Interactive Guatemala

Client
Comic Relief Education Team

The Brief
To create an interactive educational experience, for UK children to explore the lives of children in Guatemala.

The Process
I had to start planning this piece before we knew who and how many kids in Guatemala would be involved, as the one trip out there would combine finding and choosing the kids, gathering the stories and taking all the photos and video footage. My overall vision was a rich non-linear flash journey that really would engage the children.

The brief to the photographer was simple. I wanted backgrounds, landscapes, buildings, street signs, textures, animals etc. along with full body shots of the kids and their family and friends. Everything we needed to build up a real picture of their lives.

The brief to the video cameraman was a little more varied. Unsure of exactly how the video footage was going to be integrated and how prominently it would feature, the brief ended up being very diverse.

After the Trip we had 4 children’s stories, 2000 photos and 8 hours of video footage. Now I had to put this into a structure. I put them all within an interlinking landscape where you could freely navigate through a child’s story and into the other children’s at any time. This non-linear approach was something the client was unfamiliar with, so there was a big element of trust at this point as the deadline was too tight to be able to totally rethink the structure after user-testing.

The piece was split into 16 interlinking scenes, to help provide intuitive navigation and progression there was a information and progress bar along with a ‘top trump’ card relating to the child who’s story you were in at the time. To really bring the scenes to life video footage was cut-out, blurred, coloured and shaded frame by frame, so that it could be placed in these scenes. This was a very time consuming process but in the end a very successful one.

Along with myself, 2 flash developers and 2 other designers helped bring this project to life, not to mention the photographer, cameraman, story gatherers and the client themselves.

The End Result
sportrelief.com/guatemala