StoryMaker - Make your story great

2011 highlighted the role citizen journalists in conflict areas can play in the way the international community understands these events. Despite their importance, it remained difficult to find the videos they produced, beyond shaky clips on the broadcast news or the occasional high profile livestream. Furthermore, their images and sounds typically created awareness, without increasing understanding. While locals may know best, that doesn't mean they are currently best able to communicate it. Traditional media training programs exist, but are not able to effectively operate on internet scale, and typical do not include the type of mobile technologies and social media tools necessary in this age.

This app enables existing and aspiring journalists all over the world to produce and publish professional-grade news video, photo and audio content with their Android phone, as safely and securely as possible. It provides an interactive training guide, walkthroughs, and templates for users to follow as they plan their piece and capture media. The app then helps assemble the content into a finished format, with cuts and basic graphics using onboard mobile FFMPEG media processing ported by the Guardian Project. The process then attaches enhanced metadata and content tags that help identity the content on social media sites. In turn, this helps their target audience and supporting organizations discover, curate and continue to share the content in a wide manner.

Much of the existing work done on the SecureSmartCam project with WITNESS can be utilized by this application. The SSC framework provides secure means for safeguarding and publishing media to private or public media repos, using local SQLCipher storage and anonymous proxy-based uploading to sites like YouTube and VideoBin.org.

EMR improves the chance that local voices will be able to compete on an equal footing with international professionals and provide greater understanding of critical issues to the public. The tool helps mobile media move towards professional media package quality, while ensuring a more safe and secure model of connecting creators with their audience than currently exists.