Using digital innovation and immersive technology, SBS offers audiences distinctive and new experiences to challenge perceptions and deepen understanding between communities.

Digital Creative Labs

Over the past 12 months, SBS’s Digital Creative Labs produced a body of highly-acclaimed projects that reached more than one million people. From interactive maps, polls and infographics to immersive documentaries and interactive installations, the team has created distinctive experiences, both online and offline, that build engagement, trust and understanding within communities.

Of particular note, the Belongings interactive installation continues to make a positive impact since premiering at the 2018 Biennale of Sydney, touring the country and the world, and surprising audiences across the spectrum. The project featured six refugees now living in Australia, sharing how their treasured belongings have been a source of strength, hope and a reminder of home. It was a 2019 Webby Award Finalist in Best Culture & Events, Best Use of Interactive Video and Best Integrated Mobile Experience categories as well as a 2019 SXSW Interactive Innovation Award Finalist in the Social & Cultural Impact category.

Online Interactive Documentaries

She Called Me Red

The world’s first live documentary for Instagram, She Called Me Red explored the Rohingya refugee crisis through the personal experiences of Yunus, a refugee living in Melbourne, and his family who remain in a refugee camp in Bangladesh.

Smartphones are among the most precious possessions of displaced individuals, including Yunus and his family. She Called Me Red harnessed the technology’s capabilities to re-imagine how audiences engage with social issues on Instagram using live, daily user generated content, text reportage, illustration, photographs, videos, and detailed animated scenes.

The project began at the peak of the monsoon season, when daily floods and landslides threatened the safety of more than 200,000 people in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. Coverage concluded on the first anniversary of the mass exodus of the Rohingya from Myanmar.

She Called Me Red won the 2018 Nikon-Walkley for Best Feature/ Photography Essay in the Innovation category and was a Webby nominee in the Best Photography & Graphics, Social category.

“Powerful content in a highly innovative format”, Gisella Lomax, Head of Social Media, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

Missing

SBS’s interactive documentary, Missing is the extraordinary untold story of eight-year-old Wendy Jane Pfeiffer who was lost for 40 hours in the dense Adelaide Hills scrub after being abducted and brutally stabbed near her family’s farmhouse in October 1966.

Missing was developed in collaboration with Wendy and the families of Pitjantjara trackers, Jimmy James and Daniel Moodoo, who helped bring her home. The interactive documentary recreates the search for Wendy, with principal photography by award-winning photo artist Tamara Dean, captured on location 52 years later.

The project revisits Wendy’s experiences in her own words, ensuring the skills and heroic actions of Pitjantjara tracker Jimmy James are finally adequately recognised without bias or prejudice. An exclusive investigative long read was published online in February to accompany the project and tell the wider story of Wendy’s remarkable survival and immeasurable gratitude to Jimmy James.

Missing was awarded the International Prize at the New Images Festival in Paris, CSS Winner for Website of the Day and Website of the Month, and ‘Awwwards’ Website Awards winner for Site of the Day, and was a finalist for Best Use of Video or Moving Image at the 2019 Webby Awards.