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.