The ‘Fabrika Kreativnosti’ team has long been engaged in an effort to make audio podcasts ‘multimedia’ and interesting even for those who do not like listening to podcasts but are interested in our topics. Since we mostly like sound and depicting images with sound, we did not want it to be a standard video podcast. The idea of ‘Fabrika Kreativnosti’ is to address important social topics in a creative and different way, and this was our main idea when we started developing visual podcasts. Such podcasts are rare. They combine storytelling, audio and visual elements and ‘scrollytelling’, namely narration of a story through scrolling. They require authors to first create an interesting podcast and subsequently transform the audio story into visual elements.
This innovative blend provides our community with the opportunity to educate themselves on key topics through an engaging and entertaining format. To do something like this, we needed the support and trust of other professionals in our field and in professions similar to ours that the idea we have is really worth developing.
This takes us to our project ‘Multimedia Storytelling Innovations: revolutionising podcast production’ and the support we received through the Western Balkans Media for Change programme.
Through the project we did in this first phase of the business validation programme, we learnt which tools can assist us in developing and examining whether the business idea we have is interesting for our community and our audience, and the support we received helped us take the first steps in implementing such an idea. Working with a mentor helped us not only with this specific topic, but also with other challenges we had when it came to further developing ‘Fabrika Kreativnosti’ as a company and as a medium. So stay tuned as the key result of validating our business idea – new multimedia content for our podcast ‘Umology’ presenting stories about how the system we live in affects us and how to feel good in it – will be starting in August.
Working on this project, the development of audio narrative and visual storytelling also led to the development of other elements at ‘Fabrika Kreativnosti’: in order to create more interesting audio podcasts, we developed two guides: ‘How to interview to create narrative content’, which connects different interview techniques, and ‘Narrating a (journalistic) story – How to create narrative content by combining journalistic and literary approaches’. We hope to inspire others with our work and are more than happy to share our insights and lessons learned.
The support of the Western Balkans Media for Change programme enables small and professional media initiatives, such as ‘Fabrika Kreativnosti’, to establish a trusting relationship with their audience in times when they are overwhelmed by information from many different (often unverified or unobjective) sources. The Business Validation Booster programme means a lot to us at ‘Fabrika Kreativnosti’: it not only provided us with the tools to develop a business idea, but also gave us the opportunity to confirm that the idea we have is interesting and innovative.
Thanks to this support, ‘Fabrika Kreativnosti’ can continue its innovative projects, providing quality and reliable content to inform, inspire and educate our community.