New York Life's Communication team needed a new way to reach new agents. To address this challenge, Murmur led a Digilab where we collaboratively developed the concept of telling the story of one family's process of using their insurance policy to help them adopt two special needs children from China.

As opposed to a traditional branded content web video series, we chose to break the story into small, quickly digestable beats to give users the quick hit, video experience they have come to expect.

Subtle calls to action pepper the experience but the clear focus is the family's story, and how because of their personal insurance agent, they were able to realize their dream.

As a subtle nod to story layout we call it New York Life Scrapbook+.

newyorklife.com/scrapbook

THE DIG is a co-production with The Skin Deep.

Our world is globalizing and changing at an exponential rate giving rise to two starkly different yet powerful forces: acceptance and fear. Our society's inability to empathize and to deeply listen to one another on a fundamental human level is leading to misunderstanding and intolerance. It has created a polarization where both sides stare at one another, frustrated and unheard.

Love is the common fundamental human factor that touches all lives and it has the power to either unite or divide based on personal ideologies and expressions. It is here, in the realm of love and understanding, at the frontier of new forms of connection in which THE DIG lives.

Created as an intimate and interactive form of "walking in the shoes of another," THE DIG aims to create understanding and compassion for emerging human relationships through immersive storytelling and to tilt the world towards greater acceptance and understanding.

THE DIG was an official selection of IDFA 2016 and won 1st Prize for The World Press Photo's Immersive Storytelling.

thedig.tv

StoryDeck, has been affectionately called "Tinder for Storytelling". It is a mobile-native storytelling platform.

As the percentage of mobile web users continues to increase, publishers need ways to create experiences that are optimized for the mobile web. Unfortunately this typically means a responsive website that provides a sub-optimal user experience on mobile.

StoryDeck is native to the gestures, human factors and design patterns of the mobile web. Storydeck is mobile-first, fast storytelling.

StoryDecks are based on a series of cards that users swipe through to consume content (text, images, and animated gifs). User opinions are captured via swipes. With this data the platform can then create customized data visualizations, saved card sets, or personalized call to actions.

Inaugural StoryDeck clients include AJ+, New York Life, and The Economist.

storydeck.me

Cranes for Change is an extension of the interactive documentary project, The Story of The Stuff.

When a mass shooting occurs, tens and even hundreds of thousands of people send gifts as expressions of sympathy to the victims' communities, often overwhelming them.

Instead, we want to overwhelm those in a position to effect change. Users fill out a short form, print and fold a packet of coloring or origami cranes, then mail them in pre-addressed envelopes.

Created in partnership with filmmaker Ashley Maynor and Vivid Story, the project was developed initially in a Murmur DigiLab.

cranesforchange.org

Based off the Emmy award-winning interactive documentary {THE AND} that explores the dynamics of modern relationships, this app creates the space to have real, honest conversations.

Murmur created the mobile app in collaboration with The Skin Deep, creators of the {THE AND}. It is designed for cozy dinners with your friends, lazy Sundays with your partner, awkward family holidays, lonely flights, and basically everywhere else.

The app incorporates the mechanics from {THE AND} Card Game and provides you with hundreds of customized questions at your finger tips. Play it with partners, friends, family, exes, first dates, and even strangers!

bit.ly/TheAndApp

The Theater of War: Soldiers & Citizens Tour presents readings of ancient Greek dramas to military and civilian communities as a catalyst for powerful discussions about the visible and invisible wounds of war. By presenting these plays to military and civilian audiences, the goal is to de-stigmatize psychological injury, increase awareness of post-deployment psychological health issues, and disseminate information regarding available resources.

Outside The Wire, the producer of Theater of War: Soldiers & Citizens Tour, asked Murmur to develop a mobile app that could be used to capture audience "sentiment" in real-time during the performance, as well as feedback afterwards. Designed to be streamlined and accessible, audience members are able to simply tap whenever a moment of the performance resonates with them. The app is a tool to help generate compassion and understanding between diverse audiences.

Outside The Wire

Created in partnership with Free Range Studios, Our Epic Future: Create It With Clean Energy is a fun fact-filled interactive video experience that allows users to explore three scenarios of the future: one dominated by fossil fuels, one by nuclear power, and the last by renewable energy. Guess which one is the best future for all of us.

Launched a week ahead of the fourth anniversary of the Fukushima reactor disaster the project encourages users to get involved in the clean energy campaigns of five groups fighting for America's clean-energy future - Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Public Citizen, and the Sierra Club.

For the fifth and final season of the sci-fi web series FUTURESTATES, producer ITVS decided to reboot the series as an immersive, next-generation project. For the first time, it utilizes a shared storyworld between each of the individual films, a rich backstory, and an immersive web experience across multiple online platforms to tell a larger story. The goal was to experiment with a new narrative form and a nonlinear storytelling structure, yet allow each of the films to still stand on its own.

