Interactive examples

El Mundo wowed me with their Haiti multimedia coverage

This post is also available in: Spanish

I have been tracking multimedia work documenting the Haiti earthquake since I wrote about the initial coverage I saw two weeks ago, and I can say without a doubt that El Mundo’s multimedia coverage is the best I’ve seen thus far.

In particular, their graphics team constructed three excellent step graphics depicting the scope of the earthquake, the inefficiencies in building construction, and the use of the USNS COMFORT, a Navy hospital ship, during the relief efforts. Regardless if you don’t understand the Spanish text, I highly recommend that you spend some time navigating around the graphic and admiring the high-quality 3D illustrations, smooth animations, and detailed analysis of these topics.

“Terremoto en Haiti” discusses the specifics of the Haiti earthquake and background information about other earthquakes in nine frames divided into four chapters. I particularly like how they seamlessly integrated three kinds of maps – illustrated maps, Google Earth view, and a heatmap – through the use of gradual pans, fades, and zooms. Simple interactivity was provided in several frames to provide additional content, and the interactive elements are easily evident to a novice user. My only quibble is that if you click through the entire graphic using the forward and back buttons, it doesn’t sync up with the four chapter headings to show users where they are in the presentation. I would have appreciated a simple highlight effect for each chapter tab when I moved from one to the other using the navigational arrows.

“Vivienda sismorresistente” uses 3D models of buildings to illustrate how buildings should and should not be constructed to withstand earthquakes. Each of the seven steps talks about a separate tip, such as how the support walls should be symmetrical, the windows should be evenly spaced between pillars, and all floors should be equidistant from one another.

Lastly, “Buque hospital” elegantly breaks apart sections of a 3D model to depict how this ship can serve as an on-site hospital, such as where helicopters land and where they take patients depending on their injury. Pictures would have been a nice addition, but even without actual footage of the ship, I still get a clear understanding of its scope, purpose, and layout from this excellent model representation.

Each section taught me more about the topic at hand than any other resource I have seen, which proves that they successfully utilized multimedia in a way to best portray the story. On the other hand, their image gallery left me wanting more, and their video collection, although extensive, was a little too pixelated for my personal taste. However, I assume there is great difficulty in editing, compressing, and uploading heavy video files within a country that has little to no electricity or Internet access, so I won’t hold that against them!

My congratulations go to the El Mundo staff for working so hard to thoroughly cover this breaking news event.

Other posts that might interest you:

• Wall Street Journal utilizes motion graphics to illustrate China’s housing market
• The Washington Post effectively visualizes casualties of the Civil War
• SBS launches multimedia site “Dragon Children”

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