Multimedia advice

How to recreate past events with multimedia

Two recent packages have made me think about the difficulties in telling stories by recreating the past. In The Washington Posts’ recent series “Fatal Flights” that I blogged about yesterday, producer Akira Hakuta combined a multitude of elements to recreate a helicoper crash from a year ago. In The St. Petersburg Times’ recent package “The Golden Hour,” Joseph Garnett Jr., Maurice Rivenbark and Jack Rowland combined interviews with broadcast news footage to recreate a car crash from four months ago. Both are unique in their final product, but both also prove how difficult it can be to successfully tell a story that wasn’t fully captured in the present.

Watch both videos and notice the complexity of recreating each event. By combining numerous interviews from subjects at the scene, file footage, 911 calls, recreated photos and video, a carefully crafted narrator script, and much more, only then can users begin to understand the otherwise undocumented event.

While I won’t pick a favorite between the two, I do want you to notice some similarities and differences. Both use a narrator to tell the story, blended with broll from 911 audio and subject interviews. “The Golden Hour” added some sound effects of the ticking clock, tires squeaking and car noises to authenticate/dramatize (whichever you believe) the event. “Trooper 2’s Last Flight” uses black and white file footage with colored present footage to distinguish between the two. Both use 911 footage, but one uses subtitles while the other doesn’t. Both run more than twice as long as an average online video.

My point is that producers can use a variety of techniques to recreate past events. While nothing is as authentic as footage caught in real-time, we have to work with whatever we are given, and in many cases it isn’t a lot. I am extremely impressed with both of these videos because I can tell an extensive amount of time and effort went into each.

What other presentations have you seen that successfully recreate past events? I would love to see other examples!

Trooper 2’s Last Flight by The Washington Post

The Golden Hour by St. Petersburg Times

Other posts that might interest you:

• Broadcast journalism ethics need to change
• When it comes to multimedia, design is everything
• Raleigh N&O’s probation series a missed opportunity

© 24 August 2009 Innovative Interactivity (II).