Murmur was commissioned by ITVS to conceptualize, design and produce the overarching experience. We developed the storyline for the main character, Dr. Evelyn Malik, and produced all of the video, audio and text “artifacts” that connect through the site. We also designed and developed the primary rich media site and collaborated with the ITVS team on the social media rollout across their Twitter and Tumblr presences.

futurestates.tv
Watch the trailer

Immigrant Nation is a new, interactive social enterprise. Its goal is to facilitate rich, cinematic storytelling among a diverse audience involved with American immigration - past, present, and future. In partnership with Murmur, Immigrant Nation is developing an online platform that will serve as the hub of activity, supported and complemented by a variety of outreach activities, including social media and live events.

At the heart of this project is a simple premise: most people in the U.S. have an immigrant journey to share — be it their own or the voyage of a relative in the past. As the hot-button topic of immigration divides communities across the country, this shared history has the potential to create commonality between new and potential arrivals as well as those whose families have lived in the U.S. for generations.

The Immigrant Nation platform will create an interactive experience that helps users connect to their own story, and enable them to see the common threads between the stories of potential immigrants, new immigrants and longtime residents — making immigration personal, while putting immigration trends in historical context. It will also integrate into the Immigrant Nation social media channels, and streamline the process of story submission and distribution.

This is an effort that has never been more timely: the population demographics of the United States are changing and the Census Bureau predicts that in the next 20 years, white descendants of European immigrants will no longer be the majority in this country. This year, the subject of immigration will also take center stage in a National debate as a bipartisan push to tackle immigration reform ensues.

immigrant-nation.com

An online companion to the feature documentary film Aatsinki: The Story Of Arctic Cowboys, the project is conceived as an interactive debate which exposes the many social, environmental, political and moral issues confronting the Aatsinkis – a family of Finnish Lapland reindeer herders. The online experience continues the interweaving themes of the film and challenges the audience to reconsider their own assumptions about technology, food production, and, most critically, man's place in nature.

aatsinkiseason.com

Started by Murmur partner Mark Harris, The Hierarchy went through IFP's Narrative Lab and had its world premiere at The Film Society of Lincoln Center.

The Hierarchy immersive experience breaks the boundaries between traditional film, live theater and game mechanics. Audience members are placed in direct contact with the cult itself, and face their own susceptibility to cult indoctrination techniques.

Participants explore the world of The Hierarchy not only through sight and sound, but through touch, scent and taste as well. Through direct interaction with cast members and the environment, select audience members are guided into personal experiences and deeper, hidden levels where further secrets are revealed and new questions arise.

thehierarchy.info

Long abandoned by the likes of MTV, the music video as an art form is at last undergoing a renaissance due largely to the internet and social media. It is also a format ripe for further experimentation. Our social music video for the indie rock band Jets Overhead continues our interest in blurring the lines between video narrative and software.

The band's song "What You Really Want" seemed tailor made for audience participation. So we first created a website that enables fans to upload photos of themselves holding hand-drawn signs of their most personal hopes and desires. Using HTML5, the video is programmed to display a random selection of the photos during the song's chorus. The result is a new kind of collaboration that incorporates original footage created by Murmur, user-generated images submitted by fans, and curation by the band members. The video content itself changes each time it is viewed.

The video had its world premiere on RollingStone.com in December 2012.

tellmewhatyoureallywant.com

Jerusalem Unfiltered is a counterpart to the upcoming feature documentary Battle for Jerusalem. While the film focuses on the struggle of young, fearless City Council member who is fighting to save both her city and her career from the grip of ultra-orthodox extremists, the crossmedia extension delves further into the ancient city's diverse and contested neighborhoods.

Short video profiles of political, social and cultural leaders cover topics from Jerusalem's cultural renaissance to religious pluralism and Israeli-Palestinian relations, Jerusalem Unfiltered deepens our understanding of the city's hopes and challenges as we join some of its most interesting citizens in navigating the complexities of their cherished, misunderstood and historic city.

jerusalemunfiltered.com/demo

Him, Her and Them is the first example of a Social Film. Whereas traditional films are linear narratives, Social Films combine traditional storytelling with audience participation. Him, Her and Them explored the idea of adding to the story via simple text additions, much in the same way that comments work on Facebook pages. Additionally, the content is then filtered by each viewer's own social network within Facebook. Therefore, viewers only see contributions from their "social graph" — their circle of friends.

Shot in high-definition video in multiple locations around New York, the film tells a timeless, archetypal story of a young man living in a city. Thematically, it explores the idea of power, and how our notions of power are shaped through our relationships, and also through media. The film was released on Facebook in April 2011.

Watch the trailer
Watch the demo video