SECRET LOCATION AND FRONTLINE WIN INAUGURAL PEABODY-FACEBOOK FUTURES OF MEDIA AWARD – FOR ‘EBOLA OUTBREAK: A 360 VIRTUAL JOURNEY’
Secret Location, the award-winning content creation company for emerging platforms, is pleased to announce that it has been awarded with an inaugural Peabody-Facebook Futures of Media Award for the virtual reality documentary Facebook-360 project Ebola Outbreak: A 360 Virtual Journey, a collaboration with the PBS investigative series FRONTLINE and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. The new Peabody-Facebook Futures of Media Award is given to the Top 5 Stories in Digital Spaces.
“We are extremely honoured to receive this award and I could not be more proud of our team and our incredible partners,” said James Milward, President and Executive Producer, Secret Location. “This project was one of pure passion and it enabled us to transport viewers, connect with them emotionally and empathize with those affected by the outbreak.”
Ebola Outbreak: A 360 Virtual Journey, from FRONTLINE filmmaker Dan Edge, unfolds in three parts: first, it places viewers in Meliandou Village, Guinea, at the hollow tree once home to hundreds of bats where villagers believe the outbreak may have begun. Then, viewers travel to Sierra Leone as the outbreak spreads and a beloved healer’s funeral sets off a chain reaction of infections. Finally, viewers visit an emergency Ebola field hospital as the outbreak spirals out of control.
“Making this virtual reality documentary about the worst Ebola outbreak on record with FRONTLINE filmmaker Dan Edge and our partners at Secret Location and Columbia’s Tow Center was an intense and rewarding journalism experience,” says Raney Aronson-Rath, Executive Producer of FRONTLINE, which also won a second Peabody-Facebook award for the multimedia documentary Inheritance. “To be honored for our work to tell important stories like this in new, immersive forms is exciting. As FRONTLINE does more and more storytelling in the VR journalism space, I’m grateful for this recognition, and to our audience, our funders at PBS and CPB, and WGBH.”
The Peabody Awards are recognized as the world’s oldest and most esteemed award for excellence in electronic communication. They have recently partnered with Facebook to create the Peabody-Facebook Futures of Media Award, which acknowledges digital media producers who use the affordances of digital spaces to tell important stories in creative and original ways.
ABOUT SECRET LOCATION
Secret Location is a multi Emmy® and Cannes Lion Award-winning content studio for emerging platforms. Secret Location combines cutting-edge technology with traditional storytelling to create digitally accelerated experiences for the web, mobile, tablet and new platforms like Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR & AR).
Just eight years old, the company has offices in Los Angeles and Toronto and works with a myriad of clients, which include NBC, Fox, IFC, The History Channel, Endemol, and PBS, as well as massive consumer brands like Samsung, GE and Red Bull. Secret Location also produces digitally driven dramatic series, comedy, journalism and sports, with a combination of IP partnerships and original properties.
