3D News Story -- "Choice and Chance"

-- When a gunman enters the "Pulse" night club, those in his path have only a heartbeat to react. 

The project is hosted live at Tampabay.com

Description: This is a project I did with the Data Team as well as a number of amazing reporters during my internship at the Tampa Bay Times. It lets the audience to experience the night of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting in a 3D world, bringing to life the heartbeat of what was a survival story to some, and a tragedy to others. 

The morning I came to work on Monday, I started to randomly modeling the architecture of the "Pulse" night club in Vectorworks, trying to see what it would look like. The minute a draft was done and was caught by the eyes of my editor, he decided we should do a 3D graphic to tell the story of what happened that night. 

I worked closely with two amazing developers on the project. A lot of our time was spent on figuring out how to connect the real human stories with an indifferent floor plan. We resorted to cinematographic techniques such as moving the point of view and changing the lighting which turned out pretty successful. 

Doing a project on a breaking news story like this also requires a lot of collaboration with the reporters. We didn't know what exactly happened inside the club when we decided to do this project, but we can't wait until all information was there to start working on it. So we communicated very closely with our reporters as they dig more information for us to make decisions on the way the graphics should pan out.