July 5, 2023

Designers often say the work is “solving problems”. My contributions to this piece would be well-described that way.

For this story about missing children, we wanted to use video posted to Telegram as visual evidence of where the children came from and who was moving them. But low-quality, handheld, shaky video was attention-grabbing in the wrong ways and competed too much with the article’s text.

Playing the video from start to finish in this case not only didn’t fit, it wasn’t necessary. There were just a handful of key moments we wanted to showcase, so we tried breaking those out as stills and fading one into the next on scroll, like a choppy animation. The team was very happy with the effect, it has the same documenting power as the original but keeps eyes focused on the evidence. I also liked how this technique allows so much control of what the reader sees. A wary glance can pass by too quickly to be noticed in video, but slow it down and take a look, the emotion is unmistakable.

Read it here.