Listen To America
A Nation
Wide Roadtrip
In August 2017, HuffPost embarked on an epic road trip through 25 States of America, interviewing over 1,700 regular people about their concerns for their communities, politics and economic future.
In preparation for the American midterm elections, HuffPost wanted to expose a cross section of views and opinions from these interviews in an interactive format online. We designed a scroll-animated gallery of mixed-media portraits that express each individual's personality and ideas, and link the experience to the road trip that brought them together.
Making Sense of the Content
HuffPost recorded literally hundreds of hours of video on their tour through America. All of these clips were transcribed to text by a computer, where content could be analysed and key topics filtered, sorted and saved. These topics would later become headline navigation for the web experience.
The interviews were recorded on video, but the picture quality was really poor. We wanted to retain the authenticity of the vox pop format—it had to feel human, so you could identify with these people as individuals—but we didn’t want to rely on this poor quality video material. And that creative constraint actually lead us to a solution, which was to animate each person as a dynamic artwork instead.
Bring all of this content into one, conceives idea
HuffPost recorded hundreds of hours of video on their tour through America. All of these clips were transcribed to text by a computer, where content could be analysed and key topics filtered, sorted and saved. These topics would later become headline navigation for the web experience.
The interviews were recorded on video, but the picture quality was really poor. We wanted to retain the authenticity of the vox pop format—it had to feel human, so you could identify with these people as individuals—but we didn’t want to rely on this poor-quality video material. And that creative constraint lead us to a solution, which was to animate each person as a dynamic artwork instead.