the who, what and how. Who’s your audience? What’s the story? What are your goals? How do you want your audience to respond? Your answers will shape the tone, structure and complexity of the project.
Take the interactive shopping feature that Refinery29 created in partnership with Macy’s. To catch the attention of younger women, the brands used a seemingly simple approach: advice on how to style four Friday-night outfits. But a closer look reveals the thoughtful execution, with purpose-shot, coordinating photos. Animated graphics offer advice but also highlight products. It’s colorful, fun, conversational—and effective.
Creating a storyboard that maps out the user experience is crucial when you’re producing immersive content. Break down the project’s stages and sketch them out, noting what kinds of visuals will appear in different places, and summarizing sections of text. (Don’t worry if you can’t draw—stick figures are fine.)
Questions to ask yourself during the process: How will we set the scene? What elements will we use at different stages? Video? A series of photographs? Animated graphics?
Keep the pacing of the story in mind—what will your audience see as they scroll through the story? Are there dense areas that could be broken up, or chunks of explanatory text that would work better as a chart?
Be ruthless about what makes the final cut. More is not necessarily more—you want every element to make the story richer, deeper, more interesting, or more revealing.
At a minimum, your images should be clear, eye-catching and professional. But it’s worth going the extra mile—this is visual storytelling, after all.
Refer back to the questions you asked in the planning stages; the answers will help inform the visuals for your project. Does it call for moody photographs or punchy cartoons? Business Insider’s project for Cartier has a very different feel from Refinery29’s fashion piece. The feel is quiet and elegant; most of the visuals are black-and-white historical photographs, and the series of reveals lets the audience travel from the past to the present.
Are you spotlighting people, landscapes, or clothing? Depending on your subject matter, you may want to include a variety of visuals—landscapes, portraits, detail shots—or be more consistent. Regardless, you want your visuals to harmonize together and not clash. Ideally, your visuals will speak for themselves, no explanation necessary.
While still images can be potent on their own, you can also use special effects to give them more pizazz and impact. With the right tools, it’s easy to create attention-getting reveals, fade-ins, and overlaid text.
Robb Report’s profiles of three adventurers for a content partnership with BMW uses a simple tool to dramatic effect. “ Driven to Perform” morphs black-and-white headshots of the trio into color portraits of them on expeditions. The result is not just arresting, it subtly reinforces the message that seemingly ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
Video may not be the central element to your story, but it can be a really powerful addition.
Video can add color and insights, and bring scenes and people to life. For projects about sports or performing arts, video makes serious sense. In a sponsored feature, Goal.com used footage of Cristiano Ronaldo from the video game FIFA 18, showing off the realism and energy of the game.
Look for spots where a brief video can expand your story or give your audience another way to engage, or where it might inject a little delight. CBC used video at the very top of a story about digital dating, making it feel dynamic and contemporary.
Generally speaking, err on the side of brevity. Don’t overload your audience with extra-long videos, or too many of them. On the other hand, don’t let viewers down by cutting a satisfying performance short.
If you’re ready to experiment, you can try manipulating your video to make it more effective. For “ Beautiful Walls,” a feature about Afghanistan, the International Organization for Migration slowed down a video of a child walking along a flood berm. It sucks in viewers’ attention, and also emphasises the serious nature of the subject matter.
Charts and graphs can turn numbers into mini-narratives that support the larger story. Movement can give those narratives even more depth, and can make complex information easy—even a pleasure—to understand.
In “ Africa in 100 Years,” an immersive journalism project created by the Telegraph, a map of the continent is dotted with red circles representing urban population. As viewers scroll, they grow to show the magnitude of change over time. A whole progression of data can be understood in just a few seconds.
Motion graphics like this aren’t a fit for every project, and if you force it, you can end up alienating readers. Consider whether a chart or timeline will help communicate part of your story, and then think about how you can take it up a notch.
Visual storytelling still needs words—words to introduce, to explain, to explore.
That doesn’t mean you need a lot of words. Business Insider’s Cartier project includes just a couple of paragraphs of text that help frame the historic and modern photographs that are assembled together. Other projects are far wordier.
No matter how much text you have, make it count. Edit aggressively. Think about how people will read your piece. Does the text scroll well? Does it mesh with your visuals? Does it make sense?
You can get really creative with the way you present text, using color or pull quotes to emphasize different points. It’s especially compelling to layer text over photos—a technique that International Organization on Migration used to great effect in its feature “ Marked Men.” Text scrolled on top of images of fishermen who had been enslaved, echoing the tattoos they got aboard ships. That’s a way to win a “wow.”
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