Using VR to Document Climate Change
Virtual reality can be an ideal medium for documenting the effects of climate change, allowing viewers to travel to distant places and see the impact of climate change with their own eyes. 360 videos take us to the Arctic circle, to depleting rainforests, to evaporating lakes. Yet, while technology allows us virtual transport to different locations, our main focus of climate change videos should be on the communities who are impacted by climate change every day.
Human-interest stories
Often we hear about climate change through the lens of statistics, numbers, and degrees; in terms of rising Celsius degrees, of falling sea levels in centimeters, in changing weather patterns. Yet, it is not easy to grasp what these numbers actually mean, especially if we don’t experience any changes on a daily basis.
“I think it’s the biggest story in the world. It seems to be the story on which journalism has failed. Journalism likes things that happened yesterday, which you can describe and attribute to a reason.” — Alan Rusbridger, former Editor-In-Chief of The Guardian, at the 2018 International Journalism Festival.
Climate change is often sensationalized, gaining attention when disasters hit. Journalists talk about the cause and effect, yet the reality is that climate change affects communities every day. By documenting that struggle and highlighting personal stories we provide much needed context to the very nuanced and complicated issue of climate change.
At Contrast, we always strive to explain larger issues through personal stories, and we’ve applied this to climate change as well. In The Disappearing Oasis, our VR film about the impact of climate change on the M’hamid oasis in the southeast Morocco, three residents show us what their lives look like and their hopes and fears for the future. While showing how climate change has impacted their lives, the film also focuses on their efforts to improve their situation. The viewer not only sees the evident changes — for example, palm trees covered in sand — but also spends time with the locals learning about them and from them.
“I think we need to appeal to emotions, on a personal and local level,” says John Reilly, a co-director of the MIT Joint Program during a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.. According to Reilly, this is especially important in the current state of affairs, when facts are starting to matter less. He continues, “[Appealing to emotions] really challenges scientists because our discipline has taught us to remove the emotions from the analysis and create cold objective facts, and those are the things that don’t communicate”.
Technology doesn’t make it easier
VR is a powerful tool to show changes in an environment while immersing viewers into locations and communities that they would probably rarely travel to. “There is tremendous potential for visual and storytelling formats in making sense of this issue [climate change] and finding different ways to experience it,” says Jonathan Gray, a lecturer at the King’s College London, at the International Journalism Festival. According to Gray, interactive visual representation of data is another way to better engage viewers into the topic.
However, while technology gives us opportunities to be more creative and look for more exciting mediums to tell stories, it doesn’t make our work as journalists much easier. The task is still the same — providing accurate, authentic, fact-based reporting in an engaging and interesting way.
Reporting on a climate change story is difficult. At Contrast, we had to work through several different cuts of The Disappearing Oasis before we finally locked the picture. After every cut, we felt like something was missing, that we needed to be more explicit or better explain the processes. During the pre-production and post-production, we kept in contact with scientists who helped us by reviewing the script’s use of facts and specific terminology. It was a learning experience on both sides; the scientists had to work with educating me (I’m not a climate change reporter) on the issue, and I had to understand and learn their ‘language’ in order to ‘translate’ it into something that would be easy for an audience to consume.
Even though we encountered the above mentioned challenges while reporting on climate change, this is a very important story to tackle. We should use all tools available for us to talk about it. At Contrast, we use 360/VR, and this allows us to provide an intimate and personal experience related to such a big issue as climate change is.
Originally published at medium.com on June 7, 2018.
