National Film Board of Canada/New York Times co-production is the latest chapter in the NFB's multi-year, multi-award-winning HIGHRISE documentary project

2014, April 3 - Toronto, Ontario - Office national du film du Canada 

A Short History of the Highrise, an interactive documentary co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and The New York Times, has been honoured with a Peabody Award recognizing outstanding achievements in electronic media. Created by Katerina Cizek and produced for the NFB by Gerry Flahive, A Short History of the Highrise is the latest installment in the NFB’s multi-year, multimedia documentary project HIGHRISE, offering audiences an innovative look at life inside residential highrises around the world. 

The centrepiece of A Short History of the Highrise is four short films: The first three―Mud, Concrete and Glass―draw on The New York Times’s extraordinary visual archives. Each film is intended to evoke a chapter in a storybook, with rhyming narration and photographs brought to life with intricate animation. Home, the fourth chapter, is comprised of images submitted by the public. The interactive experience incorporates the films and, like a visual accordion, allows viewers to dig deeper into the project’s themes with additional archival materials, text and microgames. On tablets, viewers can navigate the story extras and special features within the films using touch commands like swipe, pinch, pull and tap. On desktop and laptop computers, users can mouse over features and click to navigate. 
 

Quick Facts

•    It’s the fifth Peabody Award for the NFB, which won in 2011 for the Rezolution Pictures/NFB co-produced documentary Reel Injun, in 2002 for Karen Shopsowitz’s My Father’s Camera, in 1995 for director John N. Smith’s NFB/Télé-Action co-produced mini-series The Boys of St. Vincent, and in 1994 for Jeff McKay’s documentary Fat Chance. 
•    It’s the latest honour for A Short History of the Highrise, which recently won first prize at the 2014 World Press Photo Multimedia Contest in Amsterdam.  
•    The HIGHRISE project has to date garnered some of the interactive world’s top awards, including the inaugural IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling, an International Digital Emmy Award, and the first-ever award for Best Original Program for Digital Media, Non-Fiction, at the Canadian Screen Awards.
•    The executive producers of A Short History of the Highrise are Silva Basmajian (NFB) and Jason Spingarn-Koff (The New York Times).