Unlocking a Global Audience for our Second VR Film on the Rohingya Crisis

One of our objectives at Contrast VR is to share our content with as many people as possible, focusing on a global audience. We believe that our stories shouldn’t live exclusively on headsets, but rather should reach millions of people on different platforms.

“Forced to Flee” is Contrast VR’s second film on Rohingya refugees this year. This time, with the support of Amnesty International, we traveled to Bangladesh during the peak of the crisis in October, 2017.

For our distribution strategy, we created a different experience for every social platform and made sure that we are using the social media channels in the most productive way.

Here’s how we published across platforms.

When in the field, it often feels like there is no time to think about any extra tasks. However, having behind-the-scenes assets, linear stills and videos from the shoot is essential. The assets will not only be used to create thumbnails or posters for the film, but also to promote it on Twitter and Instagram, possibly gathering additional eyes and ears for your 360 video content.

From the first day in the field, the whole team was aware of this and everybody knew what assets they were responsible for. Sending pictures from the field with captions to colleagues in the office who coordinate our social media accounts was also a part of our daily routine. And this was the very beginning of building an audience for the film.

For social platforms, we decided to have the original interview sound accompanied by English subtitles embedded in the video. This was the master version which went up on all 360 social platforms.

Twitter, however, doesn’t support high resolution 360 video, and not all organizations have access to even publish 360 content. Also, users’ attention span on Twitter is even shorter than on Facebook. This is why we created a considerably lower resolution trailer and a shorter version (2 minutes 50 seconds) to be posted on Twitter.

All of the above versions featured two languages — Rohingya voiceover and English subtitles. In order to reach a more global audience, we needed the videos in more languages. Amnesty International has more than 60 local bureaus around the world. We created another export — one without subtitles. We sent Amnesty additional instructions how to create subtitles, so that they could adapt the video to their audiences’ primary language (Spanish, Portuguese, German etc.). This way, we could introduce even more people to the Rohingya story.

Watching the film on a headset is a completely different experience. You are suddenly transported into the Kutupalong camp and you can see and hear the characters more intimately.

You need more time to look around to have a proper immersive experience compared to watching a 360 film on mobile or desktop. Subtitles can even be distracting and take away time from the viewers to really feel engaged and present in the environment they’re being immersed to.

We decided to create yet another version with English voiceovers over the original interview sound. The transcript is quite dark and sensitive, so we had to work hard to find proper English voice artists for the documentary.

The Instagram Story platform turned out to be one of the most successful ways to draw people to watch the full documentary on our website. We created a behind-the-scenes story with photos and vertical videos from the shoot. It performed well, as viewers enjoyed learning about the production team, our processes and the challenges we faced during the shoot. We collected the assets for our Instagram story during our shot but we published it when we released our video. After viewing the story on Instagram, the viewer had an option to swipe up to watch the full documentary.

One of the most exciting parts of our Instagram story featured our audio assistant. Jamal, a young Rohingya boy, who followed us around the camp for two days, so we decided to include him in our production team by giving him a Zoom recorder and asking him to capture ambient sound for the documentary. This, and similar anecdotes from the field, are an important part of the film and should find a place in the promotion and distribution strategy.

Even this Medium blog post of ours is part of our distribution strategy, reaching a different audience from that of Al Jazeera, AJ+, or Amnesty International. Not only do we post our learnings to share them with the community, but we also tap into another platform where different people can watch our stories.

In the first week since its launch, “Forced to Flee” gathered over 1.5 million views on Facebook. More than 70 percent of the website visitors came from our Instagram story. Around 84 percent of our website traffic was from new visitors during this period. Hundreds engaged with the various content related to the documentary on Twitter.

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