Choosing a President

Posted by: Zach Wise    Tags:      Posted date:  November 5, 2008  |  4 Comments

Choosing a President on nytimes.com

Remember when it looked like the election hinged on the candidate’s stance on Iraq? This presidential campaign has been two years in the making and the political landscape has changed a lot over those two years. Our video/photo/interactive historical look back has been a little over a week in the making but that week included some 24hr workdays. The day before the election we published Choosing a President.

Do What?

We had a hard time pitching this at the Times. It was hard to explain what we were trying to do to the top editors. We didn’t want to do a video, or an interactive or a photo gallery. We didn’t want to tell an audio story or a print story or a story through infographics and illustration. We wanted to do it all. In one story. To make it all work as one. To make it long by web standards. Most of all, we wanted it to be good. I mean, why would you do less telling the story of the most significant presidential campaign in history?

I Think it Worked

Motion graphics

We thought that setting up the political landscape in 2006 would be a great way to start this story. The problem is, it’s complex. To paint the scene in 2006 you have to introduce a lot of characters, relationships between contenders and political parties, motivations etc. Just cutting from photo to photo or video clip to video clip over top of narration didn’t seem like the best way to do this in a timely fashion. We opted to produce the opening sequences in After Effects, so that we could introduce the field of candidates and visually show relationships and motivations backed by narration.

Getting back into After Effects was fun. It can be a daunting program if you don’t use it everyday, and getting your head into it can sometimes take awhile but in the end, it can do things you can’t do with a camera. Like pivot on a dime hovering over the U.S. and swinging from state to state to hear the voices of voters. Hopefully we will use this story telling device more in the future. We’re a long way from the production quality of the TV and movie industries that use these post production programs everyday but I like to think we look a little classier.



Chapter One Storyboards:

Storyboards for the first chapter which was later produced in After Effects.


Update:

Some people wanted to know how the work was divided among the producers and what sort of timetable we were working under. So here it is.

  • Andrew DeVigal, multimedia editor, had the idea for the piece and the general approach came from him. He also took control of the mouse during the edit several times.
  • Nancy Donaldson, who started at the Times shortly after me, worked closely with David Scull, the photo editor to make selects and sequence a large part of the Final Cut project. Donaldson came from the Washington Post where she produced some truly inspiring stories.
  • Amy O’Leary, formerly of This American Life, wrote script drafts and worked closely with Katharine Q. Seelye on the final script and narration. Amy also composed the music for the piece and did the master mix on most of the audio for the project.
  • Ben Werschkul did initial video edits and worked with Amy O’Leary and Katharine Q. Seelye on the script
  • Tom Jackson created the interactive video player.
  • I produced chapter 1 using mostly After Effects and helped on editing the other chapters. The decision to use motion graphics in the first chapter was one we all agreed on being the best format for this part of the story. I started story-boarding based on the script draft. Once the script was finalized I reworked the storyboards to reflect the changes and started working in After Effects.

For the most part Nancy did a majority of the editing work in Final Cut but at times Amy, Andrew, and I would also work on some of the edits. We worked very collaboratively and we divided up the workflow effectively. It helped that we were all on the same page, as far as storytelling goes, so we all work together towards the same goal.

We had a little over a week to get this project done, but most of the actual production didn’t start until the Wednesday before the election. We were done by Sunday and very sleep deprived.

Screen-shot of the final After Effects project

About the author
Zach Wise is an award-winning former Senior Multimedia Producer for The New York Times and Associate Professor at Northwestern University.



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  • http://twitter.com/zlwise/statuses/999082887 zlwise (Zach Wise)

    @Photo_Man We published a 4th chapter. I updated my blog post on the election piece: http://tinyurl.com/6g86wf

  • http://www.innovativeinteractivity.com Tracy Boyer

    Hi Zach. Congrats on a phenomenal project! Everyone at Innovative Interactivity is curious for more information on how this project came together. I see that After Effects was used for the motion graphics, but can you speak briefly on who was responsible for what, how long it took them and what programs they used? Thanks so much!

  • http://chrisphoto.com chris

    here here. classier indeed. there’s certain standards we need to learn from the TV industry. but there’s many, very many, that should be bypassed altogether, such as story approach, tone of voice, chosen content, pacing, and the list goes on. TAL has been the top iTunes podcast for real reasons, and it was easy to tell some of them were behind the production before the credits ran. Editorial decisions, story flow, pacing, and less-is-more presentation style all make it more than the sum of the parts. well done.

    I would like to know what the time-table was for this, what collaboration on the production side looked like, how long it took to edit. I’d also, with Tracy, like to know the story behind the AE approach and how to structure a massive project like that.

    Great stuff.
    Chris.

  • http://digitalartwork.net/2008/12/21/demo-reel-2008/ Demo Reel 2008 :: digitalartwork – Multimedia Journalism

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