The Wall
Storytelling innovation from the USA TODAY Network.
The Wall was a massive multimedia reporting project that involved journalists across the USA TODAY Network. The story aimed to tell the story of the United States border with Mexico, detailing its geography and social complexities in the midst of a heated political environment.
I joined the project within months of the planned completion date, having been brought on board to design the interface for a planned Virtual Reality experience.
I quickly realized that the VR experience the team had hoped for was impossible with the data and reporting available. The LIDAR data we'd gathered wouldn't work as-is for a planned immersive on-the-ground experience, and our reporting often didn't match up with locations we'd mapped.
First and foremost, I needed to define what we could actually build in the time remaining with the resources available.
I got to work with our partners in the newsroom. We figured out a storytelling framework that we could build in a short time frame with limited engineering resources that we could ship on time while still being an impressive immersive experience.
The solution was elegant: we took the storytelling moments our journalists had produced and arranged them along the border. With stories distributed across narrative chapters, users would engage from a zoomed out view of the landscape with a glowing border beneath their feet.
Some pieces of reporting were traditional video vignettes, while others were audio recordings. The 3D environments we were able to build would live alongside more traditional storytelling while keeping everything in a proper geographic and narrative context.
While my initial and primary responsibility was simply the menu that would be used to navigate The Wall's VR experience, I ended up playing a key role in making the project a coherent success.
Putting everything together into a workable format was a gratifying challenge and a great example of teamwork across the organization. I'm proud to have contributed to a reporting project that won USA TODAY's first Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.
