This past Sunday “Coming home a different person” launched, a project I worked on with Whitney Shefte and Alberto Cuadra, alongside reporter Chris Davenport. It features an overview video that covers the increases in traumatic brain injury cases and what doctors are doing to treat it, as well as five case studies of three soldiers and two Marines, and a graphic that explains the science of brain injury.
I initially heard about the story Chris Davenport was working on and thought, wow, this is an amazing multimedia opportunity. I went to Whitney and asked her if she’d like to work on it with me. We huddled with Chris and storyboarded out a basic flow for the intro video and the entire piece — how it would be structured and how we should integrate the graphics with the videos. We decided on an overview with motion graphics explaining the rise in TBI cases. Alberto had already done an awesome model of a brain so we decided to use that in the video and do an in-depth science of brain injury piece that would feature some audio from Dr. David Williamson, who was an incredible resource for the project.
I used Alberto’s illustration as a base to create the interactivity, and wrote up some text and figured out how to incorporate the audio interview. I also set up a menu for the videos and a simple viewing experience that would allow people to watch the videos large and navigate easily from one to the next. We incorporated our standard photo gallery template into this project so that we could get all the benefits of using our normal photo CMS, combined with the benefit of having the photos packaged with the rest of the content.
These stories are incredibly powerful and Whitney did an amazing job with the video, as did Alberto with the motion graphics and illustration of the soldier and brain. Ultimately, I think it turned out to be a really engaging package with simple navigation and deep, rich content that tells the stories of these soldiers and their struggles.