#ROMANOVS100: 4,000 PHOTOS. 4 SOCIAL NETWORKS. 1 FAMILY.

Title#ROMANOVS100: 4,000 PHOTOS. 4 SOCIAL NETWORKS. 1 FAMILY.
BrandRT
Product/ServiceDOCUMENTARY SOCIAL MEDIA PROJECT #ROMANOVS100
Category D02. Data Storytelling
Entrant RT Moscow, RUSSIA
Idea Creation RT Moscow, RUSSIA
Media Placement RT Moscow, RUSSIA
PR RT Moscow, RUSSIA
Production RT Moscow, RUSSIA
Credits
Name Company Position
Kirill Karnovich-Valua RT Creative Producer
Revaz Todua RT Designer
Gleb Burashov RT Producer
Elena Medvedeva RT Producer
Eldar Salamov RT Producer
Ania Fedorova RT Producer
Ivan Fursov RT Producer
Ivor Crotty RT Producer
Lilly Kazakova RT Producer
Margo Tskhovrebova RT Producer
Peter Nalitch Peter Nalitch's musical collective Musician
Helen Rappaport Helen Rappaport Historical Consultant
Denis Semyonov Great Gonzo Studio Artist
Marina Amaral Marina Amaral Artist
Aleksandr Skryabin RT Director
Ilya Grachev RT Director of photography
Victoria Milovanova RT Producer

Describe the creative idea

#Romanovs100 is a unique digital storytelling project driven by visual data and built on the analysis of thousands of photos shot by Russia’s last Royal family in the early 20th century. To make history come to life in the world of social media & digital platforms, we partnered with the Russian State Archive to retrieve over 4,000 actual analogue images once stored in the private family albums. Our work to digitise and analyse this trove of family photographs helped portray the Romanovs from a new, deeply human perspective, resulting in innovative data-driven educational storytelling on social media platforms. This vast family chronicle is a detailed first-hand witness account of the early 20th century - for decades this part of Russian history was eradicated from school-books and kept in the dark during the Soviet era. Today, we bring it back to the spotlight.

Describe the execution

The Romanov archive is perhaps the first private photo chronicle in history to boast such detail and scope. With our project we wanted to pay a "live" tribute to the last ruling family, giving these photographs - once kept in family albums - a second, digital life in social networks. The innovation behind #Romanovs100 lies with integrating complex historical data into real-time publishing mediums. #Romanovs100 is a research into history through the visual language of photography combined with the digital reality of social media. Identification and tagging the 4,000+ images began several months before the project was launched on April 8, 2018 and continued almost to the last day. Using a special digital asset management tool, we tagged every image: “who, what, where, when”. The cloud of tags involved up to 200 markers and provided us with early clues on possible stories and craft. To link visual data to historical facts and create narratives for social media posts, we used dozens of different sources, ranging from personal diaries and letters by Nicholas II himself, to memoirs written by his contemporaries and extensive work by Russian and foreign historians. Media planning was among the biggest challenges - the task was to keep the narrative unique and original for every social media account. Guided by the specifics of every particular network and its audience, the team thoroughly selected and distributed the content between YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This laid ground for creating comprehensive multimedia cross-platform content: more text-sophisticated posts for the Facebook community, snappy visuals for Instagram, real-time first-person storytelling on Twitter, short documentary-style videos on YouTube. Audience-wise, the project aimed to show that learning history can be compelling and interactive. It targets younger audiences with innovative formats and digital approaches in educational storytelling.