About the new video to introduce Contributoria.com

Today saw the launch of a short video about Contributoria.com, the community funded journalism project I’m involved in.

It’s a cheeky, light-hearted animation which hopefully explains in 45 seconds what the platform is all about.

It received its first viewing at the International Press Institute conference in Johannesburg this week where it seemed to go down well with the audience of journalism leaders from around the world. I hope you enjoy it.

The video was animated by @BennyCrime of http://www.bennycrime.com/ and the illustrator was Nic Hinton of http://karoshikula.com.

It’s the first time I’ve been involved with the production of a piece of animation and I found it an interesting process – everything starts with then script then storyboarding in its most basic form before moving to the full hand-drawn animation.

Ben and Nic also had to work on a very tight timescale as we needed the video to be complete in time for the deadlines of the IPI event and I’m very grateful to them for pulling out all the stops. (In our haste, the mis-spelt word at the end of the piece crept in too – we’ll get onto that in due course too.)

* In a very different project, Ben and I also worked together last year on an app to create a trail of engineering points of interest in the King’s Cross area of London using the n0tice.com platform. That was a more traditional piece of video content involving carrying out recorded interviews which were then edited and produced for a mobile audience – more on that here.