Interactive Features
In early 2012, a dozen students in the Multimedia Projects course at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University set out to create an interactive storytelling mobile tablet application on Central New York’s notorious winters.
Famous for frigid temperatures and record-crushing snowfalls, Central New York averages 116.9 inches of snow annually. During the previous winter, more than 179 inches of snow accumulated, making “winter” a natural choice for an interactive storytelling project.
This past winter would prove to be strikingly unusual again, not for seemingly endless amounts of snow, but rather the lack of it. A mere 50.6 inches of snow fell throughout the 6-month stretch, providing students with the challenge of producing stories that had longer “shelf lives” than a simple feature on ice fishing.
Vertical Format
Horizontal Format
This application was produced by the Spring 2012 Multimedia Projects class under the guidance of Seth Gitner, Assistant Professor of Newspaper and Online Journalism at the Newhouse School.
The student producers include: Steve Bottari, Cassia Brooks, Erin Carson, Tenell Felder, Nate Hopper, Harrison Kramer, Kayla Rice, Melia Robinson, Emily Shearing, Beckie Strum, Katrina Tulloch and Heather Wentz.
Mobile Design: Cassia Brooks
Database Design: Jon Crockett
Additional photographs and video by Alex Abdalian, Mitchell Franz, Efren Lopez, Taylor Miller, Alyssa Stone and Zach Zollars. Soundtrack provided with permission from Synchronice.
Some of the web production for this application was developed by the ICC575 Advanced Web Design class under the tutelage of Professor Jeff Passetti.
Additional production help was provided by Steve Davis, associate professor of Newspaper and Online Journalism, Jon Glass, TheNewsHouse.com executive producer, and Simon Perez, assistant professor of Broadcast and Digital Journalism. Also, a special thank you to our alumni who provided coaching support: Andrew Burton, AJ Chavar, Andrew Hida and Drew Jordan.
The stories for this application were inserted using a content management system that combined Google Documents and InDesign using the InDesign plugin, DocsFlow from em software - http://emsoftware.com/products/docsflow/ .
We’d like to thank the subjects of our stories and everyone who works at Toggenburg Mountain in Fabius, N.Y., for their assistance during the weekend of February 18-19, 2012
